Elizabeth MacLaughlin has joined us as Associate Customer Experience Manager.  She will be focusing on our Helping Hands project management services. Elizabeth comes to us with a full service market research background.  She most recently worked at Market Strategies International here in Portland. We are happy to have Elizabeth join our team.  Her customer service skills are already winning rave reviews from our clients.  And we know her extensive market research knowledge will be a great addition to our team. 

Welcome, Elizabeth!

Representational photography activities are one of the most powerful techniques for getting to the heart of topics that are emotional, abstract or not easily described in words.  In a representational photographic activity, participants are asked to post a picture that represents their feelings or impressions of a particular thing. That thing could be a product, brand, or an experience. Essentially, in this kind of activity, you are asking people to provide a visual metaphor.  And as Gerald Zaltman pointed out in "How Customers Think"  metpahors are a powerful window into how customers truly make decisions. 

Here's an example representational photography exercise taken from one of the earliest Revelation based studies. It was a study on new parents with the objective of understanding how people change when children come into their lives.  We introduced the activity this way:

"In this activity you are going to need your digital camera. We'd like you to take two pictures and describe them. For your first picture, please take a picture of something you feel represents your life before parenthood, post it and describe your picture and why you chose it.  For the second picture, please take a picture of something you feel represents your life after parenthood, post and describe below. Thanks!"

Here is one mother's response to this activity:

"The first pic is my bed. That thing that I aspire to spend time in without at least one interruption during my sleep. Before being a parent, I could sleep in as long as I wanted. I miss it so much."

"The second is my dishes this weekend. Between [my husband] being sick, me having 12 hours of work over the weekend, and [my husband] being gone most of the weekend, the place was a wreck."

The second image is particularly powerful. Of all the possible things the participant could have chose to represent her life as a mother, including her child, she chose the sinkful of dirty dishes.  It is a very honest moment and really puts the viewer in the psychology of the participant. And it is a good metaphor for some of the challenges of parenthood: it can be messy, time is always short and certain things don't get the attention they used to.

It's a great day here at Revelation as we posted another quality release last night. Here's what's new:

• Improved Participant Video! We've improved the experience for participants uploading videos to Revelation. Participants  are now able to upload much larger files (meaning longer videos) and, the system does a great job of keeping folks apprised of their upload status.  Participants and researchers are also able to play back videos in a YouTube style video player. Sweet.
• New Languages! We posted the beta release for EU Spanish, Italian and  Japanese, expanding Revelation's language capabilities to seven, including the current English, Latin American Spanish, French and German.

Kudos to Dan Herrera, James Pozdena and Max Ogden for getting the video release out the door. And further thanks to the Dev team and Rachel Bell for shepherding the newest languages through the translation and QA process!

In case you missed any of the (3) recent GRT webinars, you can now listen and view the webinars online:

• On July 14, 2009, Jon McNeill of Hall & Partners presented "Living in and adapting to a culture of exposure: Exploring how visibility affects people's lives, thoughts and feelings" - http://www.revelationglobal.com/grt
• On March 17, 2009, Richard Radka of NODE presented "Structured Sense Making: Integrating qualitative and quantitative methodologies through the analysis and synthesis process."   http://www.revelationglobal.com/grt
• On May 12, 2009, Joseph Sassoon of Italy's Alphabet Communication presented "The Role of Helpers in Advertising: Bridging the way from semiotics to storytelling."   http://www.revelationglobal.com/grt

The July 2009 issue of Quirk's Marketing Research Review is hitting researchers' desks and we are very pleased to see Tim Macer's excellent review of Revelation. My favorite quote from the article is the closing paragraph:

"It would be wrong to look at Revelation only as a means to save money, though that could be one welcome benefit of using the method, along with the wear-and-tear on the qualitative researcher, who perhaps gets to travel a bit less....the real benefit of this method is its ability to take qualitative data gathering from the artificial confines of the focus group into the realms of the ethnographer, by working directly within the participants' own fields of experience as they go about their daily lives."

Well put, Tim! Click here to check out the review for yourself.

In May, Revelation Goes Global! In keeping with our mission to provide the next generation of online qualitative tools, Revelation released a multi-language feature on May 31, 2009.  Click here to read the full story.

Three market researchers have received industry attention for their Revelation-based studies in the last month. They presented and/or published their studies to international audiences, read more here.

Activity of the Month:  "Help Mabel" is one of our favorite Revelation based activities. In this activity the participant is shown a picture of someone who knows nothing about the topic...

I got a tweet from a customer recently, she had a question on methodology for a particular client.  The project involved some diary work and her end client was really pushing for a high tech solution to having participants capture specific uses of a particular product category when on the go.  The diary phase was just a short 2 days and the participants were to be very active outdoorsy people. As we talked things through, it became clear that Twitter and mobile submission still has some issues. First, believe it or not, not everyone's on Twitter yet, so getting them set up and explaining how to use would take a time and effort. And mobile posting to a centralized research site is still not quite yet prime time (though we are certainly working on it!).  Having folks publish to Facebook or Flickr would also require coordination and set up for both participants and researchers.

The thing that gets lost in the rush to apply technology to diary studies is that there are really two phases to the task:  capturing the moment and reporting to the research team.  It's crucial of course that the moment be captured at the time that it happens. However, the reporting can really happen after the fact (unless the research team wants to engage in conversation right at the moment). Also, mobile devices are wonderful for capture, but lousy for expression, so sometimes it's good to have people wait until they get to the computer to post to their Revelation project.

 There is, in fact,  a wonderful technology for capturing moments. It is truly universal - everyone has it and knows how to use it. It has been soundly tested for years and is pretty much fool proof. It can be arranged into a number of easy to carry form factors, and requires no batteries.  No accounts are required and it comes preconfigured.  It requires no technical support. I am speaking, of course, of paper.

It sometimes gets lost in this hi tech world, but paper is a seriously great technology. And in this case, it was the right tool. A little jot pad was all that was needed with instructions to take a picture of the moment, make some notes and report when back at the computer. It is easier and less intrusive for participants and means less project management for the research team.

Revelation customers are out in force this Spring / early Summer, speaking at some of the industry's leading conferences.  It's great to see some of our long time customers and some new faces out there sharing their experiences with the rest of the market research. Here's who doing what where:

Gretchen Gehrett, president of G2 Marketing, will present "Researching Experiences: The Perfect Tool to Capture Experiences as They Happen" at the Annual MRA conference on June 5, 2009. She will examine immersive research, illustrate how Revelation studies tap into deeper emotions -- and capture responses with rich data.

Paul Tambeau of Macphie presented at the MRIA conference (Canada's market research industry association) and showcased the study we executed earlier this year. It was entitled: "A Case Study: Using Netnography in the Not-for-Profit Sector". Paul spoke about the study, but also about netnography as an emerging methodology and the opportunities web 2.0 tools provide us to engage participants in new and exciting ways.

Kristin Schwitzer of Beacon Research presented with Andy Rieger of United Health at the QRCA Symposium in Chicago on May 7th on using multiple methodologies - including Revelation, of course -  can garner deeper insights than possible with a single approach. The twist in this study was that the study featured participants who ere 55+ and proved that online can be an excellent solution for obtaining learning from older people.

Congrats Gretchen, Paul and Kristin!

Online ethnography is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days. As someone who has been exploring and wrestling this issue  in terms of methodology, terminology and practice since late 2003, it is interesting to see researchers attempting to try replicate ethnogrpahy online.

However,  to me, it has become less about doing ethnography via online or remote and more about understanding online as a medium and how it is best suited to serve the researcher's mission. To my way of thinking, the researcher's mission is to understand human experiences and behaviors in the context of a particular question or set of business questions.

Ethnography is one methodology to this end, but it is not the end itself. My take on the question of virtual or remote ethnography has evolved from "how can we use the online medium to do ethnography" to "how can we use the online medium to best serve the mission of qualitative research."  Given that ethnography requires direct observation, it tends to require a live presence, and the efforts to date that I have personally seen to try to use the online medium as a purely observational platform have felt clumsy and unsatisfying. (I haven't seen them all, of course). 

My experience is that while online or remote is not a really good observational medium, it's a tremendous medium for participant self reporting and engagement (see Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, etc).  While the online medium is weak as a platform observation, it excels at a number of things that in-person struggles with due to the limitations of resources of time and money - and intrusiveness to participants. The confluence of broad band connectivity, social software, rich media  and wireless devices has given us  access to human experiences on a scale and with a reach that is simply mind boggling.  Online is really strong at  sustaining interaction, seeing longitudinal behaviors, and therefore capturing experiences as close as possible to the time that they happen.  And in reality, the things we are most interested in learning about our customers happen when we are not there - during the course of everyday life.

In a sense the Internet, as it does with so many things, has democratized research a bit. In an online study, the people we research are both our subjects and our research assistants who we work with to co-create understanding.  It is this reason that activities that come out of the coaching and psychology world - that put people in position to understand themselves better - are so effective in this medium.

This is what continues to excite me and the rest of the team at Revelation. Every day is day where we are breaking new ground and better understanding  the online medium - its strengths and conventions and how they can best be applied to serve the mission of qualitative market research.