Category: Research
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You Ask, I Answer: Primary Research vs. Secondary Data?
Eric asks, “Under what circumstances would you support primary research vs using imperfect secondary data?” Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here. Listen to the audio here: Download the MP3 audio here. Machine-Generated Transcript What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.…
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Mind Readings: The Worst Kind of Research
The worst kind of research is incurious research, which is research that is commissioned to prove a point. Incurious research is dangerous because the average layperson doesn’t necessarily know how to distinguish between research that is curious and research that is not. Any good researcher will say that incurious research is not how research works.…
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What’s the Value of Anecdotal Evidence?
In the world of data and analytics, anecdotal evidence is often (and correctly) demonized. Why? People in general and marketers in specific mistake anecdotal evidence for quantitative proof, for statistically representative, reliable, and repeatable evidence. Anecdotal evidence is none of those things. It’s one person’s experience, so it’s not representative. Depending on that individual’s perspective…
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Marketing Data Science: Be Careful of Studies
I saw in my social media monitoring system the other day that someone had written a blog post and linked to one of mine. Ordinarily, that’s a good thing, and not something of concern, but when I saw the anchor text, I had a mild concern. The anchor text read: “A recent study by Christopher…
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You Ask, I Answer: Conducting Research for Content Marketing?
Joe asks, “How do you conduct research for a new content marketing project? Where do you start, what steps do you take, and what systems do you use to organize your research and findings?” It really depends on the project and how much depth I need to go into. How much detail do you need?…
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Friday Feeling: The Best Audience Monitoring Tools
As a followup to yesterday’s PR Student Chat, I share some ideas about what the best tools are for staying in tune with and in touch with your audience. Beer Coffee Video chat Conferences There’s no substitute for talking to the actual audience. As much as I wish technology could do that for us at…
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You Ask, I Answer: How to Get Smart on a Client’s Industry Fast
Monica asks, “How do I create good content for an industry I’m unfamiliar with?” I had a colleague in the PR industry who called this getting smart, fast, and she used the time-honored technique of reading and researching via Google, news sources, and social media subject matter experts. This is a time-tested approach that works,…
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How to find true marketing expertise and news
Alan Belniak asked a followup question on yesterday’s blog post about what sources I read. This is less a question of what I read and more a question of method: where do the sources come from? Here’s what I mean: everyone starts with the same sources because those are the easiest ones to start with.…
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Why being incurious will destroy your marketing
I’ve had the opportunity to do an awful lot of surveying recently as part of my work at SHIFT. The surveying I’ve been doing has been initiated by me on behalf of clients and the data is used to inform various marketing campaigns. What I’ve found while doing this work is that because the research…
