furtherandfaster

Word of Mouth How to Workshop and Macatholicism

Today I was blogging at the the Word of Mouth Association's how to workshop. And very interesting it was too. You can find the full blog posted on the WARC website which will be open I think for another month for you to read even if you're not a WARC subscriber.  Word of mouth is an amusing topic because it is so endemic to human behavious you can't but get very self conscious about it. Even to lunchtime and whether saying you're going to have pudding tips over everyone else to say what the hell I was going to have pudding anyway. You'll be relieved to know that at the workshop bloggers got a lousy profile as influencerrs - lots to say (high traffic) but no one takes them seriously (low authority)

But there was a lovely example of a tipping point I though I would share with you.  Look at the flock of Mac Powerbooks by the power socket. Anyone attending a conference with a laptop gets there eariy these days to hunt for power. I managed to get to pole position. But I was amused to discover that in our laptop pod there were 2 Vaios and 3 Mac Powerbooks taking turns to share the power.  Of the 3 with Macs all had been bought within the last 3 months, 1 by a confirmed Mac user but the other two were bought by former PC users and 1 was running windows under VMLs virtual machine so could do Windows XP seamlessly in a Mac environment.  Hardly a robust sample but Apple must be selling a truckload of Powerbooks these days. How many of these are captured rather than retained sales. Have all the uber cool of planet Mac and you can still keep a toe in PC land. I had further proof of this afterwards when I dropped by the Apple store round the corner and discovered that every day at 6 they run a workshop for PC users converting to Macatholicism. Lucky you're not going to take this alarming trend as an influence on you because I'm just a blogger :-)

1st mention

I really must publish my review of Mark Earl's Herd book and post the long interview with him I recorded back in March (outrageous). Today I got my first feedback from Will who had read the book and found the co-creation case study in it about the research I ran in 2003 to explore ways to counter binge drinking. The book was out and I didn’t have an opportunity to check the details of what Mark wrote. Can I assure you that we didn't pay respondents to get drunk – which would have been a clear breach of the MRS code?  The Market Research Society thought we had at the time and got rather bellicose about it. We interviewed respondents before during and after hanging out with them for a typical Friday night - we didn't ask them if they were going out on the town nor did we encourage them to. And we took care that incentives were paid AFTERWARDS and not before. Thank you Mark for immortalising us in aspic (or should that be absinthe?)  This was one of 2 occasion when I have tangled with the MRS sheriffs - the second time for proposing to hypnotise pensioners. Which by the way the research code does allows us to do if we ask respondents nicely first. I have discovered rather too late that running research projects on the radical fringe is a lot of fun and gets you loads of brownie points from your peers but doesn't make your phone ring because research managers client side regard you as a bit of a Han Solo - you're supposed to be boarding Imperial Cruisers not outflying them.. Ah well.