Tom H. C. Anderson - More Than Market Research

I’m back in the office today after being up in Montreal for the ESOMAR Congress last week.

After speaking to Bob Lederer, who is the conference expert, I think I’ve developed my own strategy for how to maximize conference ROI.

1. Try to get in early attend workshops if possible
2. Don’t worry about attending too many of the speaker sessions.
3. Ask for and try to skim speaker papers you find especially interesting
4. Focus on networking and/or rest

Whether I’m speaking or not I’m going to try to attend workshops if they are available. It’s a great way to meet people, and if there is truly anything to learn from a speaker, then it’s probably worth spending a whole day with them rather than the 20 minutes or so that the average speaker gets these days.

At this conference I took 1 day of an optional 2 day Semiotics workshop (good but I think 1 day was enough for me), and then at the last minute decided to switch from the Insight Generation workshop taught by Unilever which I had planned to take to a workshop on Advances in Segmentation. Although I’m quite an expert on segmentation, and Anderson Analytics conducts many very successful segmentation studies each year, it is still complicated and interesting enough to warrant the time to try to understand what new things others may be trying in the area.

The problem with conferences is that they have so many speakers of varying skill and topics. Often, especially at ESOMAR conferences, it is possible to get the papers of all speakers. Bob pointed out that he reads the conclusion of these papers first, then if it seems interesting he’ll go back to the front, and perhaps also attend that speakers timeslot. Obviously at large conferences with multiple tracks trade offs are necessary anyway.

Don’t feel guilty. Instead of wearing yourself out trying to attend as many speaker sessions as possible, attend just the few good ones and spend your remaining time on networking and/or simply catching up on some rest. At ESOMAR Congress 2008 I especially enjoyed the presentations by Disney’s Paul Caswell and Manila Austin, “How Disney bridges the multicultural divide”, and Microsoft’s presentation by Beth Uyenco, “Studying consumers’ interaction with new media”. Naturally, attend some of the evening events/dinners as well if possible.

-Tom

PS
At ESOMAR Congress 2008, ESOMAR also launched their newly redesigned Research World magazine. It’s quite impressive looking (more like a book than a magazine). I was interviewed on text analytics/text mining in case you are interested. I thought the interview page 78-80 came out quite well (Text Mining Interview with Tom Anderson). What do you think?