Tom H. C. Anderson - Next Gen Market Research™

Since December of last year several marketing research bloggers and Twitterers have been quietly following the New Market Research blogs countdown from the Top 25 Market Research Blogs, to the Top 10 Finalists, and then each week an announcement of where these fall in the final Top 10 rankings. Today this blog was announced as The Top Blog in Marketing Research!

I’m really flattered, and happy if this blog has inspired any other researchers to think about less traditional market research techniques such as data mining or text analytics, and to take social media more seriously.

I continue to be surprised though whenever someone gives me praise for the blog. The second runner up for instance, Voice of Vovici by Jeffrey Henning is far more regular, aesthetically pleasing, and often more well thought out than NGMR. So while I figured based on traffic this blog would do allright, I really wasn’t sure who would win up until the very end.

For me in many ways blogging has always been and continues to be both somewhat personal, while at the same time an ongoing public social media experiment. As I’ve said previously in regard to both the blog and Twitter, initially I started both because Anderson Analytics was doing blog mining and I simply wanted to better understand things from the point of view of the blogger. I still find it somewhat hard to predict what posts will be more popular than others, and which types of issues/posts do better on the blog vs Twitter vs Facebook vs LinkedIn, and often still experiment quite a bit while at the same time not putting all too much thought into what to write.

I really want to thank all the readers of the blog, especially those who engage (whether here or on LinkedIn), you’ve really made this a rewarding and addictive experience. The friends I’ve made within the industry because I began using social media will remain with me long after I stop blogging.

I also want to thank Sean Copeland of New Market Research, whom I think many of us were probably more than a bit skeptical of when we first learned of this contest. However, in my humble opinion he did the most careful analysis of blogs I’ve seen in marketing research, starting with search engine metrics and content analysis quadrant charts and ending with more subjective but well thought out metrics for differentiation (there have been several more arbitrary lists published previously).

That said, I’m going to continue to not take blogging too seriously, as that is what I’ve always done. This is what I urge others who are interested in blogging to do as well. It should be fun, not work, and putting too much thought into blogging is a sure fire way to make it less interesting for yourself and everyone else.

I look forward to seeing which blog will be #1 next year.

@TomHCAnderson