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Before Malcolm Gladwell, there was, among others, John Naisbett.  Naisbett’s Megatrends was a must read.  My favorite was the “High Tech/High Touch” trend.  His theory was that the more technology impacted our lives, the more we would strive to find balance with human interaction.  We are social creatures, after all.

High tech/high touch has been going on with humans since the advent of technology.  My view is that this is a three-step adoption/integration process.

Take the wheel.  Great new technology.  Took awhile to figure out how to use it (Mastery).  First used it for work (Utility).  When it became easier to make wheels (and more “cost effective”), someone probably thought “let’s hook up a mule and go visit some friends”  (Social Usage).

Or the pen, after paper became plentiful (costs had come down).   Mastery again came first (practice for legibility), utility came second (use for business or lessons), and social usage came third (write a letter to a friend).  High tech to high touch.

Social usage is often linked to lowered costs and a distribution system or infrastructure that’s in place.  Take the telephone.  Initially, it could only be mastered by a few as distribution was more limited.  When the infrastructure was built, bringing phones into homes, costs were still high, and usage was more local and limited – but business usage soared.  Over time, and as people moved further apart,  the telephone allowed people to “visit” without making a trip; they could do so more often and without the time and expense of a real trip.  High tech to high touch.

Name your technology and it follows this basic  mastery-utility-social usage adoption process, if the infrastructure is in place.

Video games:  learn the rules –> a fun way to spend free time –> play with others online

iPod:  learn how to use it –> build library –> share tunes with others

So social media networks are the logical manifestation of becoming comfortable with the Internet and cell phones and the other technologies of today.  We’re comfortable now, so we’re socializing them.  Facebook makes it visual.  Twitter makes it fast.

I wonder what’s next!

I’m a consumer advocate.  To advocate for them – to give them voice in the business decision-making process – I must know the best ways to learn from them.

As new techniques are developed, I can embrace them, refine them, reject them, or even create something else that will work better for my clients.  I want a large arsenal of effective tools.  And, when needed, I want to be able to combine approaches to address the client’s objectives in the best way possible.

The current trends in marketing research highlight four rather distinct quadrants in which work is conducted.  A simplified overview is shown below.

Historically, most marketing research has fallen into what I’m calling the Sociologic quadrant – participants know they’re in a test environment and they often interact with an interviewer/moderator + other participants; additionally, verbal skills often have a prominent role.

Physiologic testing has been around for years.  It measures a physical response to test stimulus, such as  eye tracking when conducting a copy test or website evaluation.

Ethnographic (or observational) research, with its roots in anthropology, has become quite popular in recent years.  In its purist form, participants don’t know they’re being observed and less emphasis is placed on verbal responses.

Discourse Analysis is the newest approach, and is currently the hottest topic in marketing circles.  These methods analyze social media, such as postings on Facebook, Twitter and personal blogs, by studying the language used.

In the coming weeks, I’ll take a closer look at each quadrant in more detail.  In the meantime, I’d enjoy hearing your initial thoughts about this concept and how it might be used to help clients understand why different methods are being recommended.

Last month, Brian Powell blogged in Ad Age about cause marketing.  This isn’t a field I’m familiar with, but we’ve all heard the news that charitable giving is down due to the recession and I thought there might be some interesting innovations coming from this discipline.

Brian’s main point was that “cause marketing should be ideas with business and social impact.”  He believes this discipline is so important it will eventually be fully integrated into a company’s overall marketing efforts.

Just a couple of days ago, I looked into the SocialVibe widget that’s available on many of the social networking sites, such as Facebook.  It’s simple:  pick a charity from their list, pick a sponsor (aka advertiser), place the “badge” on your social network or blog site, and earn charitable donation points.  In other words, if I can drive traffic to one of my sites, and people click on my badge, my charity gets a donation.  The catch?  Every visitor who clicks the badge sees a short ad or request by the sponsor (e.g., rate an ad, pick a baseball card, etc.).

Interactive cause marketing?  A radical new twist on the old customer brand loyalty programs?  Whatever it’s called, I like it.  People can “do good” with the assistance of brands, while brands get attentive watchers of their messages.   In this day of people skipping commercials due to DVR recordings and with print publication readership down, this is really quite inventive.

How is your brand helping customers to “do good”?

When I got my new Kindle, I started to realize how much Amazon has been lagging behind in its merchandising efforts.  When Amazon first came to market with its ability to recommend books based on past purchasing patterns and/or interests, that was a real step forward in online merchandising.

But think about it: while Amazon has broadened its scope on what it sells, have they moved to “Merchandising 2.0″or beyond?  In my view, they are no longer leading.

Just for starters, why can’t I…

View the “back of the book”?  I want to read the book description (better than the publisher’s version), see which authors/publications have written a blurb on the book recommending it, and read the author bio.

Be notified when an author I like is going to publish a new book?  Even on the Amazon site itself, one doesn’t have this feature.

See all the books that the magazines are touting as great reads for the month?  Real Simple had a summer book section in its June issue.  When I read it in May, nearly 3/4 of all their recommended new books weren’t available on Amazon.  This happens to me a lot.  If a magazine or publication is going to help sell books through recommendations, shouldn’t Amazon be savvy enough to take advantage of it?

In the past week, a  new answer/search engine, Wolfram|Alpha, was launched.  Brought to us from the folks that make Mathematica software, the website declares it is  ”Making the world’s knowledge computable [in our] ambitious, long-term project to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone.  You enter your question or calculation, and Wolfram|Alpha uses its built-in algorithms and growing collection of data to compute the answer.”

In other words,  the objective is to be able to produce a “report” of all the world’s digital, computable information with one concise search.   At this point, they’ve got a nice working model, but the information in the engine isn’t as good as it will be in the future.  For instance, when I put in “Hippopotamus and African Elephant,” I got much more info on the Hippo than the Elephant because it’s a species (silly me).  I just love the visual tree created that shows the relationship between the two animals.  (Click here to take a peek.)

Will Wolfram|Alpha eventually include encyclopedia-style information?  There is some debate on this.  Currently, it doesn’t, but this first step is a good one and I’m excited about its potential.  As soon as I got the “report” concept of what this engine was trying to do, I had visions of being able to type in a question and having a full report generated – facts, figure, prevailing point of view, dissenting views, bibliographies where I could learn more, etc.  This would leave me more time to think about what I was learning.  I believe the general public would be excited too.  For years I’ve been hearing consumers complain about how hard it is to find things online, how much time they spend looking for information, how results are often not related to what they’re searching for, etc.   Information overload…managed.

At the same time, consider the work being done by Erik Hersman and the Ushahidi website, where the content of cell-phone text messages, sent during a crisis (earthquake, terror attack, etc.), are being analyzed for content so that news can be shared with the rest of the world much more quickly.  I encourage you to take a few moments and listen to Erik’s speech at TED:  click here to listen.

Putting the two ideas of fact and language-based computable data together, it’s easy to see how businesses will be able to use the newer engines to get a quick read on things like customer satisfaction, new product launches, and so on.  And it could be done globally or locally.  In short, this evolution in our access to knowledge will allow us more time to analyze information and to subsequently develop better plans, ask better, more nuanced, questions, and more.   Exciting times!