Bosch Power Tools has made a breakthrough in Facebook marketing with Social Insight Connect. “Facebook used to be a black box. But now we know that our marketing investment in Facebook is money well spent. And there is more: we can now strategically deduce how to develop our Facebook presence,” said Christoph Bühlen, Brand Manager of Bosch Power Tools

The new Globalpark solution Social Insight Connect is available now. With this new tool, brand managers can get even closer to their Facebook fans and find out  more about them. The dilemma of anonym brand contacts in Social Media can be gradually eliminated.

Sabine Stork of Thinktank talks mobile research from a "quali" perspective, and client Polly Stevens of HELLO! Magazine shares insights from a real-world project with their readers. Through auto-ethnography, HELLO! was able to demonstrate both an engaged audience, and a "trusting" one -  which is more and more what advertisers are demanding.

There has, and will always be, a debate about where it is appropriate to apply automatic text coding over more manual methods of interpretation. Both have their merits: the former for speed and volume; the latter for precision. Here, we apply both to a social network forum and compare the results – with some surprising results!

There is an experiential gap between how individuals engage with technology in their every-day...and how they participate in research. Guy Rolfe, Mobile Knowledge Leader at Kantar, has addressed this topic at length.

txteagle CEO Nathan Eagle has readily shared his inspirational account of enabling two billion mobile phone subscribers in the developing world to monetize thier personal data and experiences to organizations like Diageo, Microsoft Google - even the United Nations. The win-win-win situation brings insights to brands, income to individuals, and access to developing economies.

MR Award Winner AJ Johnson of Ipsos led a panel discussion on the myths surrounding the use of mobiles in market research - leveraging the expertise of Vincent Blaney, Millward Brown; Sean Conry, Techneos; Tacis Gavoyannis, Radius EMEA and Karin Rothstock, Tomorrow Focus. The overrun session showed there was clearly more to discuss than the hour alloted!

Not exactly part of their nature, Dr Liz Nelson (Fly Research) and Richard Windle (Samson Research) try to moan a bit about the slow adoption of mobiles for market research. By the end, of course, they get right to what can be done to further the field as part of the evolution of the industry. From Liz: "...the response rate [from mobiles] is double that of online..."

Steven van Belleghem of InSites Consulting (@Steven_InSites), led a dynamic panel debate at last week's Mobile Research Conference. He called on the experiences and knowledge of Nathan Eagle of txteagle, Alistair Hill of OnDevice Research, Emanuel Maxl of Evolaris and Hannu Verkasalo of Zokem to discuss how to use mobiles to engage hard to reach audiences. Some key takeaways: 

If one thing is clear at this week's Mobile Research Conference, it is that research is finally happening through mobiles. But markets move fast, even if research is slower to adopt, with continually new and exciting ways to engage individuals and capture information. Just when one "new" method is embraced, others emerge. Case in point: Augmented Reality (AR).