An Introvert's Guide to Networking

I learned the critical importance of networking, and discovered my natural aversion to it, early in my career. I was a new college graduate working in the strategic planning division of a $10 billion company, and our business unit had been invited to a retirement party for one of the top executives. The gentleman retiring was someone I'd looked up to during my brief tenure, and I wanted him to know he'd made an impact on me.

While I wanted to attend the party, as an introvert I usually avoided these types of events because they made me uncomfortable. Knowing there would be a lot of senior executives at this party made me even more fearful. In the end, I tamped down my fears and went. When I arrived I found a relatively empty room save for the executive's friends and close colleagues. That night, because of the small turnout, I had the pleasure and advantage of engaging in one-on-one conversations with some of the company's top executives, an experience that would prove crucially important in advancing my career.

That evening I learned the importance of networking and realized I had to figure out how to engage in business events in ways that were comfortable for me. I went on to discover an array of strategies introverts can use, ultimately writing "The Introvert's Guide to Success in Business and Leadership". Because I figured out how to embrace networking I found myself in the plum role of leading one of the highest visibility company teams as a new marketing manager at the age of 26, and representing the company at a United Nations conference in Geneva. I went on to run a $750 million business and negotiate pharmaceutical contracts with top global companies, all in a way that worked effectively with my introverted preferences.

Here's what worked for me:

I learned to appreciate my introversion rather than repudiate it.

I have met so many introverts in business who talk about introversion as if it's a malady that one must get over in order to be successful. This is wrong. Introversion is simply a preference for the inner world of ideas because this is where we get our energy. By understanding and accepting this preference, introverts can optimize time spent with their ideas to refine them and recharge. This allows them to be as powerful and persuasive as possible when networking situations arise.

I recognized that one-on-one conversations would be my lifeline during networking. Generally speaking, business events — and particularly networking events that require engaging with groups — are demanding for introverts. An antidote to this, I learned, is to seek out conversations with one individual at a time. When I approach events this way I have more productive conversations and form better business relationships — and I'm less drained by the experience.

I stopped being afraid to be the one to reach out.

My inner introvert used to think that making the effort to introduce myself was risky. I worried that my target would not be interested in talking with me or that I would make them uncomfortable. I learned over time that when I extended my hand with a smile and an introduction my effort would be reciprocated, even when I approached executives above my rank.

Social media makes this is easier than ever. Reach out via LinkedIn, Twitter and even Facebook to people who will be attending conferences or networking events you're going to and let them know you're looking forward to meeting them. This pre-introduction leads to a more relaxed and productive in-person connection. By reaching out, you open the door to potentially rewarding business collaborations, and you do so on your own terms.

I learned to prioritize time to re-energize.

While it can be tempting to go from a networking lunch right back to work, or from a networking cocktail event right to a dinner, if you're an introvert and you do that you won't be able to bring your best self to your next commitment. Take the time to recharge, whether by walking from the lunch back to work, or by finding 30 minutes alone between cocktails and dinner.

Introverts who avoid networking are making a critical career mistake. Being an adroit networker is non-negotiable — and not as hard as it might seem.

If you're an introvert, what networking strategies have you found that work?

Stop the surveys, please!

Stop the surveys, please!

According to a recent USA today article, you could be hurting brand loyalty by asking your customers to fill out “another” customer satisfaction survey. Consumer fatigue issues should have us all rethinking how we measure brand loyalty. Here are a few consumer quotes to highlight consumer complaints:

• “I can’t remember the last time I bought a fast-food hamburger or a sandwich without seeing a request for a survey on the receipt. I don’t always have that much to say about a purchase.”
• “I resent the assumption that I’m interested in helping this company beyond making a purchase. Giving them your money is enough”
• “When the survey-taker can’t veer from a ‘totally satisfied, somewhat satisfied, not satisfied’-style script, its impossible to see how they could ever be of any use.”
• “I don’t mind being asked for input on such a big-ticket item as a car or a cruise. But ‘my goodness, after an oil change?’”
• “It often makes more sense to comment on (travel) sites than to take surveys. ‘This way, both potential customers and management can benefit.’”

At the heart of the issue is a gap between consumer media habits and data collection trends. Consumers are reading and posting feedback at their favorite websites or engaging in brand discussions via social media; while researchers continue using traditional survey methods and struggle with social media technology and inaccurate data mining tools.

Here are three ideas on potential new approaches for customer satisfaction feedback:

1. Use the approach Godaddy took on a recent call. They simply invited me to provide comments via email, website or social media and even provided me a specific person to contact. Even better if they would have offered an incentive.
2. A new beta-site called suggestionbox.com allows customers to provide feedback in a suggestion box format. Customers can select a specific retail location to post to. They can also view comments from others and companies can review and post if/when a suggestion is implemented.
3. For more in-depth information, we’ve found great success recruiting panels customers to participate in a private Facebook group. Participants find it easy and enjoyable to provide feedback, and a panel can be set up for multiple weeks so consumers can move beyond transactional feedback to competitive comparisons or even co-creation of new and improved product or service solutions.

What do you think companies should do to better approach brand loyalty and customer satisfaction measurement?

Ethnography Matters

January 13, 2012 | Sam Ladner | 19 Comments

Does corporate ethnography suck? A cultural analysis of academic critiques of private-sector ethnography (Part 1 of 2)

Ethnography Matters is happy to start the new year with a series of posts from guest writer, Sam Ladner. In this piece, Sam examines the different temporal conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork in industry and academia.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Sam’s discussion where she discusses how corporate ethnographers can avoid compromising research.

Sam is a sociologist specializing in the social aspects of technological change. She mixes private-sector consulting work with academic research and teaching. Primarily an ethnographer, Sam is founder and principal with Copernicus Consulting, a social research company that consults on digital and industrial product design, organizational change, and consumer culture. She is also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management at Ryerson University in Toronto. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as Time & Society and The Canadian Journal of Communication. She is currently managing the Mobile Work Life project, which is investigating smartphones and work/life balance.

Part 1: A cultural analysis of academic critiques of private-sector ethnography

Corporate ethnography’s emergence ignited criticism that its quality and rigour was not as good as the ethnography practiced by academics. Academically trained social scientists have argued that private-sector practitioners are often not trained in anthropology or sociology, much less in the actual method of ethnography. Academics have argued that using ethnography for marketing and advertising is just more evidence of underhanded marketers attempting to dupe people into consumerism (Caron & Caronia, 2007).

And they are right.

Much of private-sector ethnography is as banal as it is ironic. In its bland quest to “understand the consumer,” it reduces culture to mere consumerism and thereby fails to achieve its own stated goal of understanding. This cynical veneer of cultural research disregards the truly transformative effect of “going native,” which is the first step to deriving both deep insight and innovation. Private-sector “ethnographers” are frequently ignorant to what ethnography actually is. The real essence of ethnography is the study of culture or as Geertz would say, the “webs of significance” or the meaning individual social actors ascribe to objects, events, or people. “Ethno” derives from the Greek word “ethnos” meaning folk or culture, while “graphy” derives from “grapho” or “to write.” Most corporate ethnographers neither study culture nor write about it. Instead, ethnography is simply as “on-site research,” such as an in-home interview, and “written up” as a series of meaningless video clips or as the truly stupefying Power Point presentation.

But these critical academics are also wrong.

Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.” But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that culture=consumerism. Academics, of all people, should know that culture drives practice. The rapid pace of contemporary corporate life clearly and reasonably demands shorter time horizons for any research project. It is more than obvious that time differs in academia. Time is what Kluckhohn (1953) calls a fundamental “value orientation,” or a universal feature of all cultures. A culture can be past oriented, meaning it reveres the past through symbolic gestures and everyday behaviours. A culture can be present oriented, by focusing on what is immediately temporally present.

Academia is a past-oriented society, with its obsession with paying homage to past greats of the literature and constant “reviews” of what others have previously found. The private sector, by contrast, worships the present (though it may portray itself as future-oriented, this is often stymied by a relentless focus on the near future). Both “cultures” mark time differently, making it completely natural to do rapid research in the private sector, and perfectly ethnocentric for academics to criticize such research based on normative assumptions of “appropriate” time frames. Symbols of time in academia are typically longer, not “better.”

Take the notion of a “year,” for example. “September” is a perennial ritual in which streams of undergraduates and graduates begin their studies at universities. It may indeed explain the obligatory one-year’s fieldwork unspoken guideline in anthropology. The typical rationale for one year is that so the ethnographer can witness the entire season, but in effect, it may be because it conveniently dovetails with the academic year itself.

There is no equivalent to “September” in industry. Work begins again when the accounting department “closes the books” at month-end. It begins again when a new directive from the C-Suite sends the organization scurrying. It begins once more when a new email arrives. Life in the private sector has nothing like “September,” much less the luxury of thinking in terms of a full year. This shorter time cycle is evident in the tenure of executives. The average CEO is at the helm for just 6 years. The average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer is even shorter — just 28.4 months (Kirdahy, 2008). This is not to say that “one year” means nothing in the corporate context, but just that it means comparatively less than it does in the academy. Academic social researchers may judge these shorter time horizons as lacking in rigour, but it may have more to do industry’s normative assumptions of time reckoning. Instead, it is more a rejection of the calendar year than it is a rejection of rigour itself.

In my next post, I will review methods to match this shorter time horizon in the private sector, without compromising the quality of the research.

Market research: When to do phone interviews over focus groups

Market research, such as market sizing, target marketing, market segmentation, product positioning, pricing, and customer satisfaction research, requires good data for the results to be credible. Obtaining reliable customer or prospect data needs good data collection.As a start up or an expansion stage company, if you’re wondering how to do your primary research and you are trying to decide between collecting data through a focus group and phone interviews, the following situations will help you determine when phone interviews work better than focus groups:

Phone interviews are better when the type of research you’re doing is complex: If you’re doing a study that requires your respondents to answer multi-step questions (e.g., implementing an enterprise application), it’s easier to walk each respondent through the set of questions on the phone. In a focus group environment, this will get confusing and chaotic. Phone interviews provide you with a “cleaner read”: In a focus group, respondents’ thought processes could be very easily influenced by other group members. Since phone interviews are one-on-one, respondents’ answers are less biased and more their own.Phone interviews are more “anonymous” and are better for gathering sensitive and in-depth information: With a phone interview, you can keep the respondents’ answers confidential. Respondents don’t have to answer questions in front of a group of strangers, which might hold them back from being open. The one-to-one relationship with the interviewer on the phone can help solve this. Phone interviews make it easier to reach your target audience: Maybe there aren’t too many of your target customers in the location/region you’re running your focus group. Phone interviews allow you to “cherry pick” prospects from across the country, and even the world. You have limited time and want to get started with your research right away: With phone interviews you can start interviewing as soon as you have your first recruit. You won’t have the time lag that you’d otherwise have with getting a group of respondents together, deciding on a location, a moderator and planning an entire event; you can do your phone interviews by yourself. Better participation from respondents: Since respondents can take phone calls from anywhere, they can be more flexible, which increases the chance of participation in the study. Also, the same faces tend to show up at focus groups; phone interviews allow you to talk to new people from new markets. So, with phone interviews, not only can you get more participation, but you can also get better quality participation too. Phone interviews are much cheaper: In-depth focus groups can get very expensive. Not only do you have to pay for the moderator to lead the session, you also have to pay him/her for summarizing the data and presenting it to you. In the case that you want to attend the focus group yourself, you have to add in the cost of your travel, lodging and other expenses, along with the financial incentives required to pay respondents for their participation. Conversely, if your phone interviews are short enough, a lot of times you can get by without paying anything. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts or counter arguments.

Market Research Interview Questions: Choosing the Right Style

This is a very important piece of the market research interview script design process, as it will be a major determinant of the quality and usability of the data your market research interviews produce.

There are many types of questions that can be used in a market research interview to extract different types of information at different levels of specificity from an interviewee. Below is a list of some common market research interview question types used in market research interviews with short descriptions and a short review of the pluses and minuses of each question style:

1. Single-Response Multiple Choice Questions: This is a multiple choice question that restricts the respondent to a single selection out of a listed group of options. While single-response questions constrain the choices of the respondent, they are much quicker to answer and much easier to analyze.
2. Multi-Response Multiple Choice Questions: This is a multiple-selection multiple-choice question that allows the respondent to select all answers that apply to them. This question type allows a questioner to extract a significant amount of information from a respondent in a short amount of time that is easily analyzed, due to its restricted selection format. However, this question type can also lead to incomplete responses, as respondents sometimes opt to only select one choice instead of all choices that apply. Validation questions can be added to the script to verify the accuracy of these responses.
3. Fill-in-the Blank Questions: This is a short fill-in-the-blank style question that does not restrict the respondent to a limited selection of answers. This question type allows you to collect detailed responses, but is very difficult to analyze because the responses are not standardized.
4. Free Response Questions: This is a multi-line, open-ended response question. This question type allows you to extract very detailed answers, but is extremely difficult to analyze because the responses are not standardized.
5. Rank Order Questions: This question type allows the respondent to rank a selected number of items or images based on preference. The responses to these questions are generally restricted to a list of numeric selections that are drag-and-dropped, pull-down-selected or restricted write-in. These questions are difficult to moderate over the phone, but can be very effective in determining relative preferences.
6. Single-Select Matrix Questions: This question type allows you to ask several questions consecutively using the same response scale. This question format can be used for dichotomous responses (Yes/No or True/False), multiple-choice questions or likert scale questions that measure level of agreement with a statement (Strongly Agree, Agree, Indifferent, Disagree, Strongly Disagree). Matrix questions can lead to a tendency among respondents called straight-lining, where an interviewee chooses the same or nearly the same response for every item, even if it doesn’t accurately reflect his/her thoughts. The reason this happens is because doing so is easier than carefully considering each question. However, the advantage of matrix questions is that it allows an interviewer to cover a whole series of questions quickly and it generates standardized responses that are easy to analyze.
7. Multi-Select Matrix Questions: This question type allows you to ask several questions consecutively using the same response scale. This question format works with multi-response multiple choice questions. This can be very useful on a phone interview when you do not want to have to read the selection categories for every question. This works very well when asking questions about competitors or marketing mediums that have matching responses across a series of different questions. This style of question suffers from the straight-lining tendency. Similarly, this question style can also lead to selective response memory where the responder only remembers the first or last response options offered. These questions often require validation questions to ensure accurate data, especially for important questions.

Effectively designing your market research interview questions will save you and your research team a ton of time when it comes to analyzing the results of your research because it will eliminate the need to standardize responses. Thus, you want to limit the number of free response and fill in the blank questions that you incorporate into your market research interview script.