As I define Peregrine, on the fly, with the help of my initial 68 panelists, the next most pressing issue is upon me. Upon us. That issue is, if we could wave a magic wand, what kind of panelists would we recruit for the “global panel†I’m organizing? Who are the best people for the 1,000 strong, owner/consumer panelists in the Twitter Chorus?
Given the Peregrine quest to do lightning fast market research and provide organizations with ideas at blazing speed, here is a list of attributes I think we need most in panel/owner/participants — and please chime in!
Responsive – When a question gets put on the table we need to react quickly with perspectives, responses, ideas, and ultimately answers that lead to insights. We need to be light on our feet, not ponderous.
Hip – It’s a dated term, but we need folks who are savvy about a lot of things. For a generalist panel we want experts on all subjects. All Subjects. The more we “know” the more we can combine creatively, collectively.
Articulate – When a message is 140 characters or less, as Twitter is, you have to be good with words. Concise, to the point, and meaningful.
Diverse – I believe we need All Kinds of People on this general panel. We can create sub-panels later that are demographically oriented to, whatever is required. For the orignal panel, I think we want: international, multi-lingual, business folks, academics, inventors, entrepreneurs, mom’s, Christians, agnostics, and folks of every ethnic stripe. I’d like a gender balance as well.
Diversity of Thinking Styles – As important as the diversity I talk about above is th inking style diversity. We want introverts, extroverts, innovators, adaptors, visionaries, strategists, tacticians, imaginative, funny, improvisational, and in general as many styles of thinking as possible.
Creative – The original panel has to be Creative above all else. Now, I believe everyone is creative, and, not everyone knows how to use it. Panelists may need to learn how to be truly generative and not just critical/analytical. And it matters how many ideas you can generate, more ideas tends to mean more quality ideas over time. As part of the “vetting” process to formalize the panel, it might make sense to include assessments like FourSight, and/or the KAI measure in order to determine the balance of creative styles on board.
What are we missing?
For more on Peregrine background, read the last few posts here! Catch up and then sign up, follow @greggfraley2 on Twitter. In a nutshell, this is all about using social media to conduct consumer research in a new way. Consumers are invited to participate as Owners, 10% of the equity in Peregrine will be shared by the first 1000 consumers accepted into the general panel, or, Twitter Chorus.
9 responses to “Recruiting "Peregrine Panel" of 1,000 Consumer/Owners”
Greg, you’ve pretty much got it nailed here. I’ve done a lot of recruiting for online research and the articulateness piece is crucial — will be more crucial on Twitter to avoid me-too responses. You may have this covered, but another key is willingness and enthusiasm about participating. That goes a long way! And signing up does not necessarily indicate these things….! 🙂 renee
You are quite right about Willingness. Part of what comes next is a “vetting” of all the signed up folks. They will need to agree to be responsive and participative. Have also thought we could “vote off” a panelist if they weren’t playing by the rules or not playing at all. With Ownership comes responsibility…don’t want to be heavy handed but this is serious business! So, be serious, or don’t play!
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Consistency is so important Gregg. I think the vetting you’re speaking of is key to knowing the services and opinions you’ll be getting out of people have some weight and *consistency* to them.
I think that you’ve really got the main things that are required. I absolutely agree about the “willingness” piece and the ongoing vetting process to make sure that panel members are really playing. To that end, I would suggest that you also look for ways to clarify what is expected of panelists on an ongoing basis. That will set you up to have better quality people join in the beginning, and make the ongoing vetting process much easier.
I think no matter how broad and inclusive you try to be, the panel will always be a relatively narrow cross section of the global population – we are all pre-selected by the language, by the technology, by our interest. Just look at the United Nations’ WSIS and IGF processes to see the effort it really takes to even approach a truly representative set of stakeholders.
However, this is not necessarily a problem because of the questions being asked of it. If the questions are targetted at the panel ‘as it is’, rather than the expectation set that the panel will provide a representative opinion to any given question, then I can see that it will be extremely useful.
For example, you could ask every panelist to provide categorised information about their knowledge, outlook and interests. Then each question to the panel could be ‘pre-checked’ against that database to see how suitable the panel might be in terms of its domain knowledge.
So a question about web technology might earn a 92% suitability score, while one about the value of, say, providing tagalog translation services, might only earn a score of 3%.
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It may prove necessary to ‘tie down security. This should be in terms of intellectual property management and assurance. The group which forms the Peregrine panel must be a trustworthy bunch.
The other elements could include legal, ethical, societal, professional, commercial – but things could get a little ‘heavy and unecessary. However,if things are not set up right from day one then any subsequent issues will either be challenging to identify or even more challenging to fix.
Absolutely. I’ve taken my time with doing the next post which is going to be all about that aspect of things. It’s taken some time to nail things down…