… and SurveyMonkey killed the professional researcher.

My wife teaches design for public relations at a local university, and frequently comments how the availability of inexpensive desktop publishing and web design solutions has transformed and utterly devalued the graphic design industry.  Now, everybody who can afford a computer is told that they too can produce stunning, full-color flyers, brochures and newsletters.  With site-in-a-box services and templates, anybody can prove to their friends they can create a web site – or barring that, everybody has a nephew or niece who will do it for them on the cheap.  With $50 logo mills staffed by overseas workers and using cookie-cutter templates, everybody can get a “custom” logo for their business idea with matching business cards.  The result?  Graphic design “self-service” has moved to the “long tail”.  Unfortunately, the “long tail” has no training, appreciation or understanding of basic design principles, and as a result the field of professional graphic design is being devalued. In effect, the bottom- and middle- markets for graphic design and print production are drying up, and designers that serve those markets are facing more competition and customers that are less appreciative of what they can offer.

We have seen a similar trend in journalism.  The explosion of blogs has destroyed the role of the objective, professional journalist and replaced it with the voices of anybody who has something to say.  Newspapers are desperately gambling with new business models, layouts, and contents to reach broader and younger audiences. Journalists are struggling to adapt their journalistic styles to be less specialized, cover more news in tabloid and other experimental formats, and compete against blogs and general reader apathy.  An amusing quote from the “Slap Boxing with Jesus” blog:

In case you didn’t know, there is a difference between bloggers and writers. Writers are supposed to bring an unbiased, newsworthy sense to the masses. They’ve been responsible for the way many – if not all – of us think, what they prefer and what they listen to. With such a powerful influence on our very being, is it any wonder why journalism is one of the most volatile, dangerous and disrespected professions around? A journalist going out to cover the Middle East is just as much a target as a soldier. Bloggers, on the other hand, are the Internets equivalent of that drunken uncle in your family who sits in that corner recliner at your family barbeque always stirring up some sh*t.

So, taking this one step further, I’ve definitely observed this trend affecting the market and PR research professions too.  I get fewer and fewer calls for survey research – not because the PR and market research professions are moving toward panels or some other methodology, but because potential clients are taking advantage of smart semiautomated survey tools like surveymonkey.com, zoomerang.com, and the built-in polling features and plugins of most blog and discussion forum applications.  Even FaceBook offers solutions for polling their members, which has gotten quite a bit of attention from upper-end consumers of market research.  These tools offer simple analytics and charts, so everybody can be their own researcher and analyst.

I’m not complaining; there is a continuing need for expert guidance regarding more complex and sensitive issues, and the market / PR research toolkit hardly begins and ends with surveys.  However, like the deprofessionalization of graphic design and journalism, it means the largest quantity of research activity will decrease in quality, and at the same time the profession will devalue to the extent that the average consumer believes s/he can do it themself and can’t see the difference in the quality of the end product.

The further consequence is that everybody will need to be just a little more critical of the statistics and research we read, believe, and distribute, as protocols for random sampling, error and confidence intervals, and statistical significance no longer are being applied.  More subtly, expect that other quality controls regarding the art of research and questionnaire design (e.g., leading questions, confusing content, and other sources of addressable response bias) are no longer applied to most of the information being collected.

There probably isn’t any profession completely safe from this “productization of professional services” to serve the “long tail”.  Former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has predicted that the middle class will disappear, leaving only personal services jobs (hotel workers, barbers, landscapers etc.) and “symbolic analysts” (those jobs that actively generate analytic, problem-solving and creative content – the true knowledge and content generators) and nothing in-between.  I think the trend I’m describing fits well within his predictions.

As a professional research consultant, I feel the only security involves making certain that I move my skill-set ahead of the curve and the availability of tools that serve the “long tail”.  As a business owner, I probably should be on guard as to what areas I am incorrectly assuming I can do “in-house” better than a specialist.  As an information consumer, I have to be suspicious of the information I receive and utilize.  And of course, the final lesson is that there’s plenty of opportunity out there – if you are creating products that do the job of professional experts and not one of those experts yourself!

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