THE FUTURE is the predominant theme right now for the market research industry. With recent and upcoming conference and session titles such as The Changing Face of Market Research, Charting the Future of Research, and The New Insights Toolbox: Transitioning to a New Era, significant energy is being devoted to defining the future of market research. Clearly the industry feels as if a major shift in research tools and methodologies is about to take place.

Of course one of the hottest topics relevant to the future of research is mobile technology. Mobile is among the primary game changers in the research world – and it is already making a significant impact, particularly as smartphone market share continues its meteoric growth. Mobile is, in fact, why Kinesis was founded in 2003 – to capitalize on wireless technologies’ ability to expand the reach of market research – so clearly Kinesis sees mobile as a substantial component of the industry’s future.

Along with mobile, another widely discussed topic is the future role of the research survey. Will the survey continue to be the leading method of quantitative data collection? Or will the rise of social media and new data mining tools render the survey obsolete? Obviously this is another debate that is of great significance to Kinesis, since survey software is the company’s core business solution.

Like mobile device usage, social media sites are growing fast. Social media is an immediate and vast platform for customer feedback, providing real-time monitoring of brand awareness and product/service reputation like nothing before. And by mining social media data for demographic information, classic segmentations can be defined and analyzed. So, as social media usage grows, and data mining tools become more sophisticated, the question arises: will the survey die? The answer is: of course not.

The survey will continue to be a highly valuable research tool because it is still the only way to obtain data that is structured to the researcher’s intentions. Social media does not provide sufficient means to control response rates nor does it always adequately qualify sample. But social media does offer a strong engagement factor, and the marrying of the two provides respondents with powerful options – to respond in the manner that they choose and to engage with brands and products via new channels.

The rise of social media actually enhances the survey in new ways. Surveys now have more launch options – in addition to email invitations, text messages, or links on websites, surveys can be launched via the social media sites themselves, and links can embedded within social media online and downloadable applications. Also, social media sites and applications allow for new information to be passed in and out of the survey dataset – gathering more data in a way that is invisible to the respondent.

The survey isn’t dying, rather it is evolving. Surveys of the future need to be shorter and more succinct to engage a public whose patience level and attention span is shrinking. Surveys of the future need to be more targeted to provide balance to the diversity found in the social media realm. And surveys of the future must be multi-device enabled – desktop, laptop, mobile phone, wireless PDA, TV, etc. – since respondents have so many web access options to choose from, and researchers cannot control that choice.

It would be irresponsible of the market research industry to ignore the growing implications of mobile and social media, just as it would be irresponsible not to plan for the other research shifts that are coming. As Richard C. Cushing said, “Always plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.” As the industry that both predicts and drives the future, market research has to keep an eye on its own horizon. Some new and very powerful tools are being incorporated in our research practices. Yet some familiar and highly effective tools, like the survey, will most certainly remain.