Here is a list of Wordpress Plugins we use to run our Online Magazine, Moral Fibre.

This is by no means and exhaustive list but it should get you started! If you want any advice on what to use for whatever purpose give me a shout, when I first started Moral Fibre I literally knew nothing about coding nor anything about Wordpress as I had started my sites using Joomla which required an altogether different set of skills to run.

Now before i start this article on Quantitative Market Research , i want to express by all means that i am no expert on this subject but have a pretty firm grounding of Quantitative Market Research through work experience and academic knowledge. This article serves as an explanation of the process of Quantitative Market Research in a typical research house.

Firstly a simple definition of Quantitative Market Research  :

Quantitative marketing research is the application of quantitative research techniques to the field of marketing. It has roots in both the positivist view of the world, and the modern marketing viewpoint that marketing is an interactive process in which both the buyer and seller reach a satisfying agreement on the “four Ps” of marketing: Product, Price, Place (location) and Promotion. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantitative_market_research)

Quantitative Market Research

Where do the numbers come from? What do they mean? Questions that are asked by many who do not understand the whole process of the collaborative work that each department does in a research house to produce the data that you see before you. On many occasions i have sat analyzing data and lost my temper because something does not seem correct. Who do i blame? Where did the error occur? In true honesty without the hard work of every department in a research house no data would even be available for analysis!

Let us start right from the beginning. When a research house receives a brief from a client it is analyzed by a senior research executive or account manager to asses what type of research would best suit the brief. Namely; is it a qualitative or quantitative project? For the purpose of this article we will suggest to the client that quantitative research would best fit the brief. A proposal is then drawn up by the research team and then approved or rejected by the client. On approval or sign-off as we call it in market research terms the next step is to read over the brief as many times as possible in order for you to gain an acute understanding of what the client needs and desires from the research. A lesson that was drummed in to my head from my mentors, always you make sure you understand the brief or you will be missing the whole objective of the research and could jeopardize the results and outcome of the research that the client is expecting. Once a clear understanding of the brief and the proposal is gained we can move on to the next step which is creating the questionnaire.

The questionnaire is the link between the respondent and the research team. The questionnaire is basically the main component of the research and thus a well structured questionnaire is key to gaining the results and objectives from the brief and proposal. Research houses have a pre-set template for designing questionnaires and as  this can get very complicated i am not going to discuss this in this article. However i will state that these pre-set templates are extremely important in order to create norms and standardise research results and also allows for the creation of a benchmark that results can be compared to. Once that questionnaire has been approved by the research team leader and in most cases the account manger it is then sent on to the client. The questionnaire is then bounced back and forth between client and the research team to add or delete any areas that the client desires. Often the clients needs are unfeasible due to the fact that questionnaires are created from a pre-set template and this often can cause conflict.

Once the client signs-off the questionnaire we are now ready for the next step. The questionnaire then is sent to the Data Processing department where each question is carefully coded. The coding process is vitally important as these codes need to be carefully inserted as they need to be processed at a later stage by the Data Capturing department. If any codes are left out of the questionnaire then a question that was answered by respondents may not have been captured and thus may cause great problems further down the line in the research process. There are ways and means of sorting this problem out as i have discovered on some occasions but the headaches and late nights at work are not worth it! On completion of the coding of the questionnaire and sign-off from the research team when they are happy that all codes are inserted we move on to the next link in the process. The Field Department, this is where are the manual labor takes place and all questionnaires are sent to be packed and sorted. Once these have been sorted out they are then deployed to the actual interviewers who ask the respondents the questions from the questionnaire. This step in the research process is also extremely important because interviewers need to know the format and flow of the questionnaire very well as often some questions will have “skip questions” which are questions that can be skipped according to previous answers, if these skip questions are not answered properly then once again late nights and headaches. However this problem is resolved by a clear briefing with all interviewers involved and is conducted by the field manager with a member of the research team present to make sure all is briefed correctly.

Once the interviewers have been clearly briefed the fieldwork process can commence and the interviewers conduct all interviews based on the sample filters that are covered in the proposal. The sample filters are vitally important as interviewers need to make sure that they reach the targeted respondents. Once the interviewing process has been completed and all interviewers have reached their quota they then return all completed questionnaires back to the field department. Once back at field department all the heavy manual labor takes place which can range from back checking respondents that were interviewed to checking to make sure that all sample filters have been reached to match what was stipulated in the brief and proposal. A very laborious process but one that is crucial to the success of the project!

Once all field operations have been successfully employed we then move on to the next link in the chain, Data Capturing.

For further information on Data Capturing, Data Processing, Charting and finally the analysis phase done by the Research Executive team also know as Client services you’ll have to wait for part two in this series on Quantitative Market Research

Peter Orsmond is a Quantitative Market Research Analyst and Project Manager within a Market Reserach Firm.

Warning: This is not an intellectual discussion. If you want some of that - go buy a newspaper and read the opinion pieces  therin. My opinions hold no water, my facts are probably incorrect and sensationalist, carry no weight and have been badly written. Amen and thank you Heineken.

Are you voting for or against the ANC?

On April the 22, 2009, all of those who have registered to vote will get the chance of either casting a vote for the ANC or against the ANC. Lets be frank nobody actually votes for an opposition party, they vote against the ANC.

If you voted against the ANC in 1994 and 2000 you were clearly a right wing nutter. However if you vote for the ANC now you are either lost, a well rogered Ovis aries or have not been paying attention to what’s going down in the country.

The nature of the beast

The last liberation organisation on the African continent has itself been liberated. Liberated of principle, integrity, sanity and the ability to self assess. Now hold on, before you start swinging your Anti Zuma club, I don’t think it was Zuma who did this to the ANC. Clearly it was Mbeki A.K.A Black Stalin.

Mbeki was just begging to be taken down and gagged - the ANC just waiting to be hijacked, and yup it was. Hands up! Money or your life!

The revolution was televised!

Every significant branch within the ANC has been taken over by oddities; what else does one call Julius Malema? The Rooi Gevaar has well and truly hijacked the party of the people – Comrade Gwede is the sitting Chairperson of the South African Community Party (why are they still around?). Long live the revolution. The revolution was televised as prophesied, remember Polokwane and all those shit ETV and SABC analysis? And who could forget the gripping TV that Mbeki made as he humbly resigned “Once more, I thank you most sincerely for affording me the opportunity to serve you and to serve the people of Africa.” I was cheering mofo cheering you hear me.

How did this happen? Well what did we expect from Democracy? The ANC lead by great thinkers, planners, strategists just gave the vote to millions of people who believe tradition is important (it is not and if you think so, grow up Santa Claus does not exist), who can’t read and write or question and loved political slogans. These thinkers, planners, strategists had very little in common with the masses they liberated; apart from the obvious, a hatred for an unjust system of government.

People gravitate to those they feel more comfortable with. Zuma is clearly what the masses within theANC feel comfortable with. What does that tell you about the ANC?

Who are the so called opposition?

So you will be casting a vote either for or against the ANC. Lets me try to explain coherently (I will not succeed) why the opposition are not deserving of your vote:

• The DA – Helen Zille, enough said.

• The IFP – Shaka is gone the Zulus can’t run shit.

• ID – Patricia De Lille is too little to be taken seriously and her hairstylist clearly has too much influence on her

• ACDP – We certainly don’t want the Christians running anything, they believe that a burning bush spoke to some dude about some shit

• UDM –Bantu has the same glint in his eye that Idi Amin had.

• MF – You seriously can’t support a party where the leader was bitched slapped by Eugene “can’t ride a black horse” Terreblance.

• COPE – I thought we all agreed Black Stalin had to go, we can’t go pulling that knife out his back now.  He would be very angry with us to stop impregnating SABC reporters and sent us to the gulags

Concluding Remark

There you have it. I have no solutions, no recommendations, nothing that will make your life easier when it comes to choosing who to vote for. Why not? I am just not that smart.

Walter Pike got me thinking; is the Democratic Alliance, henceforth referred to as the DA, really using social media as a component to their overall campaign strategy or are they utilizing social media merely as a an advertising channel through which they can disseminate party information?

The DA has revived its brand with a new logo, which as Walter Pike points out, is not much of a departure from Obama’s campaign logo. The DA have also set up two interesting digital properties in which they will take their residence for the course of the campaign; http://www.da.org.za and http://contributetochange.org.za/register. Both sites offer information on the DA’s current political standing, their manifesto, blurbs from their leader, news on all of the machinations of the political party and even allow users to blog about their contributions to the party via wordpress multi user platform. Hell Helen has even set up a live web cam on the site in which she can be seen tossing darts at the images of both Malema and Zuma - she misses every time but it’s a good laugh nonetheless.

So what are the DA doing wrong? Why am I critiquing a South African political party who really seem to want to engage with those South Africans online?

Well firstly, albeit for an information overload, the DA’s entire social media campaign sounds as if it was borne in the bunker of a political under attack - they are more than happy to toss out information-grenades but when the enemy fires back they scurry back into the bunker. For instance online @helenzille is challenged often on twitter, “she” hardly ever responds to critique.  Helen you simply cannot expect your listeners online to respond to your tweets which read more like the misfiring of Zuma’s iconic machine gun than they do an open dialogue. I, the representative of all things social media (a guru if you will), implore you to utilize a different tone to that which you utilize when giving a speech before your obviously inept parliamentarians. Social media snaps that vertical pillar upon which political hierarchies are built, you are meant to sound like the everyman and everywoman: utilize colloquialisms, throw in a witty anecdote, respond to critique, open up your party policies to debate and source wisdom from the crowd following you. Shouting down from your ivory tower at us lesser beings merely makes us more likely to keep you locked up in there and never let you out. Ever. Never ever.

Secondly, and here I address this question to the DA campaign strategists, what’s with this focus on “change” both within your offline and online communication? I know it’s been almost a month since Obama’s inauguration but did the DA really expect us to forget the word upon which Obama’s entire campaign was hinged? Well I have a kak memory and I didn’t even forget it, to give you, the DA, some idea of how others might respond to its usage. Indeed the ill tempered teenage democracy needs to do a little growing up. The DA’s proposal to herald in an era of good governance is welcomed; but was it really necessary to simply copy paste an American campaign? Does the DA think that the same strategic game plan will work in a country which more often than not looks at political matters through the lens of a hermeneutisist  i.e we tend to reinterpret historical texts in a manner which best suits our needs and we for example we tend not to forget how the “previous regime” treated us. I do hope the DA’s offline campaign is a little less reliant on learnings taken from Obamas success because without a mobile digital platform and an effective grassroots offline campaign the DA are bound to only change the lives of the white middle class South African voters who make up the majority of the blogosphere and still sadly make up the majority of the web audience. Which might explain why Steve Hofmeyer’s blog was until recently one of the most popular web spaces in South Africa. Perhaps the real change which needs to be made is to move away from Leon’s bombastic retoric and “politicalese” which took its cues from academia and whilst impressive to listen to was an anachronism in modern South Africa and was alient to the common South African and move the DA’s online and offline communication strategy into something which is relevant and yet still remains the edgy and honest political party which I respect the DA for!

Walter Pike and I ruminated, albeit very briefly on twitter, on what you we called the DA’s advertising efforts. Herein lays the DA’s  greatest dilemma - you see if both Walter and I both envision the DA’s use of social media as an advertising platform rather than meeting point in which to discuss important matters with the DA’s potential voters then the potential voters will see it that way too. The DA should have a hard think on this; consider their own ability to recall flat and uninspiring political posters which straddle street poles trying to hook in the next voter and then consider that even if they have blogs, twitter accounts and the like simply having these online properties sitting their collecting users and dust doesn’t mean jack shit unless there is a sense that the people behind the DA’s computer screens are ready to engage with and inspire those with whom they interact. Remember Obama’s campaign was fortified by the inclusion of the voice of the youth online, was affirmed by the marginalized who endorsed Obama’s ‘American Dream’ and was so succesful because it made ordinary Americans feel as if they owned a piece of the American Pie.