If you were in my office 6 months ago you would of see a wall of yellow post-its, all with trends i’ve had in my head for the past year or so. Eventually I took my 25 or so trends off the wall to make room for other stuff but during that time I managed to pull off what I came to call- the great turk trend experiment, online with my trusty turk army.
I wanted to take a few of my trends, named uniquely by me, and ask my turk army online via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk what they thought of my trends.
I simply told them the name of the trend, from there they had to tell me:
What the trend was about?
Is it gonna happen?
What brands would benefit from the trend?
My big goal here was to see how well random people could figure out a trend that I had created based on whatever patterns I saw around it. How close could these people get to what I was thinking about? More so, what new information, specifically their own and not Google’s search engine results, could they bring to the table around that trend? It was too tasty to pass up, I had to try it. I crafted my survey and picked 5 trends out of my bag of 30 or so.
Cloud University
Filter Nation
Subscription Based Living
Hyper Connected
Cheap Luxury
Right away you’re thinking about those trends and what they mean to you. That’s exactly what I wanted my turks to do. About 50 turks completed my survey in just under a day, not bad, love that speed. They were paid $1 dollar for their efforts. Like anything though, the quality of turk data will vary. But I persisted regardless. Let’s look at some of the results.
Cloud University
What’s it about?
Is it gonna happen?
33 % said meh, or middle, and or maybe
25 % yes
24 % no
Who benefits?
NASA, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, MIT, wikipedia
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Filter Nation
What’s it about?
Is it gonna happen?
30 % said yep (despite many having no idea what i was talking about)
19 % said no, won’t happen
Who benefits?
Flickr, Google, Pepsi, Nortons, Brita
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Subscription Based Living
What’s it about?
Is it gonna happen?
38 % said meh (another reason why i hate 5 scale questions with turks)
34 % said yes, happening now
04 % said no won’t happen
Who benefits?
Nutrasystem, Microsoft, Google, Any company that sells products, Amazon, Walmart
————————————-
Hyper Connected
What’s it about?
Is it gonna happen?
60 % said yes!
Who benefits?
Everyone! (well just about everyone)
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What about Cheap Luxury? See the data file for data around that one, but ya’ll get the gist here.
What I got out of it…
Clearly some folks struggled to use their minds vs using google to try and help them comprehend my curiously strange trends. Some trends really connected with folks, hyper-connected, while others baffled people. But most of all I liked the exchange, the either hopeless I have no idea or the oh yeah I know this notions.
If you want to dive into the data, you’ll find it here online.
Some of this data is crap dan, of course it is. I always tell people that 30% of your turk data may be garbage, and alot of that is based on how poorly turks typically get paid, and their general expectations around surveys, they expect them to be lame and pretty uneventful. Most of my studies on turk have been the opposite, always trying to give turks something fun to do for their time. Plus we gotta remember the nature of the purely random sample of people whom which you have no idea where they really are (though i figured out most of that, thats for another blog entry). As for additional info to the table, i liked some the answers, some we’re very entertaining to read even. All goes back to more stuff to chew on… not bad.. not bad at all.
