About Me
Hi
there, I'm Matt. I'm a Managing Partner and Senior Community
Consultant here at PluggedIN (and one of the bloggers on the site).
I'm a qualitative researcher by training (through the RIVA Institute),
and have moderated hundreds of face-to-face and online focus groups
over the past seven years. I have had the good fortune to experience
just about every type of qualitative research method, from traditional
focus groups and in-depth interviews to ethnography and various online
qualitative methods (bulletin boards, chat groups and online research
communities).
I now specialize in market research online
communities (MROCs) because I think they're the most fun, engaging and
smart way to run qualitative research studies.
Random Facts
- I live in Rochester, NY, home of Kodak and garbage plates...
- My
name is indeed Matt Foley, which is also the name of Chris Farley's
character from the Motivational Speaker skit from years back... I'm
constantly reminded of that anywhere I need to show an ID :-)
- Last summer I competed in my first triathlon, and am planning more to come soon...
- My favorite community project (so far) is probably the work we did with Kraft. It was fun to design a kids community from scratch. My favorite non-community work was probably a large-scale ethnography study I ran a few years back on the "future of the digital home."
- I'm a Red Sox fan, having gone to college and lived in Boston for years.
- I'm
a big music fan and play guitar, bass, drums and piano in my spare
time. My favorite band of all time is Radiohead, and my favorite album
is OK Computer.
- I'm a bit of a geek, and spend some of my spare time trying to learn how to program (specifically using Ruby on Rails)
- I'm a sucker for business books that deal with entrepreneurship, consumer behavior, psychology or internet marketing...
- I'm also something of a social news site addict, and am constantly trolling Digg.com for new and interesting articles...
Contact Me
You
can email me directly at mfoley@pluggedinco.com. I'm also on Twitter
(@mattpluggedin) and LinkedIN (http://www.linkedin.com/in/mafoley).