Members of LinkedIn have created a slew of “Groups” (moderated bulletin boards).  Unfortunately, the marketing and market-research groups with the largest memberships seem to attract the most entries from those just trying to win business rather than to raise substantive issues or share ideas. 

So far, I’ve found three LinkedIn groups to be potentially useful: Consumer Insights, Next Gen Market Research, and Marketing Science.  

Consumer Insights has, well, some geniunely insightful people.  I am especially pleased to see the interest not just in anthropological approaches, but in behavioral economics.

Next Gen seems to have strong enough management to fend off the promotional entries that clutter other larger groups.  If it keeps up the good work, it could become the strongest.

Marketing Science could get into research-design analytics better than the other marketing and research groups on LinkedIn.  (The “Marketing ROI and Effectiveness” group could be good, but seems to attract too much clutter.  The “Marketing Experiments” group has potential, but its tight connection to MarketingExperiments.com may somehow hinder flourishing discussion.)

Outside of LinkedIn, the “Marketing Research Roundtable” (forum.researchinfo.com) often contains excellent professional thinking and expertise, especially on the statistical end of things.