On 18th and 19th March a biannual meeting of members of the European Association BIG took place in sunny Rome. As usual it was a place for active experience exchange. Perfect guest speakers were invited. Dr Camillo Pandolfi from Unilever Europe told how a system of marketing research is built in the global corporation. Srinivas Dharma, Metrik Consultancy UK, devoted his presentation to description of an interesting system of conducting of customer satisfaction research - Moster System. Stohos, a company from Greece, became a new member of the Association.

Besides this an annual competition BIG Award was held as a part of the meeting. Real projects conducted last year are presented and evaluated during the competition. At the March meeting projects were presented by David Murray (UK), Maria Bordoni (Italy), and Roman Ogloblin (SOCIS, Russia). Based on the vote result a winner of BIG Award 2011 became a project presented by our company.

From April the CATI-Center of SOCIS switches most of its telephone research projects to NIPO platform, one of the best software solutions for CATI and CAWI surveys available on the market. This software, assayed by the largest companies all over the world, has some advantages compared to similar products (easiness of programming of scripts, easiness of scalability, etc.) and allows increasing significantly efficiency of management of both large and small studies.

“Group 7/89”, an association of organizations conducting marketing and sociological research in Russia, published a Research Companies Ranking - 2009. SOCIS has joined the Top 20 of this ranking in categories "personnel professionalism", "business processes management" and "quality control".

The study "Ranking of Russian research companies" has been being carried out by “Group 7/89” annually since 2004. This is the sixth wave.