Choosing the best credit card for your needs can be a complicated process. You need to understand potential risks, examine the financial effects, and take into account your life-style. With co-branded credit card schemes expanding, this choice is only going to get harder. Here we outline the top 10 credit card features that are the lifeblood of the market. 

Beyond the themed boards and funny images, Pinterest is becoming a powerful market research tool with capabilities that can provide a great deal of useful intelligence to a market researcher. They say a picture can say 1000 words.  If that's the case, then your customers are telling you their life stories through their pins.

From checking e-mails, to editing a business presentation, technology has changed how we go about our day.  Additionally, technology has changed market research.  Advancements are helping us become more efficient and agile. In terms of market research, technology has carved out new opportunities as well as pitfalls for obtaining useful business intelligence. 

A lot of market research material will jump straight to the usual topics: competitors, customer segments, cost, and so on. However, for many modern entrepreneurs, their exact market simply doesn't exist. Like the DVR, mp3 player, and tablet, some markets are invented to disrupt older, existing ones. It can be tempting to move forward without doing comprehensive market research: after all, what is there to research if the product is entirely new?

You've done your initial market research and you've rubber-stamped your company business plan. All that's left is execution. Your superstar team turns your idea into a business, as you acquire new users, close your first few sales, and build great new features for your website. Revenue grows a bit, then stalls, then falls, but perhaps it's just a typical hiccup for a young company trying to get things going. A large tech company then makes a product similar to yours, but you reassure your employees by stressing the features that make your version unique. A few customers drop off. User counts decrease. Your crack squad of talented developers launches three new features, but by now, you're feeling desperate.

Market research articles often focus on very specific customer types. "Suppose you're a restaurant serving mid-to-high-end Italian food," a post might begin, or else, "imagine you just built an iOS game for boys 7-12 years old." The reality, however, is that many of today's new businesses must serve multiple customer segments, and each customer segment requires new market research. Let's take a look at a few of the more common customer segment splits and discuss strategies for researching each separate market. 

Google Plus is a rapidly growing social network thanks to its giant online parent company.  According to Business Insider, there are 359 million active users on Google Plus, which is a 33% increase from June 2012. New users are entering the fray and Google Plus has forced its way into the discussion of social networks that corporations must add to their integrated marketing strategy.  The life of a social media brand manager is hectic and exciting.  The evolution of the well-known names (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) has raised the standard for which corporations enter the arena and at what volume their branded messaging is delivered to prospects and customers.  

In 2009, Kevin O'Connor (former DoubleClick CEO) was fed up. He would try to research the best college for his son, or the best ski resort for a family vacation, but all the information was disorganized, misleading, or sugar-coated by a marketing team. He wanted a place where he could indicate his specific preferences, review the facts, and make a smart, personalized decision. That summer, he and Scott Leonard set out to fix the problem, building out the basic structure for FindTheBest.com, and hiring a small team (including me) to help perform the proper market research.

You've scraped along as best you can on your own dime, and you’ve done the proper market research to prepare for your pitch. Now it’s time to deliver the presentation. The problem is that angel investors and venture capital firms (VCs) might watch 100 presentations before they pick one company to fund: you've got one shot to really impress them. At FindTheBest, we've received two successful rounds of funding, totaling around $17 million.

In the process, we've been turned down dozens of times as well. Here are five things we've learned about pitching investors, based on market research principles and feedback we've received from VCs.

1. Show you're solving a big problem

Social media and market research are natural dance partners. Just imagine how much data you've compiled on people's favorite relationship tip of the day or random nugget of baseless knowledge over time.  After all, social media provides advanced capabilities for segmentation. Once you eliminate the white noise, there is very rich data on consumer opinion and brand equity to extract and analyze.