Emporia CEO Michael Hess on Insightful Connections: Programmatic B2B recruitment, TWIR, and synthetic personas

About Insightful Connections

Insightful Connections is a weekly market research podcast that spotlights the people behind the insights: the researchers, strategists, and operators who make the industry move. We dive into the personal stories, philosophies, and daily practices of leading voices across UX, qualitative research, client-side insights, participant recruiting, and beyond. From agency founders to independent moderators to corporate insights leads, each guest opens up about what drives them, how they navigate change, and the lessons they've learned in the field.

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Listen to the Episode Here.

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What you’ll learn (and why it matters)

• How TWIR is produced with a repeatable prompt-driven workflow and audio summaries that scale.
• Active recruitment vs. legacy panels: why “find exactly who you need, now” beats hoping they’re already in a database.
• LinkedIn-verified trust signals and why consistent public publishing drives both participant confidence and inbound demand.
• Personalized outreach at scale: using LLMs to write invitations grounded in real professional histories.
• First-time participant enablement: guides and expectations that convert curiosity into confident participation.
• Synthetic personas for B2B: practical uses today (survey testing, message checks, early concept reads) and where they’re heading.
• Methodology matters: adapting academic frameworks to enterprise realities (buying dynamics, decision rights, culture).