What is the basic way to use $wpdb and get_results?

This is my code:

global $wpdb;
$q="SELECT * FROM wp_usermeta WHERE meta_key = 'nickname' AND user_id = 771";
$result = $wpdb->get_results($q);
echo $result;

The query string is good because I can run it in phpmyadmin and it works fine. I am not getting anything back when run through page.