Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

Thanks to the folks over at Research Talk, we're able to bring you a video of a recent presentation given by Tim Macer of Meaning (a UK research technology consultancy), which looks at the phenomena that is Powerpoint, or more specifically how researchers use Powerpoint as a deliverable rather than just a tool. Tim observed that PowerPoint is a provided as a client deliverable on 54% of research projects, and examined some of the problems that critics have identified in the use of PowerPoint. He then offered six “antidotes to PowerPoint.

This video is only 5 minutes in length, and you can also see the original presentation in Prezi (a great alternative tool to Powerpoint as it happens!)

Clients can be strange creatures at the best of times, not least when they ask for login details to see what’s going on in real-time within their online research community or bulletin board, but then never actually turn up! We’ve been asking the question ‘why is this happening?’, and have come up with some answers that may help overcome the apparent lack of engagement.

We believe that clients fail to logon as often as hoped for, for one of the following reasons:

1. They are incredibly time-poor
2. It’s not high on their priority list
3. They are asking for login details simply to tick a box, but never intend to logon in the first place
4. They are afraid of the technology and don’t get the right training and support
5. There’s so much data for them to observe and interact with that is scares them off

At Dub, we believe that online qual can deliver a new level of client engagement with the research if handled correctly. We’ve made steps towards supporting this, and have developed a new product that, when deployed alongside other techniques, will get them more engaged and, in turn, more insightful.

To begin with, here are some top tips - things you can do to get them more engaged:

1. Brief them thoroughly on the approach you are taking, the nature of the study design, and what the output will look like.
2. Schedule time to involve them in training on how to use the software, as without it they’ll feel alienated and afraid (your software vendor should be able to provide this support)
3. Keep the client training light - they don’t need to know how to do everything, just to observe and review the output
4. Send them regular digest reports - by email, telephone or whatever the most appropriate method - and include the most colourful, rich conversations and discussions posted
5. Give clients the opportunity to co-design a task or two towards the end of the project, thus  retaining their level of engagement throughout the project

Dissecting the points highlighted above, you’ll spot the need for some smart tools (technology / social software) to help deliver some of these methods. At voila, Dub has derived a number of new tools that can provide the client with a curated view of the latest and the most valuable conversations taking place. Despite not yet having a name (please feel free to make suggestions), the product provides an easily navigable web-based interface that removes many of the controls required to ‘run’ the project on IdeaStream (our online qual software). This clearly makes the interface more efficient and easier for the client to use. It can be customised and also allows the client to enter into conversation with the researcher via a commenting tool as well as being able to quickly share content with colleagues. Content presented to the client is easily curated by the researcher via IdeaStream.

A second new web-based product that Dub are developing is a Project Insight Management & Collaboration platform that allows the research project team (clients, researchers and other stakeholders) to seamlessly share information, collaborate and build ideas online, without the need to be ‘in the room’ or ‘on the phone’. It will run independently of IdeaStream, and will be licensed on a project-by-project basis. If you’re interested to learn more about either of these products, please contact Stephen Cribbett.

Stephen Cribbett
stephen@dubstudios.com
+44 (0) 20 7247 3327 /
m. +44 (0) 7973 663867

If you're an experience qualitative research moderator - online or more traditional offline methods - then we'd love to hear from you. We have a track-record in running multi-market online research studies for our clients, and work with moderators in-market. As we expand our business, we are seeking out fresh new talent, people with a passion for the new paradigm of online research, co-creation and collaborative innovation.

You'll need to speak and write English fluently - either as a first or second language - and be a proficient user of social networking platforms and social media tools. In particular, the markets we are looking to drive are South America (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina), Taiwan, China, Japan and Russia.

If you're interested in learning more, contact our CEO, Stephen Cribbett, via email at stephen@dubstudios.com

It's easy to sit here and say that 'we love our clients', but truly we do. We always over-deliver, go the extra mile, respond at all hours of the day AND night, and pick up the phone no matter who is at the other end! And it seems as though it's reciprocal, if you read the latest testimonial from one of our shiny new clients . Here's what's got us gushing....

“Having never undertaken on-line research before (but with over a decade’s experience of traditional formats) I approached my first (online qual) study with Dub with some nervousness. By the end of the project I felt completely at ease with the format, thanks in no small part to the Dub team’s patience, diligence and clear explanation of all the elements. This wasn’t just technical advice, it was also thoughtful consideration on how best to deliver my research objectives and to get the most out of the respondents. I guess the real proof of the success of the approach is that I’m already in the process of commissioning two further projects with Dub”

A recent blog post by Jeffrey Henning got us thinking about how we view the different types of online research communities, and indeed the methodologies employed by more European-centric researchers.

In Jeffrey’s post, he looked at how online research communities were often categorised by size, whether they were open or closed, and whether they are managed or self-service. While this threw out some interesting discussions, we believe that what many might label as online research communities can’t always be classified as communities for research purposes. Thus it would be better to define how researchers are purposing these online engagement sessions, and how this is causing a blurring of definition.

Defining Online Communities
Taking a back-step slightly, it’s important to look at what defines an online community before one can understand the term ‘online research community’. Online communities are often centred around brands, lifestyles / lifestages, hobbies and interests typically. They consist of a group of people bought together online, around a shared passion or common interest. This shared passion or common interest is essentially the glue that binds people and provides the fillip for conversation and interaction among the group.

Online Research Communities
Online research communities came to light when brands (and agencies) realised they could harness the emergent user-behaviours and sociability of online communities to get people talking about and sharing their experiences and viewpoints. This works well with both qual and quant research, but the challenge will always remain that to sustain a longer term research community of several hundred or even sever thousand members is a big challenge. Why? Because to maintain participation and interest among the membership, there needs to be more glue than just the core research tasks. The glue is content generated by the Community Managers and the membership themselves. It is the conversations that members feel compelled to enter into among themselves. If the design of the community supports these, then you are truly entering into the realms of a research community, where you can gather valuable feedback from task-based interactions as well as free and open conversations.

Another defining characteristic of online communities is their combination of strong and weak ties among members. In our opinion, the coming together of people online who only have what are constituted to be weak ties doesn’t deserve the title of a community, as the individuals are being bribed or forced into it, rather than entering out of real passion or interest.

The point I’m coming to is that in our opinion, all to often ad-hoc online qual studies and ideation sessions are deemed to be communities, yet respondents aren’t so inclined to get into conversations with others simply due to the subject matter and the incentives and rewards being offered. That’s not to say that ad-hoc online qual studies can’t be successfully deployed; far from it. It’s simply a case of getting the terminology and strategic approaches right in order to deliver the intended objectives.

So where Jeffrey categorised Idea Voting and BBFG’s as types of online research communities, often there is little or no glue between respondents to give rise to richer, more fertile content (and insight). We prefer to see idea voting, ideation and live focus groups as features and activities taking place within online communities, or standalone online engagement techniques that deliver great value, but not always a true sense of community.

Here is Dub’s summary of online community and online research and innovation activity types:

COMMUNITY TYPES
1. Insight Community
Insight communities, or Market Research Online Communities (MROCs) as they are sometimes referred to, are classified as private, invite-only, and usually consist of between 300-500 members. This number has been derived from Dunbar’s number, based on calculations by Professor Robin Dunbar - a social network theorist and anthropologist - around the number of stable relationships an individual can manage.

Insight communities are purposed with uncovering qualitative and quantitative insight into the human condition, and can include activities such as live chat and focus groups sessions, feedback and validation tasks, ideation sessions (idea jams with peer review), blogging, diaries, surveys and polls.

2. Customer Community
Customer communities are larger and more open, and can consist of several hundreds or thousands of members, all of whom share the characteristic of being a customer (or fan) of a brand, product or service. While customer communities can be used to glean rich insight, this is not their sole or primary purpose, which is more likely to be more oriented towards sales and marketing. Customer communities can be open or closed.

Note that we’ve not included Community Panels in this summary, since we don’t believe that these constitute a community with a shared passion or common interest, as mentioned earlier.

ONLINE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION METHODOLOGIES
The activities described below can all form part of the activity suite within the two aforementioned community types, or can be deployed as individual online research methodologies. With some, but not all, there will be a level of interactivity among participants, though this is largely dependent on the nature of the topic being discussed, the design of a robust methodology, the technology used to support it, and the motivations and rewards.

1. Qualitative Panel
As Jeffrey Henning rightly stated, these are adjuncts to qualitative panels of the kind with tens of thousands of members. They are likely to last several months, and are purposed with delivering qualitative insights. Since participants are likely to be rewarded with cash and vouchers (or points), they are less likely to go the extra mile and interact with others participants, but this can be made a specific requirement with the right tools, tasks and incentives.

Asynchronous Online Focus Groups (or Bulletin Board Focus Groups)
These is an ad-hoc qualitative research methodologies whereby up to 50 respondents are tasked with responding to a series of discussion topics within a private online environment, over the course of a few days or sometimes weeks. As with Qualitative Panels, it’s more likely that participants have been recruited specifically as having a shared demographic, lifestyle or behaviour, and are being paid in cash or vouchers for their time participating. The key observation here is that you are less likely to induce social interactions among participants as they tend to do what they are being paid for - the core research tasks - then log-off.

At Dub we have a number of tools and techniques that successfully encourage greater social interaction among participants. We also advocate punctuating asynchronous groups with live chat sessions as participants are more inclined to open up having spent a few days previously getting to know one another.

However, the short term nature of these focus groups means that participants also have less time to become as familiar with one another as they would in a larger online community such as those listed above.

Asynchronous online focus groups are a very successful method for qual research when designed and executed well - with expert moderators and a well structured study/discussion design. (Here’s some tips on how you can achieve this).

2. Live Online Focus Groups
Live online focus groups can be executed as standalone methodologies, or, as we suggested above, punctuating asynchronous engagement. These sessions can be simply structured around the discussion of a specific topic or, with the right tools, providing real-time feedback to stimulus such as pack design, advertising concepts, mood and image boards etc.

Sessions last an hour or two, and offer the same reach as online communities and asynchronous groups, provided participants have access to the right technology.

3. Idea Jams / Ideation Sessions
Again, Idea Jams can be assigned as a task within an insight or customer community, or as a standalone exercise where the output is a series of fresh ideas that have been reviewed by participants themselves. Peer review is a successful technique deployed by companies including Starbucks and IBM to focus in on some of the more potent ideas that can enhance customer relationships and help innovate. This activity however, does require careful consideration in respect of legal and moral ownership of ideas and intellectual property.

4. Research Blogs
Different to focus groups, blogs can be deployed as individual, standalone tasks, or as an activity promoted within a community. Dub’s research application, IdeaStream, lets clients create research blogs on the fly, which can be predefined as either private or social activities. What typifies a blog is firstly the ability for participants to post to it multiple times, over a sustained period, and secondly is capacity to capture multimedia (videos, images, links etc).

5. Digital Diaries
Traditionally, diaries have been used as a qual research task that respondents conduct using pen and paper. Templates were sent out to respondents with boxes to fill in under each day. Clearly there are limitations to this in terms of the nature of response and effort required.

Digital diaries have moved this activity on greatly. By allowing respondents to share their daily activities online, it becomes a more intuitive exercise and one that captures richer response more regularly (considering use of mobile devices).

We hope this information helps you decipher what you need and how best to achieve your research objectives. Have we missed anything, or is there more to add? What’s your experience?

If you’d like to talk to Dub about activating an online research community or online activity, contact me on stephen@dubstudios.com, or by calling +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

As of this week, Dub's powerful qual research software is available in Mandarin (for both Taiwan and China), Portuguese (for Brazil), Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia. So if you want to reach out further and engage respondents in far away places, and not bias your research by having to conduct your study in English, then get in contact with stephen@dubstudios.com or dan@dubstudios.com

At Dub, we provide local moderators who's role it is to look after the health of your online research community. Part of their role is also to localise the study design for their particular market.

Localising the study design matters greatly, for the reasons that follow;

Appropriateness
To ensure that respondents are familiar with the terms and labels used throughout the discussion guides. Often, making a direct translation from a master document (in English) can lead to the terms having little or no meaning for participants. Fro example, we recently conducted a project about data privacy, but it was deemed that this term meant little when translated for the Asian market, so the resulting term that was adopted was Protection of Personal Information.

Formality
To attain the appropriate level of formality. In some markets around the world, formality will reduce the level of creativity in response, while other markets are more comfortable with a relaxed, casual style (such as Asian and South American markets)

Tone of Voice
When conversing with certain markets, politeness is key to ensuring participation. This is different to formality, as you can be be casual and formal, and polite at the same time.

Equally, localisation can greatly help the flow of discussion and richness of response when handled correctly. Here are some handy hints and tips to follow;

1. Ensure that questions are not ambiguous or more than two questions are combined into one, and adjust the wording of questions to ensure answers are relevant and on-topic. This helps avoid unclear or irrelevant responses.
2. Ensure sequence of questions makes it easy for respondents to follow the progressing discussion and learn more about the topic and what is expected of them in the process. This reduces the likelihood of 'don't know' answers.
3. Adjust the style of questions to local communication preferences. For example, Japanese respondents value harmony and dislike voicing a different opinion, and are less used to analytical thinking and open debate.

If you've never heard of it, then The Research Club is a must-attend for any market research professional. It's simply an open, warm and inviting event for market research professionals to attend and make new contacts - nothing more, nothing less! So successful has it become that there's now a Research Club in Amsterdam, Paris, Hamburg and Frankfurt, as well as London.

There's a Research Club meet-up tonight at Tiger Tiger on Haymarket, from 6.30pm, so if you're free, why not drop by. No invite required. We're leaving soon, see you there!

If you're a market researcher, you can't have missed the online chat around Market Research Online Communities (MROCs) that's gathering momentum. However, it's highly likely that you won't have had any experience of MROCs, or will know what's involved in building and managing one, let alone how to harness them for better, more creative qual and quant research.

Worry not! Dub are experts in building and managing MROCs. We sell to, and partner with, research and marketing services agencies to this affect.

We've chosen to sell MROCs to agencies because it makes good sense. Unlike researchers, we make it our business to understand how consumers use social software and social media. Over the past few years we've developed a deep understanding of how researchers work can benefit from these new channels and engagement techniques.

Dub provides some of the most powerful proprietary social software to support MROCs. We also offer a range of community services including planning, community management and moderation, reporting and online recruitment. These are not typical of the services that research agencies offer, nor do we expect research agencies to be as passionate about social media as ourselves. The infrastructure required to build and manage MROCs is a challenge-come-hurdle to most, if not all, traditional research and marketing services businesses. So if you fit into this category, it's now common-place to partner with a business such as Dub.

MROCs can be more labour-intensive than running ad-hoc online research projects, thus the need to outsource expertise is vital for success. This approach also allows your agency to focus on core skills such as analysis.

What MROCs tend to deliver is a new closeness between research and other marketing-led activities. By listening to and engaging consumers within MROCs, you can bring consumers closer to the decision-making process than previously possible. Real tangible relationships are nurtured to the point where you are creating marketers, innovators and testers out of each and every member.

To find out more about how your agency or brand can benefit from an MROC, contact Stephen at stephen@dubstudios.com

We talk to qualitative market researchers within agencies and in-house research departments almost every day. So having banged the drum of online qual research for several years now, it finally feels as though the message that social media and market research are good bed fellows is finally getting through!

Understandably, qual researchers don't want their well-honed analysis skills removed or undervalued, but they are now accepting of the fact that the process of engagement, observation and data capture can benefit hugely from the use of smart social software and social networking. Blogs, bulletin boards and communities - all forms of social software - are fast becoming the tools of choice for agencies looking to engage consumers in deeper, more candid discussion, and with greater efficiency (time and cost!). Where before these platforms were simply seen as a means to push messages, they are now accepted tools to allow the researcher to get closer to the consumer (in their environment on a very regular basis)  than ever before.

But harnessing social software, social media and online networking behaviours requires new skills as well as tools. New listening skills, the ability to design engaging online tasks and activities, and, most importantly, knowing how to 'talk' to people online is a big challenge for those agencies stuck in the past. For this reason along, dub has created a compelling range of products and supporting online research services to help brands and agencies negotiate the pitfalls and overcome the hurdles to create more engaging, creative research.

These new research skills and techniques should be adopted by all newcomers, fast, as the world of insight communities - or MROCs - and research blogging is fast becoming the norm for immerse and longitudinal studies.

To find out more about how your agency and day-to-day work can benefit from dub's research online tools and services, contact Stephen Cribbett at stephen@dubstudios.com