We've said for a long time that online research communities provide better research experiences for both clients AND respondents, or members as we prefer to label them. Fun and enjoyment can be quite hard to measure, but seeing the feedback we've just received from a community that we've been running in Brazil, I think it speaks for itself. It's so good we had to share it with you.....

"I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be part of the project, I hope you enjoyed my ideas....I loved it and wanted you to know I did it with affection. I found it really cool, I hope you have received lots of good ideas."

and then there's this one..

"Thank you! I really liked taking part, I found it to be very dynamic and different."

and this one..

"I am available when if you need more research, okay? You can count on me."

I think you get the idea. These people thrived on the  creativity and fun that the tasks we designed offered them, and of course the very personal relationships they struck up with our moderators. I your research needs an injection like this, we'd love to hear from you.

At Dub, we've recently been building a number of online research communities to capture discussions around some very private and sensitive issues. These insight and innovation-purposed communities have been commissioned by players in the pharmaceutical and health and well-being industries, who are growing increasingly switched-on to the opportunities online communities present. These include the ability to gather candid feedback and rich insight from end-users, of the sort they've never before experienced. In a sector where insight  from sufferers and patients of such richness has traditionally been hard to come achieve, online research communities present a major shift.

Of course, when discussing Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Over-active Bowel Disorder (OBD) and other serious personal conditions with real people, respecting their privacy and offering them relative online anonymity is tantamount to the success of the study.  With this in mind, our approach allows project owners to assign tasks and questions to individuals  by way of private one-on-one discussions, at the same time as supporting open group discussions. The former puts people at great ease, and when combined with the fact that respondents are participating from the comfort of their own home or place of choice, affords response nirvana.

Group discussions such as forums and blog also have a part to play in that they allow the community to connect,  bond and share experiences with each other. Thus they reward respondents for their openness and honesty by allowing the connect with fellow sufferers, thus providing a level of support and comfort in knowing.

The recruitment of patients and sufferers is no easy task, so making them feel comfortable, respected and valued contributors within the community is essential. Our approach achieves this in a number of ways.

First we work tirelessly to design the tasks and activities that benefit from our own of research into the language and behaviours of the target audience. We see our role as party hosts, not entertainers, so it's important that we communicate with them in a language they recognise - theirs not ours.

Secondly we encourage Community Managers to share with them the insights that are being gleaned, so that they themselves are learning from the project and not just giving.

As our online research community work continues, so to does our amazement at the audience-types that are increasingly comfortable in sharing their lives online, be it in private or social environments. Our communities are an efficient and powerful way to connect, create learnings, gather feedback and support sufferers who wish to help others at the same time.

We've been off-line for a while now, for good reason. We're getting bigger by the day, and this week welcomed our latest team member, Nuno, all the way from Portugal. He's a php god, the kind of guy you want on your side. Nuno officially has the longest name ever - Nuno Miguel Novais Soares da Silva Dias (it just got bigger!) - let's hope his code isn't so lengthy!

We've also been working hard at localising our platforms, and we're proud to be able to say that we now have localised platforms for China, Korea, Japan, France, Germany, US, Poland, Brazil, Spain and Italy. There are of course many more to come, but we like to think that these will keep you, our friends and clients, happy for some time to come.

We're also working hard at rebranding, but I'll save this story for another day.....

The market research world has a new kid on the block - digital research. But is ‘being digital’ enough?

Digital research is nothing new. Quantitative digital research tools have been around as long as computers have. And very useful they are too.

But now there is a new breed of tools, which offer a more dynamic, richer approach to aggregating the thoughts, ideas and insights of consumers. These qualitative tools are an emerging field, which are being progressively adopted by the industry and their clients.

Qualitative digital research tools can be built as a result of the convergence of two key developments:

• Improved infrastructure - primarily broadband internet connections, capable home computers and media capture devises eg. video-capable mobile phones
• Sophisticated digital user-behaviours

The latter has been made possible as a result of the myriad methods of digital communication, taught to people by popular social networking services like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. These services and the interactive features they offer have equipped participants with the tools and capabilities needed to share complex viewpoints from the comfort of their own home.

Digital research tools offer numerous immediate and obvious technical benefits over more traditional research practices. For example, all data generated is already digital, enabling researchers to cut and slice data dynamically, without the need to transcribe. This is only the start - but that’s a different post!

These benefits alone under-estimate the real potential of qualitative digital research tools. The real benefits are less about the technical advantages and more about the ability to persistently commune with groups of participants for extended periods of time.

With these tools, it is possible to hold extended research ‘workshops’ for anywhere between a few days and a few months. When compared to traditional practices, the quality and quantity of the work generated by each participant can be higher than traditional approaches by an order of magnitude. And typically for little or no additional cost per-participant.

These new dynamics require a new approach to research. The typical method of questions and answers needs to give way to a more open discourse between researcher and participant. This requires researchers to think differently about the way they conduct their primary research. Pre-planning is still vital, but the possibilities of being flexible, reactive and proactive during the research period is much greater.

The levels of open discourse offered by these tools also present new and interesting ways of fulfilling research objectives. In our experience, spending the extra time creating empowering research tasks, which put the participants at the centre of the question, rather than posing questions that ‘tick the box’ produce rich, high quality results that would otherwise be missed. Equally, the opportunity to respond and build on the responses of participants (both immediately, and importantly over time) becomes central to the methodology.

Researchers also need to have an ever increasing understanding of their participant base. This includes having an appreciation of their wants and needs. Looking after participants for extended periods of time is no easy task. Participants need to know what they are expected to do, when they are expected to do it and, how they are expected to do it. In essence, they need to be offered a narrative - explaining where they have come from, where they are now and where they are going. And this needs to happen more than once during their journey!

A well managed community of participants who are ‘looked after’ by someone aware of these factors will produce better results for longer periods of time than a community who are given a few tasks and then left to their own devises.

We offer our clients a sophisticated array of social media tools (blogs, forums, video-interviews, etc.). With these tools they are able to talk to people for extended periods of time, about the topics that are important to their studies. But with this comes the responsibility to help them make the most of the tools and the people using these tools. By offering a supporting service where research tasks are co-designed and managing participants is discussed, we are able to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.