Archive for the ‘MROC’ Category

We've built and facilitated over a hundred online communities purposed with delivering fresh insight, eureka moments and relationships, and we're constantly impressed by the energy, enthusiasm and creativity extolled by consumers. Not only does the convenience of these methods facilitate better results (than traditional research techniques), it brings out the creative best in people since the rewards and value is a combination of the emotional, social, physical and financial.

We talk to our clients about the merits of 'narrative journeys'; the creation of a beginning, a middle and an end to the story that results in co-created value. Give consumers room to manoeuvre and a multitude of ways in which they can express themselves, and combine this with the ability to continually iterate the exercises and you've got a melting pot of insight and ideas.

The most successful insight and co-creation communities are those that are led by skilled Community Managers - a new breed of research moderators. Community Managers are story tellers, conversationalists and relationship brokers, and they display bags of passion in order to inject enthusiasm and energy into the community. It's a fun and interesting role that many researchers new to the discipline and quickly falling in love with as they really get to 'know' their community as people they are and not just as 'respondents'.

One strategic intent of your insight and co-creation community should be to fish out the top 1%. These can be your leading advocates, the most creative, the most digitally connected etc. Finding them is critical, and this is where we move from research into co-creation. We must drop the argument about bias and representation and look further forward. As researchers we need to be part of the creation process as well as helping clients understand what went before.

Create the right environment within your community and the ideas and insights will flow, rapidly! Build relationships and your community will be engaged and motivated to co-develop new ideas without the need to financially motivate them. Listen carefully, talk clearly and remain open, honest and transparent and you'll do well. Goodbye focus groups, hello future. It's a brave new world we are entering into as researchers, but the future looks bright. Our skills and craft are not lost, they are developing and increasing in relevance.

If you are planning your first MROC and are unsure as to how your members will respond, worry not. This is a common concern among budding research community managers, and one that can reigned in by reducing risk and starting small.

Hand pick only a small number of participants that fit your the criteria and invite them to join your community. Your first few activity should always be to engage them, but don't fell pressured to engage them straight away with research activities. Start slowly by building some profiling exercises and ask your initial members what would motivate them to participate in the communities activities, now and into the future. Not only does this technique get them talking about themselves - something we're all seemingly happy to do - it will help you understand their motivations for taking part and provide valuable information you can use to derive a strategy for incentives as the community grows and you look to build participation.

When your members start to become active contributors, you know you're doing something right and rewarding them in the right way. Remember, online research communities provide simple and convenient ways to share some of the insights gleaned with your members, so keep them informed and they'll reward you with greater levels of focus, interest and contribution.

Get the rewards and incentives right in the early stages and your community will thrive. And as a guide, think about not just cash incentives, but look into some of the softer rewards such as status, knowledge, responsibility and social connectivity.

Press Release:  London/Los Angeles - 27th June 2011

Dub appointed online qual technology partner to Decision Analyst following extensive review online qual technology partner to Decision Analyst following extensive review.

Dub, the leading provider of online research software and services, today announced a new partnership with Decision Analyst, a global marketing research and analytical consulting firm. The agreement sees Dub provide online qual technology for the coming year and provides new innovation opportunities for both companies.

A vastly experienced team of online qual researchers, Decision Analyst conducted a lengthy review of research technology partners and selected Dub having had extensive hands-on experience.

Stephen Cribbett, Dub co-Founder and CEO, comments ‘We are delighted to have been selected by Decision Analyst to support their global online qual research work. We share many beliefs on where online qual is going and our tools have a good fit with their team of experienced online researchers’

”Dub’s advanced technology and capabilities enhance Decision Analyst’s qualitative research and ideation services.  The services we perform for our clients demand the highest quality, flexibility, security, and integrity. Dub is a major contributor in helping Decision Analyst achieve those goals,” according to Gwen Ishmael, Senior Vice President.

Dub and Decision Analyst’s partnership comes soon after the announcement of Dub’s expansion into the U.S. market, with a new office in LA.

To find out more, contact Stephen Cribbett, +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or email stephen(at)dubstudios(dot)com

When we build communities with our clients, we always recommend they give their community a name. But it's more than a name, it's an identity that establishes the purpose of the community. It is symbolic of something that is owned by the research community members and, over time, becomes the glue that binds members to the host.

Practically, the name should be used in most, if not all email titles as an identifier that are sent from the community to its members. This establishes the cause of the call-to-action and gains instant recognition in what these days are over-crowded inboxes.

When your research community members are talking among themselves, they will use the name of the community to refer to their activities.

Perhaps most importantly, your members won't react quite so positively if they feel they are simply a member of an 'organisations' community. They want to feel part of something unique, exciting, a place they have had a had in creating. What's more, they should feel happy in taking on the identity of the community for themselves.

One example of a great name that was derived for a recent community that Dub built for it's client Cafedirect was simply 'Cafedirectors'. It gave its member the notion that they were a select bunch, people who were going to have a voice and a say in the future of the brand. This example does not shy away from a direct association with the host brand, though in some circumstances it's good to put some distance between the two for reasons explained earlier in this post.

So you see, the name of your community IS important and it should be motivating and inspiring.

We get asked the question ‘How long should I plan for my research community (MROC) to last?’ a lot, so I thought I’d share our thoughts and wisdom on this one with you.

First of all, there is no hard and fast rule about how long your research community should live on. It can be argued that a bulletin board focus group constitutes a community, in which case the community may last only a matter of days. But for the purpose of this discussion, let’s focus on thoroughbred research communities (ie. excluding community panels) of between 100-500 members.

There are several factors affecting the ‘life’ of your community, which can be summarised as follows;

Capital investment
Clearly, you should set out on the road to delivering a research community with a clear budget. Your budget should cover such elements as technology, skills, rewards and incentives, and finally, in some instances, recruitment.

Resources
When planning your community, you’ll need to make decisions on what is kept in house and what is outsourced. Naturally these will impact your budget, which in turn have an impact on how long the community can be kept alive.

Objectives
Your community may be designed to deliver just a single objective such as a piece of NPD or validation, but in a lot of cases they are built as a resource that can be tapped into by many people within the organisation over time. Therefore, objectives may change on a monthly basis and regular planning required to ensure these demands are achievable and delivered.

Participation
Not all communities are the raging success you’d hope for. For many good reasons, they can fail. For example, you may lack the ‘glue’ that you thought you had, the sort that keeps your community interested and engaged. There may be a cultural event or disaster of some kind that drastically changes the behaviour of your members. Or quite simply, you just not getting the level of participation required to justify the investment, the result being that the community is closed down.

Tasks and Exercises
You need to achieve a good balance between the volume and frequency of tasks and activities that you launch. Too many and you risk fatigue, the result of which is a fall-out of participants. Too few and you might see people’s interest wane and their attention drift elsewhere. Get it right and you have will engage interesting and interested people in creative ways you never thought possible.

So you see, there’s no one answer to this question, it’s all down to the careful planning and implementation of a sound research community strategy, business case and investment.

To find out more about how you can plan your research community for success, why not get in touch with us@dubstudios.com

If you’re a brand or organisation thinking of building your own online research community (MROC) as a way of regularly delivering fresh that can help you make the right decisions and helping you develop new products and services, then you’ll no doubt be pondering the role of the Community Manager.

There are of course similarities in this role to that of a Community Manager working on communities of a different purpose, ie marketing or support-led communities, but it’s the differences that are important to focus on. So we’ve taken a look at the typical activities and responsibilities you should be building into this role.

Recruitment & Growth
Unlike other community-types, the research community will have narrower membership criteria, including demographics and attitudinal. Over the course of time, members will drop out naturally and need replacing, so whether you are recruiting from a panel, existing customer data or social media channels, recruitment is one of the most important ongoing activities.

Content
Online research communities are likely to last several months or years, so retaining the interest of its members is tantamount to its success. The Community Manager will need to create ‘sticky’ content - that which is interesting, relevant, engaging and often unique.

Relationship-building
The best relationships are those that build organically over time, but deepening relationships with leading contributors - the most creative, outspoken, advocate, connected etc - pays dividends. These members can also help you with your activities. For example, make them Moderators or ask them to volunteer for various other duties which you can reward them for in a number of social and emotional ways.

Events
The best communities don’t just exist online. Punctuate your community with a range of live events, debates, presentations, parties etc, and you’ll see the participation rise and the relationships flourish.

Research
The power of your community is it’s ability to generate fresh insight and new ideas. So with the right training and tools, your Community Manager should be hunting for these golden nuggets every day. Tracking insight, trends and attitudinal changes forms part of this activity and should be supported with tools that allow them to annotate and organise the information for future reporting and dissemination

Insight engagement
One of the benefits of working with digital insight is that it can be shared quickly and easily, and can be bought to life in a multitude of ways (think data visualisation, video reports etc). Insight should be present at board level discussions, so the role of the Community Manager is also to ensure your people are engaged with it.

Moderation
This can be pre or post moderation, and focuses on making the community a safe and positive environment, weeding out the bad and highlighting the good.

Technical
Your Community Manager need not be a developer versed in the art of writing code, but it certainly helps if they can get involved in technical conversations and write specifications for new tools.

Support
Responding to questions and requests for help

Given the extent of the activities above, your Community Manager needs to be highly organised and motivated. As your community launches, they’ll spend more time on recruitment, but over time this might reduce, so they’ll need to strike a balance while sustaining a focus.

Your Community Manager needn't be a full-time position to begin with, but as your community extends, it may be worth considering the optimisation of this role to ensure your community meets it business objectives. Research communities are major commitments, so don’t take them lightly and be sure to consider all the elements, not just Community Manager, but also technology, style and content, design and investment.

The team here at Dub spend countless hours helping clients (agencies and brands) optimise their research design for the online research community or ad-hoc online qual project that lays ahead. As the relationship with our client extends, the support we give them sees us transfer the knowledge and experience of online research design we have, to the point where the level of help and support they need is simply in applying some of the rules surrounding tone-of-voice and audience engagement.

When applied correctly, these rules make for an effective online research design and, in turn, result in better response and happier participants. So without further ado, here are some of the top tips that, when applied, will turn your online research design from being good to great!

Talk like a person, not a corporation
Remove any potential ‘corporate’ speak that implies laziness and a lack of thinking, such as ‘tell us what you think’. These are not good at building a sense of community since they can make the moderator appear distant and disengaged

Engage, question, probe
When constructing a question, lead with an explanation of the objectives, then supply the question, and finally weave in more information and as and when you probe (or comment) on their post. Building the conversation in this way helps to establish the participants confidence and expand their response with greater ease and enjoyment.

Talk ‘to’ people, not ‘at’ them
Communicate with your participants as you would in everyday life. Write in the 1st person and show that you are a real person who will acknowledge and support them through the project or community. Knowing there is someone, a real person, listening and responding helps create a sense of community and builds relationships.

Identify the active participants early on, and harness their energy
As you build your community, you’ll begin to see patterns of participation and spot some of the more active and willing members. Work with these people and use them to help encourage others to speak up if they are lagging. So for example, ‘I’d love to hear your thoughts on this Ian and Amanda’.

Combine open and closed questions
We always encourage our clients to be creative and write research that allows the respondents to creatively express themselves using the range of tools available. But at the same time, we emphasis the need to combine open and closed questions to provide a change of pace and offer some respite.

Don’t be afraid to offer your opinion during the course of a task
You’re likely to be asking for the opinions of your participants throughout the life of your community, so don’t be afraid to offer your own as a way of encouragement. However, this is research so don’t bias the response, only offer up your opinion to help lift the level of response and get deeper into the conversations.

Use narrative
When constructing your questions or discussion, try and write it as though it were a story, with a clear beginning, middle and end. By this we mean frame the question. Tell them whey you are asking the question, and why you want their feedback, then drop the question or task, and finally explain what you have found out and what, if possible, you will do with their response. Online research gives you the opportunity to share feedback in a constructive way, and this is a great way of retaining attention and motivating on going participation since your participants feel as though they are genuinely contributing to something meaningful, rather than just being raped of their time for little else than cash.

Be yourself, interact
Despite not being with your participants in person, it is still possible to come across as a genuine person who cares passionately about the subject and who is going to be supportive. Try to interact with respondents as much as possible through ‘commenting’, even if it’s simply to say ‘thanks for your response’. The more effort you put into this, the more relaxed, open, communicative and natural your participants will be.

If you’d like to know more on how to optimise your research design, why not drop us a line by emailing us@dubstudios.com or calling +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 (UK) or +1 310 997 5779

Dub are pleased to announce that IdeaStream, our flagship online qual application used by TNS, Ipsos, Flamingo and Decision Analyst among others, is now available in Turkish.

This compliments 18 others languages that include: English, French, Dutch, Czech, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian, Korean, Indonesian, Taiwanese, Japanese

For more information, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or Kerry Hecht on +1 310 997 5779

Vi är mycket glada att meddela att IdeaStream finns nu på svenska

For the rest of us, that means Dub are pleased to announce that IdeaStream is now available in Swedish, to compliment 17 other langauges including...

1. English
2. French
3. Dutch
4. Czech
5. Italian
6. Spanish
7. French
8. German
9. Portugeuse
10. Polish
11. Mandarin
12. Cantonese
13. Russian
14. Korean
15. Indonesian
16. Taiwanese
17. Japanese

If you can't see your chosen language on the list, and want to run an online research community, get in touch and we can deliver your language within just one week!

It’s a given that within online qualitative research (blogs, video diaries, forums, chat, etc), researchers get the opportunity to hear consumers talk about their experiences and their feelings towards products brands and services, but is the dialogue ‘real’ enough?

John Suler’s 'The Psychology of Cyberspace' says:

"It's well known that people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn't ordinarily say or do in the face-to-face world. They loosen up, feel more uninhibited, express themselves more openly. Researchers call this the "disinhibition effect."

Perhaps the pinnacle of any online research community or ad-hoc online qual study, however, is when, as a researcher, you get to sit back and hear consumers talk among themselves about brands, products and their experiences.

Why is this so powerful? Simply, it provides some of the most candid and unadulterated insight one will ever experience since, as far as the participant is concerned, neither the researcher nor the client (brand) is in the same room and, as John Suller says:

“According to traditional Internet philosophy, everyone is an equal: Peers share ideas and resources. In fact, the net itself is engineered with no centralized control. As it grows, with a seemingly endless potential for creating new environments, many people see themselves as independent-minded explorers. This atmosphere and philosophy contribute to the minimizing of authority.”

These phenomenon and the platforms set a scenario where consumers can literally spew the good, the bad and the ugly without fear of reprisal, backlash or judgment and without the peer pressure associated with real physical presence. For the researcher and the client, it provides an opportunity to hear first-hand the language and experience the passion and gusto consumers use to share their points of view. It delivers truths that are hard to come by elsewhere, in such fashion.

If you’re asking yourself what online research communities can do for you, this should be somewhere near the top of the list.