Archive for the ‘Online Communities’ Category

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

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'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're extremely proud of all of the online research technology that we've developed over the years. It facilitates a more creative online research experience for both respondent and researcher. One of the most effective and much heralded tools that we've integrated, however, is also the simplest and easiest to use (hence our pride in it!). It's called Notes. The simplest way to describe it is like Delicious for researchers.

Notes, allows researchers and admins to annotate, share and discover respondent-generated content. As an online research project progresses, researchers and admins can add notes to the most valuable content they see, so they can return to and/or share their thoughts and ideas with others, with ease.

Researchers and admins also create meta-databases with Notes. These generate tag clouds that help uncover trending topics. Researchers can also add notes-to-self, helping to remind them about the best content they have seen.

Our clients tell us that they love Notes, not just because of its ease-of-use, but because it saves them time at the end of projects when they need to review the content for analysis. Online research (including communities, MROCs) can produce a vast amount of data, so it's important to create mechanisms that allow researchers to organise, search and filter content. Notes fulfils this and more by removing the need for your project's Senior Analyst having to sequentially review all the data shared.

If you'd like to know more about how Notes can improve your online research, contact Stephen Cribbett, stephen@dubstudios.com

For nearly a month now, one hell of a hot discussion has been taking place within the LinkedIn Group called NewMR - Co-creating the Future of Market Research. The discussion is centred on researchers views of MROC's and whether or not they are truly beyond the old divide of cal and quant.

It's been such a great debate that we thought it only right to share some of the highlights. What follows are the views and opinions of members of the group in response the question 'Are MROC's beyond Qual and Quant?'. These answers describe a new paradigm that is building and managing effective online communities for the purpose of delivering an ongoing stream of valuable, actionable insight. Enjoy...

Research Communities blur methodologies but they can be of benefit to the participant, researcher and client.

Why define the market research space by methodology? Our construct is to look instead whether we are doing "testing" or "discovery". The former is "What do you think of this?", as in this package, this idea, this word, this ad, this display, and so on -- and you can get at that with both quant and qual activities

I tend to think of online communities as a platform that allows the researcher the freedom to do almost any kind of research that they like - quant, qual or the simply the ability to listen to free conversations amongst community members

For me, the real methodological shift with communities is allowing respondents to grab the remote and set the research agenda for a change

The social web is the new frontier in many ways; is our industry able to let go of the comforts of the past way of doing things and become pioneers in defining what research will look in the new world of the social web?

In our view, you would never use a MROC to forecast the size of a market, do a segmentation, scientifically validate a hypotheses or make a decision that involves a very significant investment

Seems to me that using labels like qual and quant is about as outdated as referring to above and below the line

...they can act as a tool to spark conversation and participation within the community: in my experience polls and surveys work well as 'social objects' within a community, lures to get people talking about stuff

The sheer volume of information is the issue. It is more than most of us have ever had to deal with as qualitative researchers from other methods.

An MROC is dynamic, evolutionary and to my mind have elements of both qual and quant.

One of the starting points when we sit down with clients is defining what we want the respondent experience to be and then to marry that with our research and engagement priorities (as far ahead as we can see them). We have successes at the ongoing, MROC end of the continuum and have created environments where active participants come in and express themselves habitually and frequently and associate happily with each other.

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

This week saw Dub launch two great new tools for qualitative researchers, namely bulletin board focus groups (BBFGs) and online market research communities (MROCs) solutions.

IdeaStream is our new online research community platform that combines  live, asynchronous and qual / quant market research tools. IdeaStream is designed to support communities of several hundred members anywhere in the world and has multi-lingual capability. IdeaStream has a range of task-based tools alongside those of a more open nature. Moderators and Community Managers (CMs) also benefit from the integration of our powerful moderation tool, Notes, which alows Moderators and CMs to collaborate more effectively on projects, manage community members within a single environment and share insight with clients and colleagues at the push of a button.

You can download an IdeaStream product sheet here, and request a demo here.

Knowing how much researchers love bulletin board focus groups (BBFGs), we've also released a new multimedia BBFG solution, aptly named BulletinBoard. It's been designed by researchers for researchers, and comes with all the features you'd expect such as text-based responses and moderation tools for deeper interrogation. It also offers some unexpected and powerful new features including multimedia sharing (pictures and video) and integrated polls and surveys. BulletinBoard also benefits from use of our Notes tool, so moderators can work collaboratively and document their thoughts and rate posts over time. This removes the need to scan everything again sequentially come the end of your project, and saves you valuable time, effort and, of course, money!

Get a copy of the BulletinBoard product sheet here, and you can also request a demo here.

If you'd like to find out more about IdeaStream and BulletinBoard, including standard rates,  then please contact Stephen Cribbett. In the meantime, you can register your interest and keep up-to-date with our news and new releases, including the soon to be released qual research-oriented journal and blogging solution, by entering your details on our homepage.

We've talked about internal communities and using social networks to power business before, here, on this blog, and time and again we get pressed about the risk that these new informal, more open structures present, over and above traditional command-and-control models. Most commonly, people want to know about how they can tackle their security concerns and whether or not letting employees loose with social media will result in a reduction in productivity.

We've said before that by building an internal culture around trust, creativity and greater freedom will in fact enhance productivity, and allow people to shine. However, it's vitally important that you engage and educate your people first, then set some clear guidelines that they can follow.  This creates the right environment for people to thrive and a framework that supports better work practice and efficiency.

In support of these discussions are a few useful resources that we've come across. StopBlocking.org is a resource for those that vehemently believe that the benefits outweigh the risks.

Here you'll find a new report by Cisco Systems carried out among medium-to-large enterprises across ten countries. The establishes out that more than half of organisations sampled prohibit use of social media or collaborative tools, but that half of the end users admit to ignoring company policies prohibiting use of Social Media, with a further 27% admitting they change settings on corporate devices to gain access!

And finally, this is a great post containing Five Reasons Why Companies Should Not Block Employee Access to Social Networks. It speaks for itself really.

If you're still struggling to make the right decisions, why not drop me a line and let's get our heads together to determine the best approach for you and your organisation.

I don’t know the exact number of organisations that have experimented with social software or social media for internal communications, but from those that we’ve connected with and listened to it’s clear there are a large number of them that didn’t get the results they wanted because they didn’t know where to start or were unsure of how to build adoption. So if you fall into one of these categories, here are a few pointers that you may find useful.

More than just push messaging tool
First off, social tools (wikis, forums, tagging etc), and more importantly social networking behaviours, can be deployed to help information flow more freely, enhance knowledge sharing and internal collaboration, activate deeper employee engagement, and even has proven results in achieving staff retention. They shouldn’t necessarily be viewed as a replacement for those things you are already doing, and they should be seen as something more wide-reaching that simply a communication tool versed with message pushing!

Command and control no longer
The days of command & control are numbered as social tools place greater emphasis on people at all levels by providing everyone with a voice, whether they choose to exercise it or not. Therefore, their is no such thing as ownership - it is owned by everyone, and more so by those with a hunger, passion and willing to participate and contribute. This is heightened by the fact that there are less rules than before - but guidelines are vitally important nonetheless, as leaders seek to engender adoption.

Social networks are a solution, not a problem
There are a lot of organisations and business leaders out there banning the likes of Facebook and other social networking sites from the workplace as they see it as a threat to productivity. I question, is technology the reason that people want to do something other than what they are paid for within the workplace? Perhaps job satisfaction should be studied very carefully, as should the behaviours that are now commonplace among staff in their private lives, for it is this which needs to be harnessed in the workplace.

Host the conversation, it’s taking place anyway!
Business also fears that their workers will talk negatively about a range of work-related issues. To this I say embrace it, listen carefully, and if it becomes such a problem then let the community themselves report it and deal with it in a way they deem relevant. By offering these controls, you will find such negativity rare indeed! What’s more, these conversation are taking place elsewhere, so better to be able to gather them and respond to them in the best way possible.

Don’t be afraid to experiment (and fail)
When considering the use of social tools within the workplace, don’t be afraid to experiment, and we advocate starting small. Invite a number of people whom you believe will be early adopters, and allow them to spread the word. Make them champions within the business, and they will help culture the guidelines and behaviours that can achieve your goals. Social tools are by their very nature flexible and cost-effective, so create a playground, sit back, watch and learn.

A range of business applications and solutions
And finally, developing social tools for internal communications isn’t an initiative that should be led or driven by your IT department. Why? Simply put, they exist to implement now out-moded command and control systems, and are much more focussed on the ‘tech’ rather than the all important behaviours.

Wrapping up, social tools can help you with a plethora of business cases, including the following;

• Internal collaboration
• Knowledge sharing
• Business networking
• Learning
• Internal communications
• Resource management
• Sweating knowledge capital
• Sales support
• Customer service

If you’re asking yourself how you can achieve some of these points, and want to learn more how social tools can benefit your organisation on the inside then drop me a line, I’d be happy to help, advise, guide and get my hands dirty.

Engadget, one of the leading gadget blogs on the internet, recently decided to turn off commenting on articles. Their claim is that in in recent days commenting has got 'out of hand', with a few people creating an environment that they feel is 'ugly, pointless and threatening'.

It's a bold move, and one I suspect they did not take lightly. By their own admission, and inline with the oft cited 1% rule, only a small percentage of their readership comment. However, the feature is considered one of the basic tenants of social media - allowing motivated readers to become part of the debate. Indeed, it's features like commenting, along with the low barriers to entry, ability to syndicate across multiple platforms/channels, etc. that have helped the format grow to the size, variety and popularity it has today.

Benefits aside monitoring comments, filtering out the spam and ensuring abuse is kept at bay can be a difficult process. Blog authors have options, which include:

• Moderation - before a comment is displayed online, it must be 'cleared' by a site administer, ensuring no detrimental posts get through. However, this can take away the immediate gratification users have come to expect and cause commentors to feel they're being censored. Such a process also becomes unfeasible for a site that is as popular (and has such a high number of generated comments) as Engadget.
• Spam filters - Great for some removing the 'v1Agra' type of spam message we have all come to despise, but limited when it comes to deciding if a well composed comment is inappropriate
• Community-managed voting - only displays comments that have been given a positive vote by readers. Very 'hands-off' for site owners, but requires an extra level of interaction from users
• Register to vote - Great for blogs with a small following - e.g. personal holiday blogs, but becomes difficult to track with large and manage with large user base. Equally, as user names and passwords are required each time, barriers to entry for commenting (especially for casual commentors) become very high
• Threading - this allows people to comment on comments. It doesn't stop spam comments, but it does conversations to diverge. Sites like Slashdot take this approach to the extreme, allowing unlimited 'threading'. The side effect is that this can quickly become confusing to the casual observer. Limited threading is a useful

Our advise at Dub is to try and take maximum advantage of the medium and be as open to viewer comments as possible. As you can see, there are a myriad approaches to helping mange comments. Unfortunately, for some publishers all the options in the world can't stop the trolls and spammers of this world.

Read Engadget's full statement here