Archive for the ‘Online Communities’ Category

At Dub, we help our global clients (brands and agencies) create private, invite-only online communities for the purpose of delivering game-changing insights, collaborative innovation and co-creation. This means helping bring together a brand and its customers, but also those who aren't yet consuming their products or services, or those that actively don't want to. These are often referred to as outliers or abstainers, and they are the people who can deliver the best ideas and the richest insights.

The insight communities we help create can be categorised as either Project-based or Longitudinal.

1. Project-based Insight Communities

As the name suggests, these communities are short-lived; typically a couple of days up to a a few weeks. They are tasked to meet a single project objective (research, insight or co-creation) and once this has been achieved, they are quickly disbanded.

Being focused on a single objective means that activity is over a shorter period but is likely to be intensive. Members of the community are likely be assigned exercises on a daily basis, and these can range from blogging, keeping diaries, roleplaying, group discussions, surveys and polls, and brainstorms. Unlike traditional research techniques, members have a much clearer idea as to what is happening with the information and ideas they share since the asynchronous nature of the engagement affords the Community Manager / Moderator the time to feedback. This in itself motivates participation.

In support of project-based insight communities, Dub has the leading platform called IdeaStream

2. Longitudinal Insight Communities

Brands like the opportunity longitudinal insight communities afford, since it's like getting a large number of their most valued customers together in a room and making them available to answer any questions anyone in the organisation has at any time, 24/7.

Because of the longer-term nature of these communities, different tactics and resources need to be deployed to keep them alive and active. This includes going behind just the task-based level of interaction seen in the project-based communities, and allowing members to go off-piste and start their own discussions. The community (and insight) will also benefit from letting members strike-up their own relationships, as it allows the brand to witness their customers talking about their products and services in the most natural, unfacilitated fashion.

To help you deliver successful longitudinal insight communities, Dub has developed the UpClose platform.

In addition to providing the best technology, Dub has a wealth of experience in how to find the right people for your community, how to engage and optimise your time with them, and how to ensure your members are motivated and rewarded over time. Dub can help you plan how long your community should be and give you guidance on how to deliver design effective online research.

To find out more about how Dub can help you fire-up your insight communities, make better decisions and be more innovative, contact stephen@dubstudios.com

If you've embarked upon the creation of a longitudinal insight community consisting of customers, non-customers, outliers and abstainers, then one of the challenges you might find is how to pro-actively fire-start new discussions around topics that are a) relevant to the community, b) going to get a good response, and c), most important of all, are insightful.

Take time to look around (outside the realms of your community) at some of the most actively engaged communities in the same topic area. Pay attention to the news and latest issues affecting consumers or culture, for example. Ask yourself if these discussions would ignite within your own insight community and consider kick-starting them.

Within longitudinal insight communities, you can create the topic areas and allow your members to add the threads within it, so carefully consider the construction of the topics to encourage this interaction.

As MROCs (or insight communities) continue to gather pace and mature as a methodology, so to does the way in which they are measured and the techniques used to manage them.

We've long been touting the benefits of small but focused communities where membership numbers are no more than 300. That's not to say you can't invite more people, but the quality of the participation and output will fall as you go much beyond these numbers, as will the time and cost of managing the community and analysing the output.

While there are still researchers and research departments that use the language of 'completes' when referring to the success of their insight community, we always push back and talk to them about 'engagement' and how you can get much greater value from a smaller number of participants, both in terms of their overall participation with the tasks and exercises but also their average number of contributions.

This metric becomes even more prevalent when you start to consider moving your insight community into a phase of co-creation where you are looking to collaborate with the leading 1% of your customer base.

Another reason why your community needs to be smaller in size and more focused is that consumers are now members of more networks and groups than ever before. To cut through the white noise is thus increasingly difficult, and puts more emphasis in the design of engaging, creative research and the need to make the intrinsic motivational factors (membership, connectivity etc) work even harder.

To find out more about how Dub can help you engage the top 1% of your customer base and build thriving communities for insight, innovation and cocreation, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

As those of you involved in social networks and online communities will know, it's the intrinsic factors that often motivate people the most, for example 'connectedness', 'membership', 'sharing' and generosity'. However, a fascinating and recent study by two economists, Xiaoquan Zhang and Feng Zhu, examined contributors to the internet phenomena that is Wikipedia. For those of you not familiar with Wikipedia then it can be described as an online encyclopedia that can be edited and managed by literally anyone. What's more, Wikipedia is a collaborative site that stores details of all of the edits ever made and by whom, and there's also a live chat environment where contributors can discuss and collaborate.

What they found was that contributions from regular users (editors and authors) strangely dropped by around 40%. As the normal rules of participation would have it, these contributors should be 'more' active in order to get the work done since they care enough about Wikipedia to cover the downtime caused elsewhere. The conclusions that this episode has drawn are that contributors are also motivated by the notion of someone watching them. Why contribute when nobody is watching? To back this up, it happened to be those contributors that regularly access the live chat pages that were most disengaged.

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.

We've just received a lovely quote from a moderator that has just completed an online study using our IdeaStream platform. Here words were...

"I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the platform is so easy it saves a heck of a lot of time, encourages the participants to work much harder, and makes the moderator's job much easier"

Not sure what we can add to that, other than if you haven't experienced our online research platforms for yourself, your missing out!

Get in touch with stephen@dubstudios.com to find out more.

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.

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

Just in, some great new feedback from a brand new client based in Australia that we had to share with you. You'll understand why when you read it....

I have used many (qual research software solutions) before... I would say IdeaStream is much better. The dashboard is far superior than what I've seen with other providers. It's also very intuitive.

To find out more about just how good our dashboard is, and other things, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 20 7247 3327 or Kerry Hecht (US) on +1 310 997 5779