Archive for the ‘Online Communities’ Category

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.

Added Value - part of the WPP marketing services group of companies - is the world’s leading brand development and marketing insight company with some 25 offices worldwide and a global client list that spans all categories.

 Dub have been working with Added Value for over three years, developing and enhancing a leading-edge digital insight and innovation tool that helps them to source the latest ideas, insights and opinions from consumers and experts around the world, without the need to bring together contributors - an activity that can prove costly and inefficient.  By both providing the social software and helping the client with some of the finer points of building and managing online communities, Dub has helped Added Value win more pitches, delivered more creative multimedia insight, and cemented its positioning as one of the leading industry innovators.

The platform, designed to support Added Value’s work - known as AV-id - makes use of micro-blogging, IM, forums, bulletin boards and media-sharing technologies, and harnesses the latest social networking behaviours to support live and ongoing dialogue among leading-edge consumers and experts from around the world. Added Value consultants are empowered with a unique moderation toolkit that allows them to interact directly with the community whilst sharing their thoughts and ideas with other members of the project team in both local and remote offices.

Driving actionable insight

By assigning members of the niche online communities structured tasks and activities, (of both a qualitative and quantitative nature), a stream of rich, multimedia insight and consciousness flows. Data visualisation tools such as tag clouds help strategists identify trending topics and emergent themes, and subsequently used to spot issues that require further investigation and probing.

Idea generation and collaboration innovation

Recognising that traditional research techniques can sometime be a one-way street, we worked with Added Value to develop a number of collaborative tasks and techniques that allow members of the communities to generate and share ideas, and then select winning ideas. This co-creation technique is widely accepted as a new paradigm that brands are quickly latching on to as they seek to enhance their innovation  capabilities.

Usability, training and adoption

Today,  many of us use social software in our own private lives, but relatively few are adopting them in the workplace to enhance productivity and, as in this case, support greater insight and connectedness.  Knowing this, we worked in partnership with Added Value on a rigorous education and adoption program for key Added Value stakeholders, including a regular series of global webinars and inspiration sessions. These sessions also provide the opportunity for valuable debate that feeds into the platform's ongoing development program.

The AV-id platform and  methodologies it supports are being deployed around the world everyday by Added Value, and in languages including Spanish, French, Polish, Japanese, Mandarin, Portuguese, Korean and Italian.

As well as being used to engage consumers and experts, AV-id is equally at home engaging internal stakeholders - marketers, R&D teams, designers etc - and creating internal innovation communities.

For Bel - a global food company - AVid was deployed to help marketers, R&D professionals and designers come together to create new ideas and innovative solutions to everyday problems they face.

To-date, brands including Pepsi Lipton International, Meetic, Tefal, Reliant Energy, and Barilla among others have embraced the AV-id approach.

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

There's been some considerable buzz around location-based services for some time now, but thats mainly among us consultants. That was until the arrival of Gowalla, Google Latitude and especially the rapidly rising Foursquare. These applications allow you to connect and follow friends as they travel the world (or just your local postcode). They work by using the geo-data captured from your mobile device and then, in the case of Foursquare, get you to 'check-in' to the precise destination. Simple, fun, insightful!

We like Foursquare not only because it keeps us up-to-date with the movements of our friends, but it also allows is to discover new and exciting places to visit in cities around the world, thanks to our well-travelled friends. Perhaps more importantly, the service has massive potential for business owners - especially retailers and operators - in that users can be tracked and rewarded for multiple visits to destinations. This offers great opportunities for customer and brand loyalty schemes and deepens engagement with customers in the 2.0 way.

Best of all, Foursquare harnesses gaming mechanics to increase participation. Simply, the more you visit, the higher your points. Earn points for multiple visits to the same destination or be rewarded with Adventurer status when you check-in to new destinations.

Here's how points are currently awarded:

• +5 points for your first time checking-in at a venue
• +5 points for adding a new venue
• +1 point for per checkin, increasing by +1 with each checkin (e.g. your 1st checkin of the day is +1, 2nd checkin of the day +2 points, etc)

We've even witnessed meet-ups in Sydney and New York for those awarded Mayoral status! So what are you waiting for, drop by Foursquare, befriend me and then drop by Dub....we're waiting for you!

Socialising Best Practice and Lessons Learnt

The Design Council, a UK Government-funded strategic body, promotes the use of design through the UK.  They help business be better at doing what they do by instilling design thinking and by helping designers be more effective and public services more efficient.

Having embarked upon the development of The Designers’ Business Knowledge Base (DBKB) - an essential Best Practice resource from which design professionals, design buyers and design educators can seek inspiration and guidance - the client required a strategic overlay describing how the DBKB could be delivered as an interactive communication and collaboration tool.

The core of our work saw the development of a Digital Framework for the DBKB focusing on how users could submit and extract experience-based stories and case studies. Insights were by way of formal submissions and more conversational stories of the kind designers of all ages and experience could submit using simple, easy-to-use social software tools.

The  framework was constructed on four pillars; The User Model, Content Model, Business Model and Sustainability Model.

• The User Model proposed a variety of benefits and rewards for each of the stakeholder groups, including those of a social, emotional, financial and experiential kind.
• The Content Model explored how the resource would harness user-generated content to provide insightful and inspiring best practice examples.
• The Business Model looked at and made recommendations as to how The Design Council could monetise the service
• And finally, the Sustainability Model took inspiration from what we believed to be some of the more forward-thinking online services around, and how the DBKB could integrate their behaviours in order to be more future-proofed.

The crux of our strategic recommendations was for The Design Council to harness its existing offline design practitioner network connections for traditional push messaging, but also to engage them in more dynamic and ongoing online conversation in order to trawl for ongoing insights and knowledge around design best practice. The development of best practice guidelines in a traditional sense had proven to be expensive, and often the outcome would date very quickly. Digitally captured knowledge could be kept alive, nurtured and extended by the community, and knowledge shared over time to the extent that the community became self-helpers.

Our recommended process and methodology is currently being developed ready for implementation.