When is an MROC not an MROC?

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

Categories: Business, MROC, Market Research, Online Communities.

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