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

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.

Thinking about using online qual research techniques for business-to-business research, then look no further. Dub recently completed a research community for a B2B supplier to the construction industry that enabled them to evaluate the potential for a completely new service offering. The iterative nature of the research community allowed the agency client to fully explore these respondents spontaneous wants and needs for additional services before introducing a series of prompts (covering the service concept, detailed aspects of the service, potential naming/identities and marketing communications).

The online research  approach pioneered by Dub enabled the client to generate a level of interaction between respondents that would not have been feasible using 'off-line' methodologies, as it would not have been practical to conduct groups with this geographically disparate, busy business audience. As a result of the study, the b2b client is now in the process of launching this new service offering that will represent a real breakthrough within their industry.

To find out more about how Dub's approach to online research can get you closer to your customers than ever before, contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327

Dub has recently completed a great project with one of the UK's leading brand innovation agency clients, on behalf of a major own label ready meal producer.

Objectives
To explore consumer attitudes towards different ready meal cuisine types offered by one of the UK's leading supermarkets. The purpose of this online research community was to evaluate perceptions of several newer cuisines that had recently been introduced within the stores, understand how they impacted on more established cuisine offerings, and to identify any further opportunities/gaps.

Results
The extended nature of the online research community approach meant that we were able to dedicate discussion streams to fully explore consumer responses to a wide range of issues, and to respond/react to comments and insights.

A potential new range opportunity that only emerged in the final couple of days of the online research community is now being actively pursued by our client and is likely to lead to significant incremental business with a major retailer.

For more information contact Stephen Cribbett on +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or by emailing stephen@dubstudios.com

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

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.

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 said for a long time that online research communities provide better research experiences for both clients AND respondents, or members as we prefer to label them. Fun and enjoyment can be quite hard to measure, but seeing the feedback we've just received from a community that we've been running in Brazil, I think it speaks for itself. It's so good we had to share it with you.....

"I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be part of the project, I hope you enjoyed my ideas....I loved it and wanted you to know I did it with affection. I found it really cool, I hope you have received lots of good ideas."

and then there's this one..

"Thank you! I really liked taking part, I found it to be very dynamic and different."

and this one..

"I am available when if you need more research, okay? You can count on me."

I think you get the idea. These people thrived on the  creativity and fun that the tasks we designed offered them, and of course the very personal relationships they struck up with our moderators. I your research needs an injection like this, we'd love to hear from you.

At Dub, we've recently been building a number of online research communities to capture discussions around some very private and sensitive issues. These insight and innovation-purposed communities have been commissioned by players in the pharmaceutical and health and well-being industries, who are growing increasingly switched-on to the opportunities online communities present. These include the ability to gather candid feedback and rich insight from end-users, of the sort they've never before experienced. In a sector where insight  from sufferers and patients of such richness has traditionally been hard to come achieve, online research communities present a major shift.

Of course, when discussing Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Over-active Bowel Disorder (OBD) and other serious personal conditions with real people, respecting their privacy and offering them relative online anonymity is tantamount to the success of the study.  With this in mind, our approach allows project owners to assign tasks and questions to individuals  by way of private one-on-one discussions, at the same time as supporting open group discussions. The former puts people at great ease, and when combined with the fact that respondents are participating from the comfort of their own home or place of choice, affords response nirvana.

Group discussions such as forums and blog also have a part to play in that they allow the community to connect,  bond and share experiences with each other. Thus they reward respondents for their openness and honesty by allowing the connect with fellow sufferers, thus providing a level of support and comfort in knowing.

The recruitment of patients and sufferers is no easy task, so making them feel comfortable, respected and valued contributors within the community is essential. Our approach achieves this in a number of ways.

First we work tirelessly to design the tasks and activities that benefit from our own of research into the language and behaviours of the target audience. We see our role as party hosts, not entertainers, so it's important that we communicate with them in a language they recognise - theirs not ours.

Secondly we encourage Community Managers to share with them the insights that are being gleaned, so that they themselves are learning from the project and not just giving.

As our online research community work continues, so to does our amazement at the audience-types that are increasingly comfortable in sharing their lives online, be it in private or social environments. Our communities are an efficient and powerful way to connect, create learnings, gather feedback and support sufferers who wish to help others at the same time.