The term ‘traditional research’ is often used to describe offline methodologies; mostly, I’ve observed, in the context of selling what I assume must be ‘non-traditional’ (??) online methodologies.

In this context, the word ‘traditional’ conjures imagery of antiquated, moth-eaten and fusty research practices.

And clearly, many offline methodologies are anything but. Not to mention that many research solutions require a hybrid of both online and offline approaches.

But if we have to throw labels around, it’d probably be more accurate to substitute the word ‘traditional’ with ‘established’ (as Paul Vittles from TNS usefully suggested during question time at an AMSRS breakfast seminar I attended last week).

So does this make ‘non-traditional’ research ‘unestablished’ research?

: P

Wow. Doesn’t that put a whole new spin on it!?

Great post over at Ray Poynter’s (always) inspiring blog.

The way Ray described a short-term community, I think, delineates a clever, and potentially efficient, research methodology.

But I’m yet to be convinced of the long-term research community concept (although I’ve no doubt some readers are probably pulling their hair out over my apparent inability/reluctance to see the light/‘get it’).

: P

I’m assuming that in a ‘community for market research’ (vs a ‘community for customer relations/brand building’) context, a client will actually have some questions they want to ask and/or issues they’d like to explore.

If they don’t – if it’s a case of just wanting to pick up on issues entirely generated by the research community itself – then I’m guessing that they’d probably get better value by undertaking some basic social media monitoring … (god forbid).

Anyway, assuming we have a community that’s being used for market research, and there are some questions to throw into that research (in whatever shape or form), here are my questions;

1) At what point in time, along the short to long-term spectrum, does the nature of the output you get from a research community change? And probably more importantly, in what way does it change?

(Or is it different from day one because of how the participants are briefed about purpose of the community and their role in it?)

2) Would one analyse the data coming out of long-term vs short-term research communities differently? This, I suppose, brings us to the issue of the research community objectives. From the sales pitch, I sometimes get the impression that the sole objective of the exercise is to get the research community members to bond; never mind the insight, they’re bonding!

: P

Kidding.

But really, what are the issues, the benefits and drawbacks of community members ‘developing a sense of community’ (and from that, I would assume we mean ‘belonging’), particularly over a longer time frame?

Does it make participants more honest, or more willing to share? Maybe. But (it could easily be argued), maybe not. And what impact does, for example, group/clique think etc have on the output? How would you identify/measure the impact in such a wide (uncontrolled? quasi-controlled?) landscape?

(And to take it to the extreme, if one’s aiming for ‘uncontrolled’, then back to the point above; isn’t the ‘community’ just a very limited method for undertaking social media monitoring?)

3) If developing a sense of community/belonging is one of the key operating principles for long term research communities, then how do new recruits (or exiting members for that matter) impact the existing community dynamic and thus affect the output? How about changes in community moderators/managers?

4) Are there any studies looking at the differences in terms of valuable/usable output between short-term vs long-term research communities?

Are there any actual or even theoretical definitions of the ROI (tangible or even intangible) that one might expect from a short-term compared to a long-term research community available?

(I’ll probably come back to this with more questions when I’ve had time to think more).