More stuff I wonder…
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).
Filed under: market research | 5 Comments
-
-
-
Click here to subscribe with RSS
-
-
-
Zebra Bites by Katie Harris is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License. -
Here’s my take: any time you put a group together for an extended period of time–2 hours or 2 years–things happen. They influence each other. Norms are formed. Whether in-person or online groups, it happens.
If a group is specifically being assembled as a source of ongoing customer input/market research/etc., that’s fine as long we we understand that this group is not representative of random customers. Their input is still be valuable–it’s just different.
In fact, I’d say that in some cases it can be better to treat the customers that participate in online communities as “customer consultants.” I don’t have any studies on this, but I have seen several cases where the customers who are willing to participate actively in such groups are not your standard customer anyway–they are enthusiasts, people who LOVE the brand/category, or have other motivations. They have strong opinions and are eager to share them. Let them express opinions, and maybe even encourage them to go beyond just reporting their own purchase plans and brand perceptions.
As an aside: my experience in this area is mostly from B2B, not consumer communities.
IMO – the larger opportunity is not around the creation of research communities, but communities AS research.
You ask some great, hard questions. I think MROCs are too hyped — they’re the cure-alls for research ailments. Take 2 MROCs and call me in the morning!
For me, research communities are replacing focus groups and personal interviews in many projects but that doesn’t mean they are a replacement for focus groups: simply that they are more cost effective in those instances where face-to-face interaction can be skipped. Customers who participate in longstanding MROCs are different from customers who don’t, and grow more different over time, as they interact with your organization far more than typical customers.
Even a survey changes a respondent, but a community can deeply change its members (at least, along the dimensions of customer loyalty). As a result, we always need to have a quantitative component to test how representative (or not) the views of that community may be.
For a lot of brands, social media monitoring would reveal very little because they simply don’t pop up naturally in those contexts. I see these types of communities as a place to talk about the product/the issue, in the same way that qual research can be a focus for open discussion.
That said, they’re a lot harder to run than they look, and community identity is one more difficult issue. Some people get very involved, some people far less so, and it is not necessarily the case that you’ll hear from the people that you really want to.
I agree, I think long-term communities are quite problematic.
Thank you all for your thoughtful comments.
I think it’s such an interesting discussion to be a part of; there’s so much going on in this space, calling for (and hearing) both passion and caution.
P.S And apologies to Jeffrey, whose comment I only just found sitting in my spam folder (!?!?!) because I only check it every so often – lucky I did!