Some art, some science
Editor's note: Manila Austin is vice president of research at Boston research firm Communispace Corporation.
When online communities were first being used for market research there was understandable concern from companies that the people participating in them were somehow “not the right people.” In the early years of Communispace we were often asked, “Who are these people?” Were they brand fanatics, technology freaks, angry customers just wanting to gripe or were they just socially isolated losers? Whatever the angle, there was genuine apprehension that people who were engaged in online communities weren’t, and could never be, “normal.”
In today’s world, however, we have over two billion people online across the globe, 845 million of them on Facebook alone. Internet penetration is well above 60 percent in developed countries and growing at exponential rates in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. So it is technically possible – or will be soon – to engage anyone, anywhere, anytime. But just because the technology is in place doesn’t make engagement a given.
With the tremendous growth in Internet access, a simultaneous proliferation of online networks, gathering places and content-sharing sites has also occurred. So although the global population is increasingly represented in the digitally-connected population, people today have a great deal of choice about and control over how and where they engage online. This means that everyone is not everywhere on the Internet. It also means that, as market researchers, we have to worry about who is actually participating in the market research online communities we build.
Whether it’s the challenge of finding and engaging hard-to-reach groups or simply needing to maximize participation within a given research community, market researchers must understand how to engage just about anyone – what drives involvement and how to influence it. In this article I explore this imperative, borrowing frameworks from applied social sciences and reviewing some of our original research that is germane to the subject.
Coordinate sets of needs
In our 10-plus years of facilitating online research communities, we have found that, in order to engage members, researchers must coordinate two separate but not necessarily uncomplementary sets of needs: the social, emotional and cognitive needs of prospective members and the business needs of whoever is sponsoring the research (see also Schlack, Jennings and Austin, 2007). Ideally, these needs overlap, creating a shared purpose that is motivating for community members and is a wellspring of insight and innovation for the brand.
The key to member engagement hinges on creating this shared purpose; and it’s no accident that vibrant communities deliver value to clients. When community members are motivated to join, return and share their lives with companies through participating in online research, the community generates insights that are inherently relevant to the brand.
In an ideal community design, then, these two parallel objectives – the company’s and the community members’ – are integrated and in synch with one another.
Use all of these levers
Motivation is the underlying reason that causes us to act in one way versus another. Depending on the theory, our behavior is driven by a range of emotional states, cognitive processes or social needs. Our experience with having recruited and run over 500 communities has taught us to use all of these social-psychological levers to inform online community design, creating a compelling value proposition for members by meeting a variety of social-psychological needs. This is accomplished, certainly through community composition, but also through: providing a shared and specifically compelling purpose for the community; tailoring communication and facilitation to a particular audience; being flexible about the tools and activities used in the community; and by providing the necessary threshold of safety and trust given the stated purpose and nature of the work.
Figuring out the right mix of and focus for these elements for a particular target group is essential for maximizing engagement. The more market researchers can understand what motivates engagement, the better chance they have at building robust communities that attract and retain people. One way to understand what drives online behavior is a concept pioneered nearly a century ago by the social psychologist Kurt Lewin: the notion that behavior is a function of both the person and his or her environment. For optimal engagement, it is necessary to understand the characteristics of individual community members in conjunction with those contextual features of the online environment that are influencing them.
Getting the fit right
Communispace has explored engagement for many years, testing the importance of getting the person-environment fit right on a community-by-community basis. In the following sections, I first describe research findings showing how the drivers of members’ satisfaction with their experience in online research communities differ depending on community type. I then share research that explores how communities generate robust engagement for targeted groups when they are designed with those group characteristics specifically in mind.
To understand the relationship between motivations for participating in a community and the level of engagement, we looked at three communities: a community of technology buyers, sponsored by a technology provider; a community of high net-worth investors, sponsored by a financial services provider; and a community of teachers, sponsored by an educational publisher.
Specifically, we examined the correlation between engagement (as measured by average number of posts per week, percentage of weeks active and percentage of weeks lurking) and member satisfaction with the community along three dimensions, that: the brand was truly concerned with what members had to say; the community was a trusted forum for sharing ideas; and members felt they could give candid feedback to the brand.
We found that different factors have different motivational impact depending on the composition and purpose of the community (see sidebar below).
One of the benefits of participating in online research communities is the opportunity to feel heard by a company: knowing that one’s voice matters and is making an impact. For the community of teachers, engagement was most obviously related to having a voice with the sponsoring company. For members of the technology and investment communities, however, feeling like the sponsoring company was “truly concerned” with what members had to say was not related to engagement in any way. These findings suggest, however, that we cannot assume this benefit has the same motivating capacity in all communities. Rather than feeling heard, members of the technology and investing communities appeared to be motivated by other factors. For both groups, seeing the community as a trusted forum for sharing ideas was related to members posting more content. And for the technology buyers, this, as well as being able to provide the sponsoring company with candid feedback, was related to remaining active for a greater percentage of weeks.
Taken together, these findings offer clues about what contextual factors are influencing engagement in these three examples. In the community of teachers, which is largely a female group, feeling like the sponsoring company “truly cares” about what they have to say is an important reason to participate. A discussion of gender and the ethics of care (versus justice) is beyond the scope of this article but there is an extensive literature base that supports the conclusion that a community of women teachers would be positively motivated by feeling cared for and the opportunity to have a voice.
For the community of high net-worth investors, feeling heard or that the brand “cares” was not related to increased participation; but feeling that the community is trustworthy and that they can share ideas there was a more compelling reason to participate. This finding makes sense when we consider how intimate a topic money actually is and how rare it is to find places where it feels safe to disclose specific details about one’s financial situation. Being a trustworthy forum was also shown to be related to engagement for the business-to-business community of (mostly male) technology buyers but so was the opportunity to provide candid feedback.
Unlike consumer communities, the link between the company and customer is very direct in business-to-business environments. Giving candid feedback to the sponsoring company is a rewarding experience, because community members benefit directly when their feedback is heard and acted upon. And, being customers themselves, they are well positioned to experience the results of their feedback directly. Thus we see how the value proposition differs in these three cases and how, in a commensurate way, the drivers of engagement are different as well.
A better way
It is tempting to make assumptions based on a broad understanding of a specific demographic group – that Boomers won’t generate content online; that Millennials won’t stay engaged in one place for extended time periods; that professional people won’t devote their time to participating in online research, etc. These are truisms though, not truths; and they are not necessarily useful for informing community design. A better way to understand the value proposition for members is to observe how particular groups behave in various kinds of settings. If the person-environment fit is well-executed, members of key target groups should outperform their counterparts in other online settings.
For example, even in the early stages of our research we found that women tended to contribute more in all-female communities than they did in mixed-sex communities and that African-Americans were similarly more engaged in communities composed of other African-Americans (Austin and Lerman, 2006).
More recently, we found this same pattern to be true in online research communities composed of multinational members (Lerman and Austin, 2012). In particular, we found that women tended to be active for a higher percentage of weeks when they were in a single-sex environment and that Millennials posted more content and were actively engaged more consistently in communities designed specifically for young people as opposed to other kinds of communities.
Results of these analyses suggest that engagement in online research communities does depend on a successful match between community members and the community environment. Our experience tells us that this fit is achieved through a combination of factors working together: the community’s purpose and social glue; the demographic qualities of participating members; the community manager’s communication style and facilitation plan; and, for international communities, the mix of countries and comfort with writing in English must also be considered. These elements are determined when the community is designed and, if properly implemented, serve to create that meaningful value proposition that compels community members to engage again and again.
Stood the test of time
While community design is arguably as much of an art as it is a science, the following tactics have stood the test of time for us, helping us deliver value across multiple demographics and industry verticals, and in support of any number of business objectives.
Provide a meaningful proposition for members. First and foremost, remember that online research communities are intentional and purpose-driven. The community designer must create and communicate that purpose, which becomes a center of gravity for members and which can help differentiate the research community from public social networks. So be it a shared experience with a medical condition, being frequent shoppers of the same retailer, being fashion mavens or style leaders or having professional interests in common, finding that common bond that creates social glue for the community is a critical first step.
Get the community composition right. Hand-in-hand with creating a compelling, shared purpose is the need to be thoughtful and targeted about who to invite into the community. Recruitment costs can be expensive but the cost of assembling the wrong group of people is even higher. Not only do community members need to meet specific criteria as determined by the research objectives, they must also find the notion of interacting with one another interpersonally appealing. So research design in online communities is just as much about designing an engaging social context as it is about writing good survey questions or moderating discussions.
Create a private, safe and intimate environment. Unless the business purpose is to spread word-of-mouth (which is arguably a marketing, not a market research, goal), then the person-environment fit is almost always improved by keeping the community small and private. From the members’ perspective, the fact that the community is closed and exclusive makes them feel as though they are participating in something special. Additionally, privacy – along with the intimacy and trust that develop as a result of it – are crucial contextual elements if the content of the community is at all sensitive. From the brand’s point of view, closed communities allow companies to test products early on in the innovation stream, to get to know individual members in ways that would be impossible in a large and public network, and – conversely perhaps – to hear a greater range of opinions. One advantage of a small and private online environment is that it is difficult to remain anonymous or to be a passive participant; this means that the formation of cliques, which do occur in public settings, is deterred, creating a more inclusive dialogue with a greater diversity of members (Schlack, 2011).
Tailor your facilitation. The value proposition is based on more than the structural elements of community design, which are often determined before a community launches. Of equal importance are the ongoing interpersonal actions community managers perform on a daily basis. While cultural norms are often codified in member agreements and information on the homepage, they are enacted and reinforced daily by facilitators. We have learned, for example, that the style of communication and activity design are very different in B2B versus B2C communities. It is fine and even welcomed in a community of moms, for example, to field activities on lighthearted or sentimental topics. In business customer communities, whose members look for and expect a much a more business-focused experience, communication and research activities need to be clearly aligned with members’ professional interests.
Leverage your brand. Our research has shown that branded communities consistently outperform unbranded ones (Lerman and Austin, 2006) and companies should not underestimate the power of a brand to bring people together. Even for low-involvement categories (e.g., fabric softeners, toothpaste, motor oil) we have found that people are energized by the opportunity to engage with companies when they believe their time and effort are being well spent.
More nuanced
In order to engage people in online market research we must view them in more nuanced ways than one-dimensional demographic or consumer categories. Historically, the measure of good research has been to mitigate and control systematic error as much as possible (Austin, 2012). In online research communities today, however, we must figure out how to engage people before we can consider measuring (or predicting!) their behavior. Thus the design of the setting – putting in place those features that will make a given community compelling to members for various reasons – is a new core competency.
References
Manila Austin and Katrina Lerman (2012), Building Engagement in Online Communities BRIC by BRIC (Communispace whitepaper: www.communispace.com).
Manila Austin (January 9, 2012), "Familiarity breeds contempt? A study of positive bias in online communities (Quirk’s e-newsletter, http://www.quirks.com/articles/2012/20120125-1.aspx).
Katrina Lerman and Manila Austin (2006), The Fifth ‘P’ of Marketing: Size Matters (Communispace whitepaper: www.communispace.com).
Julie Wittes Schlack (2011), The “64% Rule:” What Real Customer Engagement Looks Like (Communispace whitepaper: www.communispace.com).
Julie Wittes Schlack, Michael Jennings and Manila Austin (2007), Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs: Why Size Matters (Communispace whitepaper: www.communispace.com).
What drives member satisfaction?
At Communispace, we have found that different factors have different motivational impact depending on the composition and purpose of the community. We have a member satisfaction survey with standard questions that we have run across various client communities over the years. When we examine the correlations between satisfaction factors and participation, we see that the drivers of engagement vary considerably by community.