Editor's note: Niels Schillewaert is managing partner in the New York office of research firm InSites Consulting. Tom De Ruyck is head of research communities in the Ghent, Belgium office of InSites Consulting.

The use of social media has changed our lives. User-created content, citizen journalism and online social interactions (e.g., conversation, collaboration, participation, sharing, connecting) are embedded into the daily activities of consumers. With the different semantic waves of the Web, the entire market research process and industry has undergone clear changes. For instance, we now speak of having conversations with consumers rather than asking them questions. Against this backdrop, online research communities have proven to be a viable way to engage consumers while also getting marketing executives closer to their customers in a connected and participatory way.

Research communities assemble consumers to interact in an asynchronous longitudinal setting by applying social media techniques. Companies outsource tasks such as product and service creation and testing to a crowd in an open call in order to bring consumers inside organizations and make their presence felt all the way up to the boardroom.

Why are research communities so hot today? Just like any information technology they bring automational, informational and transformational value (Day 1994; Grover et al. 1996; Mooney et al. 1996). They bring automational effects by allowing companies to quickly tap into a sample of consumers on a specific topic that presents itself and get answers more efficiently. The informational value emerges from the richer, more complex understanding we get of consumers. Transformational outcomes of research communities lay in the fact that they can be combined with mobile technologies and integrated with social networks, for example, to allow respondents to perform tasks which were previously not possible without asynchronous technology and expanded, ongoing engagement and interaction.

And still there is a friction between the ability and desire to utilize research communities in our industry. The status of online research communities today is comparable to teenagers and their first sexual experience. Everyone says they are doing it, everyone wants to do it … but in the end no one really knows how to do it well. Hence, there is a need for an overview and some concrete tips on how to run online research communities.

Online research communities: types and applications

When positioning online research communities in the social media research space we should distinguish them from the natural communities and social networks where content and conversations self-generate between consumers. Researchers can tap into these for knowledge via “netnographic” methods like social media listening, scraping and ethnographical, qualitative observation.

Communities are invitation-only and are created with a marketing and research motivation to focus on a specific product category, brand or customer segment. Communities allow marketers to observe, facilitate and join conversations between consumers. Consumers enjoy this more participatory research approach and the interaction reintroduces the social context often missing from other research approaches that conceive the consumer as subordinate and sometimes approach them accordingly.

In terms of taxonomy there are several labels and definitions for research communities in practice today, which may lead to some confusion and some may even debate whether all of the labels classify as real communities. The labels range from online research communities, market research online communities (MROCs), bulletin boards, blogs, community panels, ongoing communities etc. (see Table 1). What they do share is that they are all some sort of asynchronous discussion platform but they vary in terms of duration (short-term and ad hoc to ongoing), intensity of moderation (longer-lasting communities are less intense or community panels are even just a form of access panels), direction of conversations and the number of research techniques used (ranging from synchronous online discussion groups, surveys, diary blogs, one-on-one interviews).

As mentioned, research communities can vary in terms duration and intensity. But when do you need a short- versus a long-term community? As often is the case in research it depends on the management and the research objectives marketers have. Research communities can be used throughout the marketing mix for understanding, developing, implementing or optimizing marketing offers (see Figure 1). For example, communities are used at the fuzzy front-end of product innovation or for consumer immersion. In a development phase, they can assist in developing new value propositions for product concepts, brands or activation campaigns. Implementation communities can be organized when products or services are about to be launched and need beta-testing or in-home user tests. Finally, research communities can be used for gathering feedback on customer experience and satisfaction processes. 

When managers have one very specific goal, a short-term community can satisfy the research needs. To run a successful community, one needs to keep up the engagement with and between all stakeholders, and that is hard to do when there is only a single management goal. If on the other hand managers have a combined need or want to have a continued finger on the pulse of their target group, ongoing communities are more suited. In other words, the number of underlying management objectives directly determines the activity plan of a community.

Technology and tools

The focus these days is often on technology and tools while the common ground real communities should share is engagement. Unlike Internet access panels, participants in a research community talk to each other as well as to researchers and marketers. Consumers exchange ideas in their own language and raise questions and answers which researchers sometimes did not even think to ask. In other words, the social context and interaction are important and help provide a holistic understanding. This can only be achieved by creating engagement at different levels, however. First, there is a need for natural engagement; consumers have to identify with the topic or the brand under investigation. A second form of engagement is method engagement. Researchers should propose questions in a fun and challenging way to increase participation and quality of input (using gamification, "infotainment," challenges, etc.). Finally, research communities need to create impact engagement by delivering insights to those on the client management side.

Many practitioners focus on the absolute number of people they connect with in research communities. While important, we argue that sample size is subordinate. What is really important is the number of interactions per discussion thread, which can only be created through engagement with consumers. Setting up an online research community is technically easy, but in order to make interactions useful and effective, researchers need adequate processes for natural engagement and method engagement (Schillewaert et al. 2011):

Natural engagement

Purposeful sampling. Researchers are advised to create natural engagement by sampling brand fans or consumers who show an interest in the topic when recruiting for research communities. True, these consumers are “biased,” but at least they reflect an illustrative consumer reality and generate in-depth discussion.

Small is beautiful; short and intense may be best. Depending on the research objective, communities can last a couple of weeks or months or be ongoing. They can have 50 or a couple-hundred participants. But be aware that longer and larger communities need higher engagement and require more resources. Lurking – which occurs when community members remain in the community but don’t actively participate – can increase when there are too many members or an overwhelming number of posts. A paradox? Not really. When participants see too much information they disconnect because they are convinced their opinion has already been voiced and adds little or no value to the discussion.

Method engagement

If not naturally present, engagement has to be created via the research methods used:

Adapt the context and environment to the target group. For example, let participants chose colors and the name of the community or put topics and questions on the discussion agenda. Foresee a social corner (next to the actual discussion space) where participants can interact “off topic.” If needed, moderators should guide participants to such a social corner. These actions help give the community a “for members/by members” feel.

Build the community. Once participants are screened and recruited, kick-off sessions are important to build engagement on a social as well as informational level. The research agenda and objectives are discussed, the client is presented and participants get acquainted.

Moderators should develop the C-factor – the “C” of community manager. Good moderators have good writing skills, are creative and apply social media-friendly approaches to interaction. Moderators need to be aware that community discussions can last for too long and also need to be steered. Researchers and community moderators build identification with the group, keeping engagement up and on-topic while not letting members oversocialize and drift away from the researchers’ agenda.

Involve as many stakeholders as possible. Engaging members of the marketing team, senior management or a well-known expert from the industry or academia to participate in the discussion can spur activity levels tremendously.

What we “do” to people is as important as what we “ask” them. Give participants tasks to perform and play games with them that generate insights. We can make people generate information for us by introducing fun and creativity. In his book Brain Rules, John Medina posits that we often ignore how the brain works. We researchers do the same thing. If we would apply some of his 12 rules to how we attempt to generate information, we could get more productive. For example, there are four rules that are particularly relevant for market research: exercise boosts brain power; we do not pay attention to boring things; vision trumps all other senses; we are powerful and natural explorers.

By acting on some of these rules, researchers can create an engaged group of participants and benefit from the natural affinity and enthusiasm they have for brands. Allow participants to do what they like, surprise them with something special and check out their reaction.

Does not have the necessary impact

If we are completely honest, a lot of the research that is conducted does not have the necessary impact with and for those who commission it. Unfortunately, research has become commoditized as clients pursue “better, faster, cheaper” rather than something that is truly transformational or value-adding. Still, the core of market research should be to bring the voice and ideas of consumers inside organizations all the way up to the boardroom. Online research communities by their very nature are well-suited to do this but researchers must still create internal engagement among users of the data they generate and drive the insight-adoption process.

Market research studies are not only about formal presentations, knowledge management and communication programs. Informal gatherings can be a great way to have managers use and share intelligence. The most powerful and effective situations are those in which research is a conversation starter and generates lively stories about customers. This can be done in three phases:

  • Engage the internal audience via positive disruption. Create discussion and healthy competition by contrasting management knowledge with actual market situations using games and quizzes in which managers or executives learn about consumer findings. By answering questions about consumers they receive social status (e.g., a badge), achieve different game levels and unlock extra information as they progress, etc.
  • Inspire executives by allowing them to observe, facilitate and even join the consumer conversations in the community.
  • Motivate managers to increase their usage of market research studies in their daily job through creative and inspiring sessions and organize internal news streams and “infotainment” (e.g., via Twitter updates, newsletters, infographics, mood boards).

As internal engagement increases, so does executives’ knowledge. The more involved and energized they are, the more they will converse about the study at the watercooler and continue to observe consumers beyond merely reading the final project report (De Ruyck et al., 2011).

Bring the consumer into the boardroom

Online communities can help to bring the consumer into the boardroom through creative intelligence generation methods, making sure research is a conversation starter that stimulates management responsiveness. We need “enacting” communities, ones that create ENgagement and ACTivation among both clients and participants, through gamification, storytelling and a fulfilling research experience.

References

Day, G. (1994). “The capabilities of market driven organizations.” Journal of Marketing, 58, 4 (October), pp. 37–52.

De Ruyck, T., Knoops, S., Schillewaert, N., Coenen, G. and S. Rodrigues (2011). “Engage, inspire, act.” Esomar Congress, Amsterdam.

Grover, V., Teng, J., Segars, A.H. & Fiedler, K. (1998). “The influence of information technology diffusion and business process change on perceived productivity: the IS executive’s perspective.” Information and Management, 34, 3, pp. 141–159.

Medina, J. (2008). Brain Rules. Pear Press.

Mooney, J.G., Gurbaxani, V. & Kraemer, K.L. (1996). “A process oriented framework for assessing the business value of information technology.” The Database for Advances in Information Systems, 27, 2, pp. 68–81.

Schillewaert, N., De Ruyck, T., Ludwig. S. and M. Mann (2011). “The dark side to crowdsourcing in online research communities.” CASRO Journal, pp. 5-9, http://issuu.com/casro/docs/casro-2011_journal.