FreshNetworks Blog

There are many ways to get insight from online communities. Some communities are built specifically for this reason – online research communities, but all online communities offer great ways for you to gain insight into your product, brand or market, into issues and opinions, and into the people who form the community. Over the next two weeks, we’re going to be presenting ten different ways in which you can gain some basic insights from any online community, as part of our series: Insight from Online Communities.

A first, and often overlooked, area of insight is in the profiling information you gather when people join your online community. Profiles play a number of roles. They help other community members to find each other, they emphasise the public face of the community, they help those managing the community to check the identify of members (if this is needed) and they offer the community owners and managers a way to find out more about their members.

When thinking about how you design and build your online community, it is important to pay particular attention to the profiling information you capture. You need to make the most of this opportunity, but not ask so much that you will dissuade potential members. And you need to decide which of this information will be public and which is just between you and the community member.

There is considerable insight you can gather from profiling information from any community, be one with a few hundred or many thousand members. You can learn more about who your customers are, or who is interested in the subject and focus of your community. You can gather demographic information to help with segmentation, locate where people are geographically and detailed information about their use of products or their opinions about issues. But perhaps the most information can come from allowing people to tell you a little bit about them. Offering a free hand where they can write about themselves. If you then code and analyse this data you can build a valuable and rich data set which lets you understand much more about your community members.

But perhaps the most valuable role profiling data can play is to let you understand and analyse all future contributions to the online community. If you can gather and code information in profiles then you start to build up a picture of individual members and the community as a whole. This will let you analyse and understand better future contributions and conversations. Let you get much more value and insight from your online community.

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Some more reading

• Body of Work: Community and Social Network Research
• Getting insight from online communities
• Business media: trends for 2009