FreshNetworks Blog

Some online communities are specifically built and managed as insight tools: online research communities. They are designed to help support the consumer or market research needs of the organisation behind the community. They may be public or private, but they are designed to deliver against specific research objectives and involve specific research exercises alongside the organic discussions and debates in the community.

Not all communities are online research communities, but all communities can be a useful source of insight. Just watching the conversations can be invaluable and bring real insight to any organisation, but there are ways that any community can get real insight value from the insight of your members. Over the last few weeks we’ve described eight ways of getting insight from online communities.

1. Profiling data:gathering the right information and then analysing the profiles of  your community members can bring significant understanding of the people who join your community.
2. Focused discussions: focusing the discussions in your online community make it easier for people to join the debate and also let you concentrate on those issues that are of most interest to you and likely to bring greatest insights.
3. Learn their language: the language community members use is often overlooked, but provides a real insight into their lives and their perceptions on a product, market or issue.
4. Rating and voting: not everybody in an online community wants to begin or even add to discussions, but we can start to understand what they think and get insight from them by offering and than analysing their use of different ways of communicating, such as rating an idea or voting for a piece of content.
5. Photo uploads: photos offer a real insight into what people think and also allows us to gather opinions people who are not as comfortable expressing themselves in words. What people choose to upload photos of, and the reactions to them bring real insights into the community.
6. Photo activities:by targeting photo content into specific activities, we are able to maximise the benefit we get from each upload. Get community members to upload photos on a specific theme or in response to a specific question. Isolate the most interesting photos by using rating, ranking and comments to harness the opinions of community members.
7. Discussion events:as your community matures, patterns emerge in use. One of these will be that people come to the community at similar times each evening. You can take advantage of this by offering discussion events where people discuss a different issue at a certain time each week.
8. Quick polls:any community can use some simple insight tools, and quick polls are one of these. They are a great way to get instant and top-level quantitative insight from your community, but you must make sure you word the question (and potential answers) carefully if you are going ot use them for real insight.

Of course, a greater depth of insight can be gained from a community that is designed specifically to get insight from your customers and others, and that ties straight into your internal planning, research and strategic fields. For this you need an online research community.

Read our series on Insight from Online Communities

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Networking site cashes in on friends (Telegraph) (techmeme.com)
• How to build an online research community: a podcast (freshnetworks.com)

For the final in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we are looking at using what is very much an insight tool but that can be included in any online community: quick polls. Easy to respond to and simple on the community, getting online polls right is actually more difficult than you might think. If you want to get real insight from them, you need to know what questions to ask, and what answers to offer.

Quick polls offer a way to get high-level feedback from your community members on simple quantitative questions. You can understand what people think and can often get feedback very quickly.

There are four steps to make quick polls successful and a useful source of insight:

1. Define what you want to find out – you have only a quick poll and a limited number of words to explain what you are asking. Define a question that is actually useful to you and that is specific enough so that people understand  what they are being asked.
2. Choose your words carefully – how you ask the question is very important. You need to be clear, specific and direct. Make sure you are asking only one question otherwise it will be difficult to analyse the results.
3. Offer specific answers – in a quick poll you probably list a set of answers from which people will choose. Make sure the answers you offer are discrete and different from each other and that you offer all the combinations people will want to choose from.
4. Use the poll to spark a forum discussion – the poll itself can only tell you what people think. To find out why they think this, you should start a related forum discussion where people can discuss the poll, their answer and the issues it raises.

Quick polls can be a great opportunity to get relatively quick feedback from the community members and real insight into a question that is important to you. It’s important to make sure you make the most of this opportunity and produce data that gives you real insight.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members. (freshnetworks.com)
• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (neilperkin.typepad.com)

So far in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we’ve looked at the kind of depth of insight your can get from profile information, the discussions on the site and the language people use, ratings and voting and from photos and photo-based activities. For the penultimate post in the series we want to look at a different type of activity that you can run in your online community – discussion events.

The nature of online communities typically lends them to asynchronous discussions, with forums often the centre of the community and the most vibrant and popular parts. In fact, this is one of the real benefits of online communities – they foster debates, discussions and support between people who are disparate temporally and geographically. However, sometimes there can be real benefit from getting members of your online community onto the site at the same time to take part in a discussion event.

As an online community matures, you will find that people start to adopt patterns of use. Some people will always talk about and comment on the same subjects, some people will talk in conversations with their friends, and many members will show clear patterns of use. They will go to the community at the same time during the week and will do similar things when they are there. This pattern of behaviour is one that should be capitalised upon from an insight perspective. If you have a group of your members coming onto the site at the same time every week, then this is a great opportunity to engage them in a new way. Rather than having them discussing things asynchronously, use your existing features to run a discussion event.

As with most things online community, it’s best to start small. Watch when people are most likely to be on your site and then advertise a discussion event to match one of these times – a Tuesday evening chat session, for example. Choose a subject that’s topical and related to the theme of the community and invite people to come onto a forum thread and discuss it for half an hour. The first time you might get a handful of people, but persist. Run them regularly and more and more people will come. Before long you’ll find that this is used as a real catalyst for discussions for the rest of the week. You can get a depth of insight from a range of your community members on a topic that you choose at a time that you choose it. You can then help to direct the community on an ongoing basis by regular, targeted weekly chat sessions.

If you want to really maximise the benefit you get from these sessions you should report back to the rest of the community what went on, what was said and what you think of it. You’ll gain a depth of insight and reinforce a sense of community that can really help to continue to grow and develop a community, even when it’s reached maturity

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (and me) (almostalwaysthinking.com)
• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community (freshnetworks.com)

Our last post in our series on getting insight from online communities looked at the benefit you can get from photo uploads. We are going to stay with this area today but look at how you can maximise the insight benefits you get from photos (and indeed from other media) by running specific photo-based activities, by encouraging comments, ratings and responses to photos.

Online communities can sometimes be daunting when people join for the first time, or when we allow them to do new things or promote new features. People need to be shown what to do, they need to be encouraged. That’s one of the reasons we believe in promoting community management – a good community manager is part of the community and can help to introduce new features and parts of the site, and to encourage activity.

A great way of encouraging participation on the community and focusing so that it is of use to you is to run activities. Many communities have galleries, with no focus or direction to what photos should be uploaded, those that are better are those that are:

1. clear about why you should upload a photograph
2. include some element of activity or competition-based incentive (such as “over the next month we want you all to upload a picture of your favourite room in your house”)
3. allow rating and comments – not everybody will want to upload a photograph but they may want to comment on those already there, and others may just want to rate their favourite photos (or indeed, the ones they like least)
4. include tagging – allowing users to tag and sort photos will mean that they organise your galleries for you and make it easier to find content and related items

These steps are best as part of a concerted effort to increase photo-activity on your online community and will work best if you focus attention and encourage photos for a particular purpose or on a particular issue. People will know what they’re doing and why they’re uploading photos and then comment, rate, respond and organise them for you.

You’ll also get a wealth of insight. From the photos people choose to upload to the comments they get or the way they’re tagged. And because you’ve focused all this activity on one area or problem you’ll get a depth of insight too.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Do we need to incentivise participation in online communities? (freshnetworks.com)
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them (freshnetworks.com)

We’re halfway through our series highlighting ten ways of getting insight from online communities. We’ve looked already at ways of making the most of the profiling data, conversations, language people use, and ratings. In this post, we’re going to look at how allowing (and even encouraging) photo uploads can be a real source of insight in your online community.

Many online communities are very text-based. They are based on conversations, and the forum is the central area of the community where most activity takes place. But given the increasingly media-rich nature of the Internet, this is something of a shame. Some people just don’t express themselves as well in words as they do in other media. Sometimes a photo can convey an opinion or start a discussion. And sometimes a collection of photos allow people to work together on a problem, issue or problem.

You can get real insight from allowing people to upload photos, and even more from encouraging them. Hotel reviews on TripAdvisor are significantly more meaningful when you have visitor photos to accompany their reviews. If your online community was about a product or service, then finding out how people actually use it would be of real use – photos of where they store your product in their kitchen for example would give you a real insight into peoples’ lives. A community for a holiday firm could get real insight from photos of guests on holiday. A community about home improvement could be much more powerful with photos of peoples’ rooms or houses. In fact pretty much any community could benefit from photos.

There are really three levels of insight you can get from photos:

1. Understanding why people choose to upload the photos – what photos do they upload? Are some users more likely to upload photos than others? Do the photos that are currently in the gallery influence the photos people upload? Understanding these motivations gives you insight into your community members.
2. Analysing what people upload photos of – if you run a community for a holiday firm do people usually upload photos of people, the accommodation, the weather or the scenery? This probably gives you a real insight into what they associated with their holiday. People are going to upload photos that they feel reflects the aim or objective of the online community. Analysing what photos they choose to upload will give you real insight into their attitude towards the issue.
3. Observing what reaction the photos get – do people discuss photos that are uploaded? Do they post photos in response to those already on the site or is each photo upload a fairly extant experience? Are the community members using the photos to tell a story or solve a problem together or is each using it to illustrate their own point.

A photo upload is a source of lots of insight. Into the community member and the community as a whole. Into what they think about the subject or issue at the heart of the online community. Into what their real lives are like.

Photos can, of course, give you more insight. If you encourage and allow comments and voting on photos you can get much more insight. We’ll be talking about this in the next instalment of getting insight from online communities.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Social Media: it’s bigger than you might think (freshnetworks.com)
• The Ad Man Answers #53 (mjroseblog.typepad.com)
• Traditional media is spreading community messages (freshnetworks.com)

We return to our series on getting insight from online communities with a look at how you can get insight from those members of your online community who may not want to begin posts or be regular commenters in public forums. We’ve looked already in the series at the information you can get from profiling data, discussions and the language people use online. Today we want to look at how you can get insights from ratings and votes.

It’s a commonly accepted fact within online communities that many of your community members and visitors will not want to initiate or publicly respond to public discussions. They are happy reading the content and are important as without all these readers, those who do contribute would have no reason to do so. This behaviour is encapsulated in the 90-9-1 rule: in any community of 100 people, 90 will be readers, 9 will edit and add to content and just 1 will initiate discussions or add new content. The best communities find ways to make the most of each of these types of people, recognising that different people behave in different ways and accommodating that.

Most online communities allow people to vote for or rate content – say that you like a certain post or rate a photo or other piece of content out of five. However, too often these tools are overlooked as sources of insight. This is a shame. For those 90 people out of every 100 who are unlikely to contribute to discussions publicly, votes and ratings are ways of letting them have their say. Making this easy to do and encouraging people to rate or vote for content will maximise the benefit you will get from it from an insight perspective.

Whilst such ratings and votings shouldn’t be thought of as representative of the community, they can capture the collective wisdom of the members. If you want to know how important a discussion is, looking at how many people voted for that thread, or at its average rating, is a way of helping you to understand the mass of opinion. If lots of people have voted for it, or rated it highly, then this is a great sign that it’s a discussion you should be reading and digesting.

In a more proactive sense, you can use voting and rating alongside comments as part of a process of co-creation. Getting people to comment on photos, articles, concepts or any piece of content will capture the opinions from a proportion of your community members. Encouraging them to vote too will allow more people to have a voice.

Voting and rating is often used as an engagement tool in online communities, but it can also be a source of valuable insight. See how people rate the different discussions, or the votes that different pieces of content get. You’ll learn something new.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Howard Rheingold: Online Social Networks
• Polling, Opinion and Q&A; Sites are Redefining Social Networking
• Solving real world problems through online social networks

We’ve already looked at the insight you can get from profile data and focused discussion in online communities. For the third in our series of how to get insight from online communities we are going to look not at what people say, but how they say it.

Communities drive discussions, be those the organic discussions that will begin between members, or discussions prompted by questions, content or other stimulus from the community manager. There is a lot that we can learn about the community members from how they respond in these discussions. What they say, the ideas they give and the opinions they express. But often overlooked is to examine the language they use.

There is a great value to seeing and  understanding the language people use when talking to each other about issues, products and brands. Organisations often have no clear idea of the language people use, the words they choose and the way they discuss their product or talk about an issue. It is difficult and has traditionally been hard to really see how a mass of people discuss and talk about what you do. With online communities you get a real spotlight into this, not only the language people choose but how they talk about and describe things to each other.

Observing and understanding this can be really valuable. One of our clients at FreshNetworks was able to identify significant problems in it’s marketing by watching how people discussed their needs and the different products in an online community. When none of the language they used was chosen by community members we saw that there must be a problem, asked the members why they hadn’t used this language and then realigned the client’s marketing message using the language that customers were using. In this case the real insight from the online community was not so much what was said, but how it was said.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009
• Crowdsourcing – does the customer know best?
• What Can Small Business Owners Learn From Obama

Yesterday we wrote about how to maximise the insight gained from profiling data in online communities. For the second in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we’re looking at how to make the most of the core of most online communities – discussions and forums.

Most communities have some form of discussion area. This may be in a traditional forum, or may be focused on media, features or other pieces of content. But the basic concept of allowing community members to discuss, debate and share ideas is a critical part of an online community. These are the spaces in which people will probably spend the most time in any online community they join and are the parts that get most involvement early on. It’s easy to see how and where to contribute and  existing discussions encourage people to add their point of view.

Whilst it’s great to allow discussions to grow and develop depending on the interests of the community members, it’s important not to overlook the power of this simple tool for insight. Many brands and organisations enjoy being able to watch how people discuss things. What their opinions are and how they express them. What language they use and what they choose to discuss. How they interact with other members and how they discuss things with each other. Forums and discussions can offer a vibrant source of insight and with a little bit of focus can be even more valuable.

To gain maximum insight from discussions and forums it is best to build them as part of a larger research process and series of activities, something that an online research community is ideal for. However, any online community can make the most of its forums and discussions from an insight perspective. It’s about how you frame and focus the discussions that go on and the four points below will help maximise the insight benefits you get:

1. Keep your discussions focused at first and build them round issues that are of specific interest to your brand or organisation. Community members find it easier to join conversations if it is obvious where they can add their opinions and so focusing on the issues of most interest to you will help them take part and help you gain insights where they are needed most.
2. Provide a space for people to discuss any other issues, and mark it specifically as such (one of our communities has a ‘Juice Bar’ specifically for this). We don’t want to discourage people who want to participate and can gain a lot from knowing what people what to discuss organically. Sometimes the best insights come in areas you couldn’t predict.
3. Make sure the brand or organisation responds to people in the forum. The best insights often come when you iterate ideas with community members. They suggest something and you tell them what your reaction is. They then respond, and it is this response which starts to yield real depth of insight you wouldn’t have got otherwise.
4. Think of ways you can use discussions for innovation or co-creation. Thinking of a new product? Start a discussion about your ideas and see what the reaction is.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community
• Business media: trends for 2009
• Ted Mininni: Is Some of Nike’s Current Success Due to Its ‘Running’ Social Network?
• Blogging 101

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.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

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

People build and join online communities for many different reasons. They may want to create and use the most comprehensive hotel review site in the world. They may want to feedback to a brand about their product. Or they may want to help other people get the most out of their mobile phone. The common thread that goes through online communities is that they are issue-, goal- or topic-focused.

Within this environment conversations and discussions flourish. People are there because they share a common interest and they want to discuss this. Some of the communities that we build and manage at FreshNetworks are online research communities. These are communities that have been specifically built as a tool for consumer or market research. They are a great tool for understanding both what people think and why they think it, allowing you to explore the social context in which decisions are made and give you an instant and enthusiastic research resource.

However, even online communities that are not specifically built for research can be a valuable source of insight. Alongside the planned research and activities you get from an online research community, any online community is a fantastically rich source of organic insight. Organisations and brands that run online communities are able to get a range of benefits, whether or not they specifically intended the community to be a source of insight, including:

• understand how customers talk about you, your market and your competitors
• see what issues are currently of most interest to them
• get reviews and feedback on your product or service, and those of your competitors
• learn the language that customers use
• know the questions and concerns that your customer base have
• find out about new competitors, new ideas and new products

All of this, and more, just from having a successful and well managed online community.

We at FreshNetworks think that there are huge benefits people can be getting from their online communities and hope that people are doing so. With this aim in mind over the next few weeks, we’re going to be sharing our thoughts and  experiences of getting insight from online communities, specifically those that were not built in the first place as a research and insight tool.

In our experience, good online communities can have a great benefit to brands. We’re going to help you make the most of them.

Read our series on Insight from Online Communities

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Do we tell the truth in social networks? Does it matter?
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
• Why online communities benefit from our desire to be heard
• How to build an online research community: a podcast