FreshNetworks Blog

It’s almost Christmas, and for  the penultimate in our Five things to do in 2009 series, I wanted to focus on one specific use brands can make of social media: online research communities. Of the communities we build and manage at FreshNetworks, many are specifically built for research. Even those that are not usually end up offering valuable insight into what consumers think. This insight is something every brand can benefit from, so today here are Five ways to use an online research community in 2009.

1. Get customers involved in your business

It’s often said that the cleverest people don’t work for you. And it’s certainly true that customers and consumers are likely to have quite extensive experience of your products, and how they are actually used. If you want to test a new idea, find out how people are using your product or find out about how you are different to your competitors, then the best way can be to ask these people who know best. An online research community can act as a customer voice and empower internal teams with customer input and insight. If you have a question, however small it may seem, you can get feedback from your online research community, often overnight, and be able to represent the customer inside your business.

2. Innovate with your customers

We’ve posted before about the power of co-creation and of innovating with your customers. An online research community can be a great way of both getting new ideas organically, and of working with your customers on innovation and co-creation. The format means that you can have ongoing discussions with them and involve them throughout the innovation process, rather than just testing ideas at specific stages. Bringing together internal experts and others with your customers can also have a powerful outcome, and in our experience always brings to your brand ideas you might never have thought of before.

3. Find out how your customers interact

Traditional market research has often considered the customer as a respondent – an isolated being who can answer questions about their habits and behaviours. This is a false construct and misses the most important aspect of any market decision – the social context. It is difficult to truly understand the ‘why’ of market research using traditional methods – we  know what people do and think but not why. All we can usually do is ask them what they think the why is. With an online research community it is easier to observe the conversations people have, how they discuss your product or competitor products. How do they advise other people, how do they explain their decisions and opinions, what do they choose to discuss. Answers to all these questions can come from observing what they do and how they talk to their peers. Just watching your online research community can sometimes be an enlightening thing to do.

4. Learn the language your customers use

Too many brands and products are hindered by the language that is used to describe it. We often find that customers use a very different vocabulary to the one that brands use. This can be very difficult to explore and understand using traditional methods. It’s only in an online research community can you analyse and draw insight from the language people use. And then you can ask them why they use this language and not the one that you do. Perhaps the most powerful finding from one of our online research communities this year was that a global telecoms firm was talking about its product in a way none of it’s customers understood.

5. Find answers to questions you didn’t even know to ask

Traditional market research offers great ways to find answers to questions. It’s less good at getting answers to those questions you never thought to ask in the first place. By building a community of customers and then using this for research and insight you will generate organic discussions and debates alongside any activities you run. These discussions will let you understand what your customers talk to each other about, what they really think about your product and how they really talk about. You will be able to see what matters to them most and what they think about it. And most importantly they will ask questions. A well managed online community will see community members generating ideas and debates with each other. If you are using this community for research then you will be able to benefit from these questions, and the answers others give. You’ll know the answer to things that are important to your customers, but that you probably never thought to ask

Read all of our Five Things to Do in 2009 posts

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members.
• How to build an online research community: a podcast
• How the market research industry should embrace communities
• What can you do today that can empower your customer using social media?
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community

Those of us who work in online communities or social media are used to telling brands things like “your customers often have better ideas than you do” and “the best way of innovating is to co-create with consumers”. What might be true of the way communities can be used for clients, is also true of the community itself. Your members are often the best source of feedback and of ideas on how to improve the online community itself.

We work with a lot of online research communities at FreshNetworks, and our sister company FreshMinds Research is one of the top research agencies in the UK, and so have a lot of experience of research in house. And for us the need to research and work with community members to improve their experience seems an obvious one, but I fear that across the industry this isn’t yet the norm.

As we come to the end of the year we are working with all of our clients to review 2008 and plan how we are going to help to build and grow their online communities in 2009. It is obviously important to focus on how the brand wants to continue to build its engagement with customers, where they want insight or innovation, or where they want to provide advocates with tools to amplify word of mouth. But it is also important to consider what the community members think themselves. They are the ones who spend time and get benefit from the online community, and the ones who know best what they want.

Online communities are all about engaging customers and consumers in a different way and so as agencies we should do this too. It needn’t be complicated, but getting feedback from community members is a great way to improve any community, and probably find out a few things you didn’t realise you needed to know.

So if you run an online community, then before you pack up for the holidays consider asking your community members the following three open-ended questions:

1. Has the community been as useful and enjoyable for you as you hoped when you joined?
2. What do you enjoy most about the time you spend on the community?
3. What would make you visit the community more often?

These are simple questions, but will give you real insight to help to build your community in 2009.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Online communities at 60% of large firms by 2010
• How to build an online research community: a podcast
• PR industry slow to get to grips with online PR, says e-consultancy
• Controlling Word of Mouth Marketing Using Social Media
• The only secret of Web 2.0 marketing you’ll ever need

The first podcast I’ve recorded is available from today. Brought to you from the guys at ResearchTalk, I’m talking with them and Tom Ewing from Kantar Operations about how to build an online research community. You can get the podcast over on the ResearchTalk blog (and on iTunes), or listen here:

In the podcast we discuss how brands can use online communities and how they can use this for research. We compare online research communities with other forms of market research (especially qualitative research) and finally we discuss in some detail how to go about setting up an online research community.

What I say builds on the experience we have as a team at FreshNetworks and also pull on some recent examples of online research communities that we have built and managed for clients. I hope it’s useful and if it is I might start recording more podcasts in the future…

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Online surveys bore respondents – they need to be engaged
• FIR Interview: Francois Gossieaux on Tribalization of Business
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
• How the market research industry should embrace communities
• Ethnographers or Bricoleurs?

So it’s official. Online surveys bore people. Two things confirmed this for me today. First, my colleague Helen was sent a particularly badly written online survey, and then I read of a report from Engage Research and Global Market Institute, which shows that people have become bored with the format of traditional online surveys. Helen’s experience was probably typical of many of those who responded. She received the questionnaire and started answering it, only to get bored by the layout, types of questions used and by the complexity of the questions themselves. So she stopped, abandoned the questionnaire, and became yet another statistic in the history of non-completions in market research.

The purpose of the study from Engage Research and GMI was to investigate why people drop out of online surveys. They examined the drop-out rates from over 550 surveys and then correlated these with survey length and question formats. They then asked a sample of 200 online panelists what frustrated them most about online questionnaires. Finally, they compared static HTML questionnaires and those using flash; and traditional question formats and more traditional ones.

The research showed that as boredom sets in, respondents speed up the rate at which they answer questions. Few responses are given and the quality of those that are dips. There is an increase of pattern answering and of people straight-lining – choosing all responses from one end of a scale (an easier way to respond to questionnaires). Respondents are getting bored with online surveys, and quality is suffering as a result.

So how do we make the most of respondents and get them to respond to our questionnaires online? Respondents to the survey said that relevance of subject matter and an interest in the questions were influential in deciding whether they would complete a survey or not. The format and structure of the questions themselves also matter. Many people drop out within the first five minutes of an online survey. Grid questions cause 80% more drop-out than any other question format.

So respondents are getting bored of online surveys. They no longer have the enthusiasm to spend on complex questionnaires or on subjects they are not interested in. The novelty really has run off and agencies are finding it more difficult than ever to get responses.

What can we do in this environment? Like many situations when the web has been used to change a process, people initially took an old process and just delivered it online. A script that might previously have been conducted by telephone was put online. As with many other examples of developing a process or product online, this really missed out on the real opportunities.

Taking surveys and conducting them online has sometimes resulted in longer and more complex surveys. Once the novelty of the online experience moved on, respondents grew bored of these surveys and it will soon become more difficult to conduct surveys online in this way. What we should be doing instead is thinking of ways in which the online experience can really enhance and augment the online research process. This is where developments in social media and online communities can really come to the fore. Rather than just offering a new way of transmitting the same questionnaire, online research communities offer a real way to do something different. Making the most of social media tools to engage people and to explore their attitudes, beliefs, behaviours and responses. Developments must be in this area, and we will probably see fewer cases of stand-alone online surveys in the future.

If respondents are getting bored of completing online surveys we just need to engage them more.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Market Research with a Twist
• Online Surveys for Money – Things to Remember to be Successful
• Telephone research must stop. Full stop.
• Online surveys bore respondents and damage data quality

When we talk about using social media for research one question that often comes up is “Why can’t we just do this research in Facebook?”. The answer is simple: “You can find out something from Facebook, but as an actual research tool it’s quite limited.”

So if the answer really is that simple, why is the question asked at all, and why not use Facebook?

Facebook is a great tool and it’s a site I’m a huge fan of. You can keep up with friends, meet new friends and talk about similar interests and issues, organise events, post photos, play games, flirt… The list is almost endless. ‘Almost’, because there are some things you really can’t do on Facebook. We’ve talk a lot about the difference between social networks and online communities, about how the former are ‘me’ places where I talk to my friends about things that interest me; and about how the latter are ‘we’ places where I work with people towards a common goal or end point. Social networks are difficult places to engage people and difficult places to build a group that is contributing towards a shared goal or end-point. Because of this, they’re difficult places for marketers, and difficult places for researchers.

It is true that there are are huge amount of things that a brand can learn from seeing how it is discussed on Facebook. Take a brand like Starbucks and their are 34 groups in London alone (more than 500 globally) discussing the brand. In each of these there are things that the brand could learn – from ideas for advertising, to discussion on free Wi-Fi in store, to discussions about whether their drinks are kosher. These are all great discussions, but from a research perspective they are like listening to people’s conversations at a bus stop or in a restaurant (or indeed in a coffee shop!) But you cannot get the kind of detailed research and insight that you need from these discussions, from that you do need an online research community.

It’s only in a research community that you can really make sure you get the most out of the discussions and debates – both those that organically happen in the community, and those prompted by a specific activity. Only in an online research community do you have right or response and an ability to enter into an equal discussion with other members. Only in an online research community can you build and analyse the profiling data you get from the members and the vast backlog of their contributions and opinions. Only in an online research community do you have a set of members who are their to engage and interact directly with the brand and there to support you.

The benefits are huge, but more than anything, Facebook and other social networks don’t offer an ability for you to research and get meaningful insight. You can observe not research.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Polling, Opinion and Q&A; Sites are Redefining Social Networking
• Incentives In Online Social Communities
• Communities = more than the sum of their social media parts
• Four Pitfalls Associated with any Social Media Marketing Campaign

So the Bank of England shocked the market today with a 1.5% cut in interest rates. Perhaps an indication that things are looking far from rosy in the economy at the moment. It’s an interesting time to be working at a growing business. Today we won another new client at FreshNetworks, to build and manage an online research community for a major museum here in the UK. We are growing when others are becoming more concerned about their business going forward. When I meet others in the market research industry, people at agencies and even at brands, one question that seems to be on everybody’s lips at the moment is “how exactly will the economic downturn impact research?” We’ve posted before about how brands can innovate through an economic downturn, but what about the agencies themselves?

I think that the impact on the industry will really depends on what basis agencies are selling and who their clients are. Of course there are always the counter-cyclical sectors (take-away food, insurance, accountancy and bunk bed retailers) but the real argument in the economy is going to be the ROI one. Proving the return on investment of what you offer is more important than ever.

This may mean that the services and solutions that agencies offer to clients will need to be more tightly tailored, but the outlook i probably less gloomy than in other sectors. Businesses more than ever before need to get it right first time with what they take to market, and need to make sure they are really up-to-speed with their changing needs, habits, beliefs and intentions. In this kind of climate, research is more important than ever.

What agencies will need to do is innovate and offer ways for brands to get more out of each piece of research they do and to bring research earlier into the development cycle. Brands need to get things right when they send a new product to market, launch a new website or a new marketing campaign. The piece we won today for the museum is in category – the online research community we are building is about involving their visitors throughout a process of change and development, rather than testing ideas with them once prototypes are built.

Research needs to play a stronger role supporting brands and provide them greater value for money, but it is and will continue to be essential throughout the economic downturn. The agencies that work are those who are client focused and who are embracing new techniques and innovations to help deliver value to clients. That’s why I think we’ve seen a real surge in interest in online research communities in the last few months, and why we at FreshNetworks suspect at least this segment of the industry will flourish over the coming year.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Recession-proof branding – Part 1
• How to use market research to beat the recession
• Is the market research industry recession-proof?
• UK Market Research Industry Reports 2.3% Growth
• Maintain Those Marketing Budgets
• Focus On Consumer’s Behavior, Not Their Words

I wrote last week about the role of incentives in online communities (and specifically how they can lead to behaviours that you might not want). In the post I give an example from Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at MIT, that shows why incentives can breed unintended behaviours. Today I came across his YouTube channel and thought I would post his video explaining just this.

I’m actually working on the issue of incentivisation at the moment. Many clients we work with, building and managing online research communities, want to explore the different ways in which they can motivate people to take part in the community or in activities. Our approach is not to incentivise in the way traditional in market research (by giving financial incentives) as this moves the experience out of the social and into the market environment. We become traders of information rather than members of an online community of people working towards a shared goal, or with a shared set of interests and aims. However, sometimes we want to reward behaviours we want to encourage but keep this in the social context.

I’m working on a white paper discussing just these issues at the moment, so watch this space…

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Do we need to incentivise participation in online communities?
• The Science of Irrationality: Why We Humans Behave So Strangely [Mind Matters]
• Is your market “predictably irrational”?
• Teams vs. Communities

There’s a debate to be had in the world of online communities, especially in the world of online research communities about how we incentivise people to take part. At FreshNetworks, in the online research communities that we build and manage for clients we tend not to incentivise, at least not in the traditional way that we see in market research. So for a community we ran earlier this year with C-level executives from across Europe we didn’t incentivise and got high levels of participation. If this had been a focus group or telephone survey, traditional market research would have included incentives (either to the individual or to a charity on their behalf) of over £150 per person. Some other agencies who build and manage online research communities always pay incentives, but as a norm we don’t.

I’m currently reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (a great read for anybody who is interested in human behaviour!), and he discusses exactly the reason why not paying traditional incentives can be an effective strategy. We know that humans operate in both the social context and the market context and Ariely shows how the mere mention of money, quantifying an effort, is enough to place an experience firmly in the market context. Take the example of a lawyer who is asked to do some work to help a group of disadvantaged people – offer to pay them a reduced day rate and they will probably say no; ask them to do it pro bono (for free) and they will probably say yes. In the former case they think they are being devalued (a market context), in the latter they know they are doing it for free as a favour (a social context). The mere mention of money shifted the engagement to a market one.

Ariely describes an experiment that throws more light on how to encourage participation. They recruited a group of students to take part in an experiment – they were asked to spend five minutes doing a mundane task (moving a circle on the left of a computer screen into a box on the right) as many times as possible. One group were given five dollars to take part, another 50 cents and another nothing. The outcome was measurable – the more times the circle was put in the square the harder the participants worked. Whilst it was true that those paid five dollars worked harder than those paid 50 cents, it was those who were paid nothing who worked hardest of all.

A second iteration of the experiment strengthened the theory that mentioning money creates a market context. Rather than offering money they offered gifts – to one group a chocolate worth about 50 cents, to another a box of chocolates worth about five dollars and to a third group nothing. Money wasn’t mentioned, just the gift that they would received. This time all three groups performed equally.

The outcome from these experiments is clear. The mention of money as an incentive for doing something shifts the context from a social one to a market one. People make a decision of how much they will contribute based on the value they think they are receiving. Without the money (or even with a gift not described in monetary terms), people operate firmly in the social context.

When we are building and managing online communities we want people to take part in the social context. The communities are not market-based transactions, but social environments. Monetary incentives (or equivalents) will only go to create an environment at odds with this. That’s why we tend not to incentivise participation in our online communities, we find that we usually don’t need to. Where we do incentivise we tend to do so with gifts, information or access – non-monetary offerings which leave people firmly where we want them in the social context.

Some more reading

• How the market research industry should embrace communities
• Social media is not a focus group
• Online research community lessons from MomConnection
• Professor Dan Arieley author of “Predictably Irrational”

Subscribe to updates from this blog

I was speaking on the Future of the Industry at the ESOMAR Panel Research 08 conference in Dublin last week, an international market research conference. Over the two days of the conference, a lot was said about social media and online communities (see previous posts on lessons we can learn from the team at MomConnection). Speaking in the last session on the last day is always more difficult, and I wanted to leave the people at the conference with something to think about. So I spoke about two issues we have seen develop FreshNetworks.

Firstly I spoke about how online communities, and more importantly the ability for consumers and brands to talk directly with each other using social media, is changing the client-agency relationship in research and other marketing services. Whereas previous agencies played the role of standing between the consumer and the brand (or the client and respondent in market research terms), now their role is more to facilitate these two groups interacting directly with each other. This sounds like an easy change but really it isn’t. It shifts both the role of the agency (from intermediary and translator to facilitator and advisor) and it throws up it’s own problems. In the research industry, for example, the agency, standing between brand and consumer, has an important role to play ensuring that any research is conducted in an honest manner, designed and carried out to make sure that the results are meaningful and that business decisions can be made on them. With the role of the agency and client changing, there is a need to change processes and techniques. The first step is to recognise that the role has changed.

Secondly, and building on this I showed that whilst we’ve had online research communities for some time, to date they have typically been used as new ways of doing old things. Today, with the significant shift-change in the use of social media for customer engagement, online communities can now do completely new things. We are seeing more and more organisations building online communities as a way to engage with clients. Indeed just a few weeks ago a report from Gartner predicted such communities at more than 60% of large US firms by 2010. The challenge for the market research industry here is that, with so many communities being built and so many firms building them, they may lose the initiative. Communities are a brilliant source of insight (either planned and managed or insight through UGC). Organisations will begin to rely more and more on these tools as sources of insight and research, whether or not the community has been built or managed by a research firm.

So it was a bit of a “if we don’t do it somebody else will” speech. A sentiment that really does apply to the market research industry today.

I wrote a paper for ESOMAR on this and if you’re really keen it’s available here (or just ask me if you want to chat about it).

Some more reading

• What Does The Agency Of The Future Look Like To You?
• What CMOs Want from an Agency
• ‘Generation V’ Defies Traditional Demographics

Subscribe to updates from this blog

I’m at the ESOMAR Panel Research 08 conference in Dublin for a couple of days. Tomorrow I present a paper on the future of the market research industry, talking about how online research communities are changing the agency-client relationship. Today I get to listen to the other speakers, talking on subjects from data quality to online communities. The latter sessions were obviously of most interest to me.

One of the communities discussed was MomConnection, a US site run by Parenting and babytalk. I hadn’t come across this site before, but it seems to be like Netmums here in the UK, except that rather than being an online community of mums it is a specific online research community.

The site has been running for five years now and in part of their presentation they highlighted ten insights they have learnt from running the site:

1. Right size, don’t supersize – the team from MomConnection keep a community of 5,000 people and say that anything larger would be of less use from a research perspective
2. Protect the sponsor and the brand – when you’re building a branded online community it is important that you recognise and act as a brand ambassador
3. It never gets cheaper – the team claim that the need to constantly innovate and develop the site mean that there will always be a cost involved with running and improving the community
4. It never takes less time – the MomConnection team do a series of monthly, quarterly, semi-annually and annually activities to maintain the community and membership
5. Encourage shared ownership – the team talked about shared ownership between the client and agency
6. Respect your panel [sic] – they engage in direct contact with members and have named individuals dealing with them
7. A real community isn’t in it for the money – if you build a real community you won’t need to incentivise them to take part
8. Make the most on evolving needs to innovate – listen to the ideas of community members and the client on how to evolve the community
9. Stay focused on the client’s goals – make sure they get out what they want but also that they make the most of the community
10. Speed breeds success – the online research community format is built for quick turnaround research and so build tools and processes to support this

What are your thoughts on these as the ten main lessons for online research communities. I’m looking forward to debating them with the rest of the team at FreshNetworks when I’m back in the office, but reflecting on them today I think there are areas I would expand on. The ‘never gets cheaper’ and ‘never takes less time’ may be true but from our experience, although there may always be a cost and time  invovled in managing the community this does not have to increase proportionately to the increased size of the community. If you get things right at the start you can scale the community with a relatively decreasing cost per member. I also agree with the need to encourage shared ownership, but we would rephrase this, saying the community owns the community and so the client needs to be part of that to make the most of it.

Anyway – more on some of these things in my presentation tomorrow. I’ll right about it afterwards.

Some more reading

• Building Online Communities
• Reaping customer insight from user-generated content
• Adopting Web 2.0 in Organisations
• Building Successful Online Communities

Subscribe to updates from this blog