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

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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)

We’ve started the week at FreshNetworks with a great video from German agency Scholz & Friends as required reading. The video takes a look at how things have changed for brands, advertisers and marketers over the last 60 years. From the advert-focused world of the 1940s to today’s conversation-driven economy.

There are lots of people talking about the “power of conversations” (and suchlike) in social media and online communities at the moment. Very few of them are made as eloquently as in this video. We move from limited choice and impactful advertising to a rejection of advertising and then to a powerful final question for their Brand X: “Don’t you have something interesting to say”.

We find that most brands could and do have something interesting to say, people are interested in what happens inside a brand, in connecting with it and having a more public and human face to their interactions. For me this is really what we’re seeing through the changes the video highlights. There is much talk about a social media revolution (and we’ve written before about why that’s not quite the right word), whereas what we see here is that the shift is in terms of relationship. From advertiser to friend.

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Some more reading

• Social Media “Buzz”
• Expectations of Brand Continuity
• No wonder advertising doesn’t work
• Recommendations – 25% more influence than adverts in social networks

I spent an enjoyable couple of hours this evening taking part in Futurelab‘s liveblogging event – marking the 1,000th day of their marketing and strategy innovation blog, and the release of their new Agency Report. The session was a great opportunity to share and build on ideas with others in the marketing industry, and reminded me of some of the sessions that work well in the online communities we build at FreshNetworks. The

The Agency Report that was also released today is a great read and the presentation below shows the highlights of what they’ve found. For me the most useful section is to look at the disconnect between what clients want and what they are all to often being offered by their agencies. I’m sure many of these are familiar to those of us who work in marketing, but this doesn’t mean that these are not issues that we should be addressing or working with clients to overcome. The changes that Futurelab suggest include:

• engagement rather than noise
• being different
• truly focusing on the customer rather than product
• being digital

Perhaps most important is to do these things without losing the focus on the client’s needs and their business objectives. In the current climate there is a real opportunity to keep improving the relationship between client and agency and making sure that we are meeting all of their needs and they are positioned in the best possible position. The report below suggests some ways we can all do this.

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Some more reading

• Join the Futurelab LiveBlog on Tuesday December 9th
• Futurelab Agency Report
• Social Media + Company = Are you ready to innovate?

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.

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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

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.

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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