Online Community Culture As It Relates to Market Research
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Jun 10, 2008
Last Thursday the MRA Conference had a great panel discussion on communities and market research. Some highlights follow. (The quotes are reconstructed from my notes, as no transcript was provided.)
After much discussion of consumer communities, one of the questions from the audience was on how applicable online communities were to the business space. Misia Tramp, founding partner and president of Intrepid Consultants, said, "Eighty percent of our online Advisory Councils are B2B. Because relationships in the B2B space have a higher cost to switch than in the B2C space, B2B panelists actually contribute more than consumer panelists do." She went on, "Think about it - today, surveys are often the only B2B engagement that many business customers have with the brand." To the issue of incentives, she said, "None of my members of any of our Advisory Councils are incentivized. We give the counsel a clear manifesto, a clear mission. Members feel a sense of responsibility to contribute." Finally, besides B2B, in what she termed "the employeeverse", Intrepid is creating Employee Advisory Councils within organizations.
Speaking of employees, Misia said that traditionally internal market researchers impose themselves between respondents and the business users within their organizations. Speaking metaphorically of a focus group, she said that stakeholders need to come out from behind the one-way mirror and sit at the table with the respondents. Intrepid prefers to include stakeholders in the conversations by giving them real-time access to the Advisory Councils. She believes this provides better insight and greater, more constructive engagement on the part of respondents. "Online portals make research more scalable and affordable so that you can do more research," she said.
Another question from the audience was on the issue of bias. Murtaza Hussain, Chief Executive Officer of Peanut Labs, responded, "Every online community or subcommunity has a bias: people like to hang out with like-minded people. You have to define the bias, not fight against it."
On the topic of going against a community's culture, Murtaza said, "You can certainly generate a backlash. If you have a boring, long survey, or you don't fulfill your commitment on incentives in a timely manner, that one bad experience will be multiplied across the community: that one unhappy member gets read thousands of times. As a result, we don't do certain types of surveys." Misia concurred, saying, "You now have an accountability to the community." Surveys need to be attractive and streamlined. A survey can't have many very similar questions. The content has to be engaging.
As I said, it was a great panel discussion, with a lot of good questions from the audience and good responses from the panel. Clearly, online communities pose some fresh challenges for market researchers. Traditionally, little thought was given by market research departments to the respondents who took the survey; they were a disposable commodity, often purchased from the lowest bidder and subjected to long questionnaires. With online communities, the respondents are now members who need to be engaged and respected, for they now have a forum to air their grievances. Traditionally, internal users of the research were not involved in the process until the end; now they can be community members participating alongside respondents, teasing out better insights into the constituencies they serve. While the challenges posed by feedback communities are new, all panelists agreed that the rewards are great. When it comes to gathering qualitative data, online communities are - as Murtaza put it - "faster, cheaper, better."