User-Generated Feedback
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Feb 06, 2009
I have often compared online communities to focus groups and used the analogy of a "standing focus group". I've even echoed Misia Tramp's comment that stakeholders in an online community need to come out from behind the one-way mirror and sit at the table with respondents.
I'm afraid my relentless comparison to focus groups might set false expectations about market-research online communities, though. They are different from focus groups in a very key way.
Focus groups are ultimately about directed discussions. The moderator typically has a detailed discussion guide that will shape the two hours of conversation. Since those two hours of conversation are a scarce resource, the client and moderator have carefully crafted the discussion guide to cover all the main points of research that they consider important. Certainly, participants can interject and send the discussion off into tangents, but those are tangents, incidental to the main research.
Online communities, on the other hand, can make those tangents central. A good online community will prompt undirected, even directionless, discussions, since time is not as precious a commodity in an ongoing community as it is in a focus group. The role of a moderator in an online community is not to be a conductor but to be a member of a jazz ensemble, teasing out improvisations. One of the key benefits of communities is precisely this bottom-up feedback, where participants talk about what is important to them: which often may not be on the top-down driven agenda of the researcher, client and executive management.
This spontaneous feedback is a rich and fertile source of information. Many organizations are adapting their web sites to promote and host UGC (User-Generated Content). Online communities promote and host User-Generated Feedback.