Questions about Panels & Online Communities
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sun, Oct 04, 2009
Today at the AMA MRC (Marketing Research Conference), I presented a preconference workshop on proprietary panels and online communities. Interestingly, 80% of the attendees were looking at building or expanding proprietary panels and communities of their own customers and prospects.
Here are some of the questions that came up in the session itself and one-on-one with attendees (with links to some answers):
Since it was a three-and-a-half-hour session, I did something new as far as event-evaluation research goes: after the first hour, I gave each attendee a four-question survey, asking what I should change about how I was presenting, what I shouldn't change, how satisfied they were and how enjoyable the session was so far. I took to heart the advice of Jim Davies, principal analyst with Gartner; he had said in his EFM presentation at the Gartner CRM Summit a few weeks ago that too few organizations gather feedback during the experience itself. Based on the survey results, I made the rest of the session more interactive and covered some topics in more detail than I had originally planned.
I loved the additional interaction, which exposed all of us to more points of view. I walked away with six ideas for future blog posts to discuss aspects of panel and online community management that I have neglected so far. I also learnt a widespread fear: that management will look to an online community for all its answers, leaping to conclusions from community research without validating that those insights represent widespread sentiments. We agreed that as market researchers we need to continue to educate our coworkers and management teams about the differences between quantitative and qualitative research, so that organizations make the right decisions. Using panels and online communities as complements to one another is a key way to accomplish this.