Top Ten Reasons for Building an MROC in 2010
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jan 04, 2010
If you don't currently have a Market Research Online Community, and you are not thinking of building an MROC this year, you should be. Here's my updated Top 10 reasons why.
- Give customers a place to discuss your organization. With over 150 million U.S. adults participating in online communities, your customers are already talking about you on the Internet, in social networks, forums and mailing lists. Give them a place where they can talk about you, with you.
- Increase loyalty just by having a community. Just like conducting a customer satisfaction study can improve satisfaction, simply having a community can improve satisfaction. The Deloitte and Beeline Labs 2009 Tribalization of Business Survey researched 400 organizations with communities. Of these, 34% saw increased loyalty as a key benefit, up from 24% in 2008.
- Introduce prospects to your organization. A virtuous circle of community engagement helps expand an open community and even win you business. The more community participation, the more pages to be indexed by search engines: the more pages, the higher the search engine traffic: the higher the traffic, the more prospective customers discover your organization and engage with existing customers to learn about it.
- Compress the traditional feedback cycle. In 2010, you don't have the time or the resources to use the traditional feedback cycle. You need to streamline your market research with online communities, so that you can continuously act on the voice of the customer.
- Conduct a thousand research projects. Business is moving faster than ever, and online communities enable you to conduct more projects than you can imagine, to help inform your speed-of-light business decisions. In three years, the ABC Studio Advisory Panel has fielded literally a thousand projects. That's a thousand points of light illuminating the path forward for its business.
- Help your staff internalize and distribute feedback. According to the CE IQ study, companies with the most loyal customers periodically share VOC (Voice of the Customer) information with employees across the organization, ensuring widespread understanding of the customer's point of view. Online communities provide a great means to achieve this, fostering greater employee-customer engagement.
- Get more qualitative feedback for less investment. Brad Bortner of Forrester said it best in his independent white paper, Will Web 2.0 Transform Market Research?: "Market research online communities (MROCs) will shock the qualitative market research world. They provide cheaper, faster, and newer types of insights that today's traditional qualitative research modes, such as focus groups, don't currently provide." Such savings are why Ned Winsborough said, "We have a mandate at General Mills to move as much of our qualitative research online as possible in the coming months and years."
- Provide comprehensive quantitative feedback. Integrate online communities with panel management or enterprise feedback management, and you can conduct projectable, representative surveys that help you size the problems and opportunities uncovered by your qualitative research.
- Sustainable competitive advantage comes from the changes you make. Community members will participate in your new online community because they want your organization to serve them better. You will engage employees in the community so that they can be customer ambassadors. Short term, you'll develop an infrastructure that will enable you to rapidly implement new ideas. Long term, you'll develop a culture centered on customer-driven innovation and co-creation.
- Engage your customers in a community while there is still time. Face it, each of us only has so much time to spend on community and research initiatives from the organizations we do business with. As Gartner analyst Kathy Harris said at her CRM Summit presentation on innovation, "If you don't engage your customers in innovation, someone else will."
Build an online community in 2010, and your organization will be stronger and more successful in 2010, 2011, 2012 and beyond.