Panels, Communities, Panel Communities & Community Panels, Oh, My!
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Nov 11, 2010
Earlier this year I had lunch with Diane Hessan of Communispace (@CommunispaceCEO), and we exchanged stories of our respective companies’ startup days. Back in 2000, Communispace and Hallmark discovered that online communities were excellent for teasing out customer insights. The next year, as they further developed their community of parents, they sketched out this triangle:
Organizations not only get to ask customers their questions, but they get to see how customers talk to one another about products and services. And customers volunteer information directly back to the organization.
Unlike discussions in a focus group, which are closely moderated and often cut short to move to the next item in an agenda, in an online community discussions can become quite long and involved. This is enlightening and terrifying – terrifying, because the customers can complain to one another about problems, but enlightening because the sponsor can reach valuable insights that are hard to gain with other methods.
Like many in the industry, I’ve adopted the Communispace triangle as a way of illustrating communities. In fact, I find it makes an excellent contrast between panels, communities and social networks:
(Check out Social Networks vs. Online Communities vs. Panels for details.)
The key difference between a panel and a community is that, in a panel, members only talk to researchers (typically through surveys). Panelists don’t talk to one another.
- Panel – A list of panelists that an organization has explicit or implicit permission to invite to surveys.
- Community – An online group where members answer open-ended questions from researchers (and occasional short polls) and discuss the product or service category with one another.
Diane contrasts the two this way: “The big difference is that in communities the members have conversations and relationships with each other and that it’s essentially an asset that is available continuously. A panel typically has many more people, talking to the company (not each other), and it tends to be more ‘project-oriented’ rather than continuous.”
Now when you start to combine the two approaches is where things start to get really confusing:
- Community Panel – A panel that has an adjunct community. Panelists are now invited to specific surveys not only by email but also through a web portal. A subset of the panelists also use the web portal as a community site, conversing with one another.
- Panel Community – The subset of a panel that uses the community.
Communities and panels are complementary. You can use discussions in the community to delve deeply into specific subjects. Then, when you learn attitudes or attributes that are of interest to you, you can field a survey to the panel to see how representative those attitudes or attributes are of your market. (Assuming, of course, that your panel itself is representative.)
Together, panels and communities unite the yin and yang of quantitative and qualitative research.