Online research community lessons from MomConnection
I’m at the ESOMAR Panel Research 08 conference in Dublin for a couple of days. Tomorrow I present a paper on the future of the market research industry, talking about how online research communities are changing the agency-client relationship. Today I get to listen to the other speakers, talking on subjects from data quality to online communities. The latter sessions were obviously of most interest to me.
One of the communities discussed was MomConnection, a US site run by Parenting and babytalk. I hadn’t come across this site before, but it seems to be like Netmums here in the UK, except that rather than being an online community of mums it is a specific online research community.
The site has been running for five years now and in part of their presentation they highlighted ten insights they have learnt from running the site:
- Right size, don’t supersize - the team from MomConnection keep a community of 5,000 people and say that anything larger would be of less use from a research perspective
- Protect the sponsor and the brand - when you’re building a branded online community it is important that you recognise and act as a brand ambassador
- It never gets cheaper - the team claim that the need to constantly innovate and develop the site mean that there will always be a cost involved with running and improving the community
- It never takes less time - the MomConnection team do a series of monthly, quarterly, semi-annually and annually activities to maintain the community and membership
- Encourage shared ownership - the team talked about shared ownership between the client and agency
- Respect your panel [sic] - they engage in direct contact with members and have named individuals dealing with them
- A real community isn’t in it for the money - if you build a real community you won’t need to incentivise them to take part
- Make the most on evolving needs to innovate - listen to the ideas of community members and the client on how to evolve the community
- Stay focused on the client’s goals - make sure they get out what they want but also that they make the most of the community
- Speed breeds success - the online research community format is built for quick turnaround research and so build tools and processes to support this
What are your thoughts on these as the ten main lessons for online research communities. I’m looking forward to debating them with the rest of the team at FreshNetworks when I’m back in the office, but reflecting on them today I think there are areas I would expand on. The ‘never gets cheaper’ and ‘never takes less time’ may be true but from our experience, although there may always be a cost and time invovled in managing the community this does not have to increase proportionately to the increased size of the community. If you get things right at the start you can scale the community with a relatively decreasing cost per member. I also agree with the need to encourage shared ownership, but we would rephrase this, saying the community owns the community and so the client needs to be part of that to make the most of it.
Anyway - more on some of these things in my presentation tomorrow. I’ll right about it afterwards.
