FreshNetworks Blog

In February this year a survey on the market research industry in 2009 showed two very different pictures. The research, sponsored by online-oriented companies Cambiar, MRops and Peanut Labs, found that whilst clients and agencies alike predicted a small growth in the market of about 1%, this did not tell the full story. Although they saw the market growing slightly in 2009, they thought that the proportion of work that was brought inhouse would increase significantly.

There are a number of reasons for clients bringing research inhouse. The current economic climate is making organisations review external contracts more thoroughly and spend money more carefully, and also making employers use their own staff in the most efficient way possible. So rather than paying  external agencies to do some tasks, clients are using their internal teams instead.

But even without the current economic climate there are deeper reasons for this move inhouse. The survey showed that one in five clients would use social media and social networks to generate sample, and that one in three clients intended to build their own branded community for research. The use of social media as part of the research process is changing the role of agency and client and changing the range of tools and methodologies available to us all. It can seem to make it easier for us all to do research, find people, watch what they are discussing and ask them questions.

We wrote yesterday about the promise of online research communities, and how too often they don’t quite live up to this. Whilst social media is empowering clients and agencies alike to do research in different ways, there is still a role for both. A good online research community is not just about asking the right questions, it’s about engaging people, building a real community that is vibrant and active and ready to contribute to research, innovation, word-of-mouth and in many other ways.

To do this isn’t easy. Whilst social media may make access to people and the ability to build a community site easier, it does not make motivating, moderating, and working with community members any easier. In fact it adds a whole range of new problems. How do you design a community that really meets your business needs? How do you find and engage the people you want to? How do you grow and build members, conversations, activities and word-of-mouth? How do you make sure that the brand is represented well in the community, and that the community is represented well in the organisation? How do you deal with negative discussions as well as positive ones?

These and other questions are the new challenges that social media and online communities present for research. If there is a move inhouse that is not necessarily a bad thing for the industry. It may be that certain parts of the research process are taken inhouse, whereas others are left for agencies to support. Agencies can operate where they add value most and where their expertise is best put to use. Clients, for their part, can take more control or have greater influence over some parts of the process. Exactly how this relationship changes is not yet clear, but change it will.

Clients will take more things inhouse, but have greater need for agency support in new areas. To cater for this, agencies need to change and some of their traditional roles may become redundant. For me that’s the bigger story for the market research industry in 2009.

I’ll be talking about the changing client-agency relationship, and in particular how clients can manage their own online research communities at the Online Research Methods conference in London in June.

We’ve written before about the real power that online research communities can bring to a brand, and also of the way in which you can get insight from any online community. The promise of rich insight is great – real people talking to each other about your brand, market and competitors. They provide a real hub for innovation and co-creation and give you access to real-time insight. But sometimes they just don’t seem to work, they just don’t deliver what you might expect.

At FreshNetworks we have built online communities from scratch, and also worked  with organisations who have an incumbent online research community that isn’t living up to its promise. Through this experience we’ve developed the following four tips to help discover what the problem might be:

1. Do you actually have a panel, not a community?

Research panels and online research communities are very different. They work in different ways, deliver different types of research and insight and are useful for different business objectives. The biggest failing that we see with online research communities is that what you really have is a panel of people and not a community. The discussions tend to be between the brand or agency and community member, rather than peer-to-peer in the community. And you find that the majority of your traffic comes when you send an email about an activity, survey or discussion that you want people to respond to.

This can be the most difficult problem to solve. You need to think again about who you want to engage and why and  build an engagement strategy alongside your research plan.

2. Do your community members actually want to engage with you?

Wanting to engage with people in an online community is really only half of the story. There are probably lots of things that you want them to do, but do they really want to do them? And if so do they want to do them in your community?

The difference between an online research community and other forms of market research is that you want to build and grow a community of people to work with to help you for insight and research. You can’t call through a list of people until you find those who want to answer your questions. You need to build a community that targets and meets the requirements of the people you want to engage so that they will be there to answer your questions when you have them. If they don’t actually want to engage with you, this can be difficult.

3. Are you incentivising in the right way?

The topic of incentives is one much discussed in market research – should you incentivise people, for what behaviours and with what reward? Get your incentive structure wrong and you will encourage and grow the  wrong behaviours. People will only contribute to your online research community to an extent they think appropriate for what they are getting in return.

The signs that your incentivisation structure is wrong includes unusually larger churn-rates. Indeed you might see the higher rates of churn typical of a research panel, rather than the low churn rates we see in online research communities. You’ve moved people from the social context of the community to a market context where they aren’t engaging with you but transacting.

4. Are you part of your community?

The role of the brand and agency is changing with the growth of online research communities (a topic I shall be returning too at the Online Research Methods conference in London June). One major change is that rather than the agency and brand always asking the questions, and the respondent answering, the playing field is levelled somewhat. Online research communities only really work if you play a role in the community as a peer, rather than trying to lead or direct it.

You have questions to ask and activities that you want people to do, but you also need to join in the conversations. Don’t always ask questions, but answer some too. Join the forums, talk about yourself – give a face and a name to the research and the brand. This makes the experience better and fairer for everybody. And also more enjoyable for you. Where this doesn’t happen, where the agency or brand hides behind an ‘Admin’ name, or doesn’t engage in the community, you miss out on a whole range of real, rich benefits.

So, if you see an online research community that you think just isn’t living up to its promise then ask these four question of it. Of course, identifying the problem is less than half the battle. The next step is to fix it.

Some more reading

• The Best Market Researchers to Follow on Twitter (futurelab.net)
• Getting insight from online communities (freshnetworks.com)
• Maximising the insight you get from your online community (socialmediatoday.com)

Last month I spoke at the Conversations event in London, debating with Jeremy Brown, from Sense Worldwide, the right that brands have to do research in social media. The debate was lively in in ten minutes we managed to pack in a lot: co-creation, why the best ideas come from outside your business, what you have a right to ask people where, online research communities and why people really will talk about washing powder online.

I talk about using research and in particular online research communities as a base for open innovation, and a way to get input from those outside your organisation. We also discuss whether there is a limit to the types of people that will engage with research in this way or the topics that are suitable for discussion. In our experience at FreshNetworks, the answers to these questions are not as clear cut as many may assume. There are a vast range of people that you can engage in an online community who may not typically be heavy users of social media for entertainment. It is also often surprising the topics people are willing to talk about – if you can establish what about the topic matters to them and why they would share and discuss this, you can get valuable insight on a really diverse range of things. Even on washing powder.

Conversations, London – Jeremy Brown, Matt Rhodes from designbyfront on Vimeo.

Research Reinvented have polled the Twitterverse (I hate that word!) to find the most influential people in the market and consumer research areas to follow. Rather ingratiatingly I’m one of them and now get to wait to see if I make the top 10.

At FreshNetworks we make the most of strong research credentials, both in our specific online research communities, but also helping all of our clients make the most of the insight they can get from online communities. You can read more of our recent research posts from making online research better to one on simple, effective market research.

The full list of market researchers to follow on Twitter is below (in alphabetical order) and you can vote for the top ten by commenting on the Research Reinvented blog.

If you fancy voting (and maybe even voting for me) then comment on the Research Reinvented blog here.

Marketing Researchers to follow on Twitter

• @alisonmacleod – UK – Researcher – Following 49 and 36 followers.
• @berniceklaassen – Singapore – Head of TNS Interactive in Singapore – Following 126 and 79 followers.
• @ccsavage – UK – Christopher Savage – Researcher – Following 458 and 381 followers.
• @comerpatrick – USA – Patrick Comer SVP business development at OTX – Following 71 and 106 followers.
• @communispaceceo – USA – CEO of Communispace a Research Community Software Provider – Following 2112 and 2603 followers.
• @cristi_popa – Qualitative Researcher at Yellow Submarine research – Following 535 and 252 Followers.
• @curiouslyp – UK – Simon Kendrick – Researcher at Essential Research and previously worked at ITV and GfK NOP Media - following 234 and 244 followers.
• @duey23 – USA – Brian LoCicero – Director Client Relations – Kantar Operations – Following 63 and 46 followers.
• @emielvanwegen – Netherlands – Researcher at Synovate – most tweets are in English – most tweets are Research 2.0 related – following 395 and 458 followers.
• @ericsalama – Following 33 and 425 followers.
• @insightsgal – USA – Researcher – Works for a tradeshow and publishing company – Following 531 and 468 followers.
• @jennibeattie – Australia – Director Digital Consulting at Digital Edge – Following 378 and 259 followers.
• @jhenning – USA – Jeffrey Henning – Vovici – Geek since before Geeks were Chic – tweets focus on research communities and customer feedback – Following 1132 and 948 Followers.
• @joelrubinson – USA – Chief Research Officer at the ARF – Following 632 and 574 followers.
• @johngriffiths7 – UK – Researcher – Following 60 and 181 Followers.
• @katetribe – Australia – Quantitative Researcher Tribe Researh- Following 869 and 867 Followers.
• @lovestats – USA – Annie Pettit – Statistician and Researcher and active blogger on MR – former VP Online Panel Analytics at Ipsos – Following 1873 and 1151 followers.
• @mattrhodes – UK – Head of Client services at FreshNetworks – specialises in online communities and social media – Following 2155 and 2027 followers.
• @merrilldubrow – USA – CEO of MARC, former SVP at Harris Interactive – Following 62 and 83 followers
• @mikemacleod – USA – Market Researcher at Lightspeed, previously at Harris Interactive – Following 1693 and 1908 followers.
• @montenegror – USA – Multifaceted Market Researcher at Black Mountain – Following 314 and 229 Followers.
• @mrheretic – Market Research Deathwatch – a mostly cynical but interesting pov on the MR industry – Following 31 and 72 followers.
• @ogaudemar – USA – Olivier de Gaudemar – SVP Online Community at OTX – Following 138 and 268 followers.
• @raypoynter – UK – Director at the Future Place – frequent speaker at MR conferences on Market Research 2.0 and winner of ESOMAR best paper award – following 136 and 187 followers.
• @researchrants – another anonymous researcher and partner in crime of @mrheretic – blogs frequently about Greenfield – new twitter user and most tweets are on MR – Following 32 and 146 followers.
• @researchrocks – USA – Kathryn Korostoff – Research Entrepreneur and founder of Research Rockstar, a market research training company- Following 42 and 84 Followers
• @rscionti – USA – Richard Scionti – SVP Solution Services at TNS – Following 82 and 76 followers.
• @tomewing – UK – Social Media Knowledge Leader at Kantar Ops - 297 and 405 Followers.
• @tomhcanderson – USA – Tom Anderson – next generation researcher and former employee of TNS NFO – Following 948 and 672 followers.
• @vincenthofmann – South-Africa – Qualitative Researcher at Submarine former employee at Synovate – Tweets on all different topics, but also on MR – Following 416 and 522 followers.
• @zebrabites – Australia – Qualitative research director at Zebra – Following 372 and 639 Followers.

Last month I was asked if I would speak at as new conference in the UK focused on online research. The MRS and Research Magazine were looking to bring together different practitioners (both clients and agencies) to share best practice and case studies in online research. The Online Methods conference will be held on the 3rd June in central London, and I’m speaking about online research communities, specifically about how to work with clients to grow and manage them.

For too long, the online research industry has been focused on one thing: quantitative research. There has been a significant shift from telephone (CATI) research to online research over the last few years. Both panel-based and more adhoc quantitative research is being successfully delivered online. The ability to build and reach a range of people with these surveys is helping both the quality and the cost-effectiveness of this kind of research. But in the last few years, online research methodologies have moved far beyond just quantitative research.

Qualitative and ethnographic research have typically been difficult and relatively expensive. They have involved recruiting and then spending time with specific individuals who meet our criteria, and getting a volume and range of responses has often been prohibitively expensive. Developments online have changed this. Online communities and social media have really changed the face of market research, allowing us to both do old things in new ways and to do completely new things. If done correctly, it is now easier than ever to conduct qualitative or ethnographic research with a wide and often disparate respondent base. You can observe and analyse people in their social context, and get insight into not just what they think but also why they think it.

At the Online Methods conference, I will be talking a little about this, but more about how these changes are causing a fundamental shift in the market research industry and in the relationship between agency and client. The old divisions no longer apply. Previously a client would commission an agency who would go away, do the research and then report back. Now clients and agencies work together, each using and playing to their own strengths. This can make online research communities very cost effective for clients and removes the barrier an agency can sometimes place between a client and their customers. There are lots of ways that online methods are changing market research, but the changes in the agency-client relationship are possibly most fundamental of all.

In a nutshell: A one day conference for buyers and suppliers of online research taking a practical and solutions-driven approach to its uses and applications.

Where? Crowne Plaza – The City, London

When? 3rd June 2009

How to book: Click here

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Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• How to build an online research community: a podcast (freshnetworks.com)
• Maximising the insight you get from your online community (freshnetworks.com)

Some online communities are specifically built and managed as insight tools: online research communities. They are designed to help support the consumer or market research needs of the organisation behind the community. They may be public or private, but they are designed to deliver against specific research objectives and involve specific research exercises alongside the organic discussions and debates in the community.

Not all communities are online research communities, but all communities can be a useful source of insight. Just watching the conversations can be invaluable and bring real insight to any organisation, but there are ways that any community can get real insight value from the insight of your members. Over the last few weeks we’ve described eight ways of getting insight from online communities.

1. Profiling data:gathering the right information and then analysing the profiles of  your community members can bring significant understanding of the people who join your community.
2. Focused discussions: focusing the discussions in your online community make it easier for people to join the debate and also let you concentrate on those issues that are of most interest to you and likely to bring greatest insights.
3. Learn their language: the language community members use is often overlooked, but provides a real insight into their lives and their perceptions on a product, market or issue.
4. Rating and voting: not everybody in an online community wants to begin or even add to discussions, but we can start to understand what they think and get insight from them by offering and than analysing their use of different ways of communicating, such as rating an idea or voting for a piece of content.
5. Photo uploads: photos offer a real insight into what people think and also allows us to gather opinions people who are not as comfortable expressing themselves in words. What people choose to upload photos of, and the reactions to them bring real insights into the community.
6. Photo activities:by targeting photo content into specific activities, we are able to maximise the benefit we get from each upload. Get community members to upload photos on a specific theme or in response to a specific question. Isolate the most interesting photos by using rating, ranking and comments to harness the opinions of community members.
7. Discussion events:as your community matures, patterns emerge in use. One of these will be that people come to the community at similar times each evening. You can take advantage of this by offering discussion events where people discuss a different issue at a certain time each week.
8. Quick polls:any community can use some simple insight tools, and quick polls are one of these. They are a great way to get instant and top-level quantitative insight from your community, but you must make sure you word the question (and potential answers) carefully if you are going ot use them for real insight.

Of course, a greater depth of insight can be gained from a community that is designed specifically to get insight from your customers and others, and that ties straight into your internal planning, research and strategic fields. For this you need an online research community.

Read our series on Insight from Online Communities

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Networking site cashes in on friends (Telegraph) (techmeme.com)
• How to build an online research community: a podcast (freshnetworks.com)

For the final in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we are looking at using what is very much an insight tool but that can be included in any online community: quick polls. Easy to respond to and simple on the community, getting online polls right is actually more difficult than you might think. If you want to get real insight from them, you need to know what questions to ask, and what answers to offer.

Quick polls offer a way to get high-level feedback from your community members on simple quantitative questions. You can understand what people think and can often get feedback very quickly.

There are four steps to make quick polls successful and a useful source of insight:

1. Define what you want to find out – you have only a quick poll and a limited number of words to explain what you are asking. Define a question that is actually useful to you and that is specific enough so that people understand  what they are being asked.
2. Choose your words carefully – how you ask the question is very important. You need to be clear, specific and direct. Make sure you are asking only one question otherwise it will be difficult to analyse the results.
3. Offer specific answers – in a quick poll you probably list a set of answers from which people will choose. Make sure the answers you offer are discrete and different from each other and that you offer all the combinations people will want to choose from.
4. Use the poll to spark a forum discussion – the poll itself can only tell you what people think. To find out why they think this, you should start a related forum discussion where people can discuss the poll, their answer and the issues it raises.

Quick polls can be a great opportunity to get relatively quick feedback from the community members and real insight into a question that is important to you. It’s important to make sure you make the most of this opportunity and produce data that gives you real insight.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Want to improve your community in 2009? Ask your members. (freshnetworks.com)
• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (neilperkin.typepad.com)

So far in our series on how to get insight from online communities, we’ve looked at the kind of depth of insight your can get from profile information, the discussions on the site and the language people use, ratings and voting and from photos and photo-based activities. For the penultimate post in the series we want to look at a different type of activity that you can run in your online community – discussion events.

The nature of online communities typically lends them to asynchronous discussions, with forums often the centre of the community and the most vibrant and popular parts. In fact, this is one of the real benefits of online communities – they foster debates, discussions and support between people who are disparate temporally and geographically. However, sometimes there can be real benefit from getting members of your online community onto the site at the same time to take part in a discussion event.

As an online community matures, you will find that people start to adopt patterns of use. Some people will always talk about and comment on the same subjects, some people will talk in conversations with their friends, and many members will show clear patterns of use. They will go to the community at the same time during the week and will do similar things when they are there. This pattern of behaviour is one that should be capitalised upon from an insight perspective. If you have a group of your members coming onto the site at the same time every week, then this is a great opportunity to engage them in a new way. Rather than having them discussing things asynchronously, use your existing features to run a discussion event.

As with most things online community, it’s best to start small. Watch when people are most likely to be on your site and then advertise a discussion event to match one of these times – a Tuesday evening chat session, for example. Choose a subject that’s topical and related to the theme of the community and invite people to come onto a forum thread and discuss it for half an hour. The first time you might get a handful of people, but persist. Run them regularly and more and more people will come. Before long you’ll find that this is used as a real catalyst for discussions for the rest of the week. You can get a depth of insight from a range of your community members on a topic that you choose at a time that you choose it. You can then help to direct the community on an ongoing basis by regular, targeted weekly chat sessions.

If you want to really maximise the benefit you get from these sessions you should report back to the rest of the community what went on, what was said and what you think of it. You’ll gain a depth of insight and reinforce a sense of community that can really help to continue to grow and develop a community, even when it’s reached maturity

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• A Presentation About Community, By The Community (and me) (almostalwaysthinking.com)
• Five ways to use an online research community in 2009 (freshnetworks.com)
• Why Facebook really can’t be your online research community (freshnetworks.com)

Enterprise rent-a-car have a legendary reputation for customer service. What I didn’t realise is just how large a role market research played in helping them grow and maintain that reputation.

Last year I attended an excellent conference – Wavelength 100.  I guess it’s a UK version of TED, their stated aim being to connect “visionary companies making a difference in the world through business”.

The delegates and speakers were a fascinating mix. In my first session I struck up a conversation with Peder Kolind who I happened to be next to. It turned out that having set up one of the world’s largest security firms he sold up to kick off six philanthropic projects in Nicaragua. Later, at lunch, I found myself sitting between Martin Narey who used to run the prison service and is now CEO of Barnados and Mark Addlestone who runs Beaverbrooks the jeweller – a family business that has been in the top 10 of the Times and FT Best Companies to Work for lists for four years in a row.

It was one of those days where you couldn’t help but feel in awe of your surroundings and rather small by comparison.

Anyway, the conference was excellent. I didn’t get to see all the sessions so I have been catching up on those I missed buy listening to their podcasts – which you can find on iTunes under “Wavelength 100 Listen Again“. Last night I had the pleasure of listening to Donna Miller, HR Director Europe at Enterprise-Rent-a-Car.

It’s a fascinating story.  Enterprise was founded in 1957 by Jack Taylor. Given that one of my other businesses is the recruitment consultancy, FreshMinds Talent, I knew about their policy of hiring graduates and investing deeply in their development. What I did not know about was how they had developed their customer satisfaction research over time.

Donna talks about how the firm came to realise the old truism: what is measured is done. She explains the evolution of a simple set of research questions around customer satisfaction and the importance attributed to the results of these surveys. At Enterprise, you can’t get a promotion unless your customers rate your service as excellent. That rule works all the way to the top of this $9Bn company. So even if you’re running a huge team across many sites and producing great profits, you’re promotion is still bound by your customer satisfaction scores.

Well worth a listen. And if you go to iTunes to get the Enterprise podcast, I also recommend:

- MyC4 – a superb social enterprise where anyone can loan money to African SMEs to help them invest and grow. You can start with just £5. It’s also an example of online community building for charities

- Southwest Airlines – a firm renowned for their outstanding people management. it has a very strong internal sense of community

- Middelfart Sparekasse – Hans shares a few fascinating stories about how this Danish Building Society has developed a strong community feeling and incredibly loyal workforce

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Customer Service Is Public Relations (davefleet.com)
• Voice of the Customer: Service Based Differentiation Matters (seomashup.blogspot.com)

Image by World Economic Forum via Flickr

An article in today’s Daily Telegraph in London (Networking site cashes in on friends) reports that Facebook has plans to monetise in a way that it has been unable to do to date. It’s not advertising or charging for premium services. Rather Facebook is going to get it’s money from a rather more prosaic source: the market research industry.

The social network is trialling features that would allow firms to survey its 150 million members to find out their thoughts on their product or market, get insight into their lives or test new concepts with them. In fact they could test just about anything they wanted. And given the fact that Facebook collects vast volumes of profiling information, they would allow this research to be targeted based on location, gender, age, and just about anything.

The company has been demonstrating the benefits of its new polling feature (called Egnagement Ads) over the last week to some of the most influential business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. It asked a range of questions to Facebook members and were able to feed responses back to those at the Forum pretty much in real time. Engagement Ads are also being trialled at the moment by two firms: CareerBuilder, a global graduate recruitment firm, and AT&T.

As Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s global markets director, said to the Telegraph:

I had tonnes of people saying ‘this could be so incredible for our business’. It takes a very long time to do a focus group, and businesses often don’t have the luxury of time. I think they liked the instant responses.

We’ve written before on this blog about why Facebook really can’t be your online research community. Facebook, and indeed other social networks, isn’t suited to getting the depth of qualitative information that you can get from an online research community. As we wrote at the time:

It’s only in a research community that you can really make sure you get the most out of the discussions and debates [...] do you have right of response and an ability to enter into an equal discussion with other members [...] can you build and analyse the profiling data you get from the members and the vast backlog of their contributions and opinions [and] do you have a set of members who are their to engage and interact directly with the brand and there to support you

Perhaps what Engagement Ads more closely represents is a large online research panel. With firms able to buy questions and target a particular set of respondents based on their screening criteria. Even here, there are some concerns about Facebook. Panel providers spend a lot of time screening participants. They hold the same data on every participant and are therefore able to screen respondents fairly and comprehensively. The problem with Facebook is that it just does not collect data in the same way. As a member, I can opt what data I give them. I don’t have to tell them my age, my location or even my gender. So if somebody wanted to poll men aged 25-34 in London, England, Facebook might not approach me, even though I fulfill all those criteria. Respondents are therefore biased towards those who are willing to reveal this profiling data, rather than being a fair and random sample.

But of course, Facebook has a significant advantage. Size. With 150 million members, spread across the globe, it doesn’t matter if a proportion (even a large proportion) havent’ filled in their profiling information and so are excluded from the sample. There will be more than enough respondents available to get the responses they need. And to get them quickly.

So if Facebook is to use Engagement Ads as a market research tool then it won’t be tuning into an online research community. It won’t even compete fully with online panel providers. But it will offer something new to the market – a vast, rapid-response and (potentially) relatively cheap way of testing opinion and getting a flavour of what people think. For more depth of insight, however, firms are probably going to have to look to other sources.

Subscribe to updates from the FreshNetworks Blog

Some more reading

• Facebook’s Monetization Plan? Polls. And Lots Of Them (mashable.com)
• Facebook offers up users as marketing tool (guardian.co.uk)
• Facebook begins testing ad-driven polls (venturebeat.com)
• Facebook Polls Bring Reality To Davos Elite (ajax-blog.com)
• Mark Zuckerberg, WEF, and the Sentiment Engine (allfacebook.com)
• Not in Davos? Get Your Opinion Heard, Via Facebook (mashable.com)
• Facebook (NOT) Rolling Out New Product Research Service (Updated) (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook is NO ‘Market Research tool’ ! Telegraph misinterprets FB (techpluto.com)
• Newsflash: Facebook Not “Cashing In On Friends” (ajax-blog.com)