Peak Crowd

You often hear that web surveys are "long and boring" - a criticism it's frankly hard to deny. The movement for respondent-centric research (even if it's only really "respondent-centric" in the way free range eggs are "chicken-centric") has taken reforming this evil as its main goal.

But one issue - with consequences for social media research - is that "long" and "boring" are actually different problems, with different solutions.

If a research task is long, you make it shorter. This may have the happy consequence of making it less boring too.

If a research task is boring, you make it more interesting. But this doesn't necessarily imply making it shorter.

Here's where social media research comes in: community building, crowdsourcing, digital ethnography, all that bottom-up, interactive, participant-led stuff. One of its selling points is how engaging and interesting it is for the people who take part.

What's not as often mentioned is how time-consuming and demanding it can also be. Now, if people are engaged and interested that isn't really a problem. (Though recent research presented at ESOMAR by Ray Poynter of the Future Place suggests that, in Australia at least, MROCs aren't as engaging as they've been made out to be.)

Even so we seem to be pulling in two directions - towards shorter, easier surveys, and towards more complex, more engaging, more participatory projects. The type of participants each will attract may be very different. There's a gamble at the heart of social media research, which is that "boring" is more of a problem for participants than "long".

As more and more research communities are built, and more and more brands ask their customers to join in with their research, or marketing, or PR efforts, it's not hard to imagine "Peak Crowd" - the point at which the participation required exceeds the participation offered.

One of the things we can do to offset this is be a bit smarter about efficient project design - make sure that people can contribute as much as they want to, when they want to, and that someone who can only do a little isn't a wasted participant. By making "long" and "boring" variables participants can control, we'll be able to deal with them a lot more effectively.