The eight myths about successful research communities

By Jeffrey Henning

At the NewMR Virtual Festival, Diane Hessan of Communispace said one of the most frequently asked questions she gets is, “What are the critical successful factors for a community?” Having built over 400 of them, Diane says, “We have probably made more community mistakes than anyone in the world!” Based on those experiences, and on extensive research on research that Communispace has done, Diane has identified 8 myths about successful research communities.

Myth 1: A community is just a fancy word for a panel. “Using the terms interchangeably creates a lot of confusion! They are actually quite different,” Diane said. “A panel is a large group of consumers that a brand would access about once a month to do a survey. The members of the panel don’t typically interact with one another. In contrast, think of a community as a virtual room where customers can talk with one another.” In fact, a community fosters three channels of communication:

• The client company is asking questions of community members. Each time it might be a survey, a bulletin board, a brainstorming session, a request for members to send in videos or photos, or to participate in mystery shopping, journals or diaries.
• Members can give unsolicited advice to the client. “Answers to the questions we forgot to ask!”
• The members of the community talk with each other. “In the third channel, the one the researchers love the most,” Diane said, “members talk with each other and the result is more exploratory about their lives, dreams and values.”

Myth 2: Communities can be valuable for almost any decision. There is a myth that you can just ask members about anything, figure out what they are saying, and move forward. Communities are great for new product service development work, existing brand and product feedback (including of competing brands), general market research and longitudinal research. Research communities are not appropriate for:

• Go/no-go decision making
• Volume forecasting
• Response rate estimation
• Predictive modelling
• Segmentation
• Advanced quantitative studies
• Satisfaction tracking studies
• Ad tracking
• Market size estimation
• Brand equity studies
• Awareness and usage studies

Myth 3: Bigger is better. There are lots of different types of online communities, for social media, for marketing purposes, where the success metric is how many registered users you have. This is not the case for research communities. “The purpose of the community is to understand, to engage. You don’t need one million members. You need members who are engaged and responsive and willing to open up their lives.” You can generate 3,500 contributions a month from a community with 350,000 visitors, 1% of whom participates once, or from a 400-person private community with 55% participation rate and 16 contributions per active member,. “Measure engagement rather than members! The real Holy Grail is intimacy.”

Myth 4: Make sure you pick the best technology. “There is an endless list of companies with great technology and with communities where no one participates much,” Diane said. Technology is important: you have to have a rich feature set; you need an ability to run with subsets; to profile community members, but engagement is the most important thing.

Myth 5: Communities are largely for “brand fans” (or high involvement products). A great use of a community is to understand non-customers or customers who only occasionally use your product. You can study brand advocates, of course, but communities have many other uses. You can have a vibrant community on low involvement products – say, toothpaste – where members have an engagement with one another. Communities are very vertical.

Myth 6: Community members are biased. “After all, you have a relationship with these people. After time, they love you and will be excited about anything you do, right? Our research team has done extensive research about this and finds that community members become slightly more critical over time.” As the relationship strengthens, community members are more likely to tell you why they are unhappy with something.

Myth 7: The more you pay, the higher the response rate. “Let me give you some context – the average member is asked to engage in 8 to 10 research activities a month, so we give members some sort of gift as a thank you for this time. They get a gift certificate of about $10 a month if they participate at a certain level that month.” Communispace has tested this extensively, and has found that participation doesn’t go up when you pay more. The number one reason that people participate in communities is that they want “a continuous and loud voice in the future of company”.

Myth 8: ROI is hard to get. It is not impossible to measure the ROI from communities. Research communities are “better, faster, cheaper” and they have many potential returns: reduce costs, build customer loyalty, kill bad ideas fast, conduct more effective marketing, get to market faster, develop more creative solutions, decrease risk, try new products, bring in fresh perspectives.

Republished with permission from the Voice of Vovici blog.