Failing communities

“We have made more mistakes than anyone else,” said Communispace CEO Diane Hessan, kicking off her talk at Festival of NewMR 2011 about what can go wrong within market research online communities.

Here are her five things that haven’t worked over the years:

1. The bigger is better syndrome: Community size is the wrong metric to focus on. “The perfect size for us, having done about 600 of these communities, is about 300 to 500 members,” Hessan said. “It sounds small, but the metric that matters is engagement. If the community is too big participation actually goes down.” Communispace has a 64% rule for participation rates, which works out at an average of 7.3 contributions per active member each month. Compare that to Facebook Fan Pages, Hessan said. Recent research suggests that for every 100,000 fans a page has only an average of 54 people will actually ‘like’ a post and only nine will comment. “Engagement trumps sample size.”
2. Survey-itis: Surveying too much can be an easy mistake to make and a major problem. “Over the years we have had communities where we have just surveyed people but members told us this was just downright boring,” said Hessan. “As you increase the variety of activities you increase participation.” A study of 57 Communispace communities found that those with more balanced facilitation generated a much higher number of average monthly contributions. “Until 2009 the preponderance of what we were doing was just discussion boards and surveys,” said Hessan. “But there are so many examples of what you can do above and beyond traditional market research. We have had great success with mobile ethnography, heat-mapping, collaging, whiteboarding, video chats, co-creation. The net here is that by using less researchy, more humanist approaches, success has gone up.”
3. The garbage pail: Hessan’s term for doing things with a community that are not worthwhile, or succumbing to the temptation to use it for everything – like working out 2+2 on a calculator because the calculator happens to be to hand.
4. The Trojan horse: sometimes people want to use a community to listen to consumers, but others want to create advocates, Hessan said. “But consumers know if you are only pretending to listen to them, just so they will go out and buzz about you… that has never, ever worked for us.”
5. The traditional research mindset: Concepts like the importance of anonymity, of keeping things neutral and structured and ensuring the client is invisible to consumers don’t apply in communities, says Hessan. “What works is being open, transparent and having a conversation.”