Four trends reshaping MROCs

By Jeffrey Henning

At last week’s New MR Virtual Festival, Tamara Barber of Forrester Research, in her presentation “MROC: now we’re telling you what it is”, discussed the future of market research online communities. “MROCs are here to stay, but only the most strategic will survive,” said Tamara. “They have been whizz-bang shiny objects for researchers in the past, but the ones that survive will be those that can actually help clients.”

MROCs have been called lots of things: insights communities, online insight villages, online knowing festivals, online insights communities, think boxes, innovation communities, even idea spaces. Whatever you call them, they are a community used for the purposes of gathering insight. Even if MROC sounds like something from the Flintstones, a la Terri Sorenson [and Jane Mount!], said Tamara, Forrester is going to stick with calling them MROCs: “We came up with the term three years ago to describe these,” said Tamara, “so we will stick with it.”

What is an MROC? Forrester’s definition: “A market research online community is a captive interactive group of people online, joined together by a common interest, systematically harvested for market research purposes over time.” For Forrester, MROCs are private communities. “They are not just used on an ad hoc basis when you have a question but are used regularly. MROCs are different than online focus groups because they are used over time. And, while you may be able to do surveys in a community setting, MROCs are really qualitative.”

Tamara shared the results of some ongoing Forrester research into what’s next for MROCs.

• The size debate is going away – While past discussions have obsessed about small vs. large online communities, “today more people are really talking about engagement: how you want people to engage.” Measuring engagement really reveals the health of the community. Yes, the bigger communities let you “slice and dice” participants, but what matters is that members are engaged and contributing. “Instead of focusing on size, focus on engagement.”
• Communities becoming mobile – Vendors are optimizing communities for the mobile web and are building smart-phone applications for the iPhone and Droid. Community members can then participate in many of the same activities on their phones rather than on their computers. Mobile solutions help brands “connect with people in the moment, when they are involved with a certain stimulus in the real world.”
• Communities becoming even more social – While MROCs have always been about the social activity, now communities are reaching out to the public social networks that members already engage with: inviting members to do exercises on Twitter, or to access the community through applications on Facebook or MySpace “so that you don’t have to leave Facebook to participate in the community.”
• Communities are engaged earlier in the business-planning process – “As I said at the beginning, MROCs are here to stay but only the most strategic will survive,” Tamara said. “Communities are moving away from providing one-off answers to questions: those situations where the CEO has a burning question, and the survey isn’t back yet, so let’s hit the community.” Community research is now becoming a formal part of the process for new product development. MROCs are helping facilitate the launch of many successful new products.

Tamara will be sharing more trends in an upcoming independent Forrester white paper. “The bottom line,” she concluded, “is that, regardless of what you call them, MROCs are evolving and proving their value. It is in an exciting place to work for certain!”

Republished with permission from the Voice of Vovici blog.