Interesting comments. I don't know the detail of the Communispace model but I do know there are a few agencies out there who build online communities for brands around real interests and issues which are using the kind of conversations that happen online and in communities to inform clients.
At FreshNetworks we build online communities, and one of the uses that they might have for clients is insight. But we don't run online focus groups or other 'older' techniques. Rather we build communities and invite members to take part in conversations with brands and each other. It's specifically not about asking the questions but about listening to what people discuss themselves.
Of course, as you point out, this kind of community is probably harder to build. You have to create an environment that people what to enter and content and discussions they want to engage with. It's about good management of the conversations and the members.
If you get this right the level of insight you can get from an online community far outweighs a focus group. And you're right that just running a focus group online would be a real waste.
There's another benefit of getting the community right. Unlike Communispace, we don't incentivise people to take part. We don't need to. They get benefit from the community, from their peers and from the feedback loop that is created with the brand. Now that's a real change from traditional market research.
John Whiteside
· 1 year ago
Focus groups are useful. You're right that they're not the same as organic communities, but neither is ideal.
Organic communities are fantastic but they are also self-selecting. If 1% of your customers are passionate enough about your product to participate, you need to ask if their feedback maps to the 10% of your customers who are responsible for much of your revenue. Or the market segment that is currently a tiny part of your business but shows great promise for the future.
Focus groups, including the online versions, are a bit artificial, but you are able to have some control over who the members are, and create a group that looks more like your actual (or ideal) user base.
I think it's just really important to understand what you are after and the benefits and limitations of any particular approach.
(Full disclosure: in the past I have done some work for Communispace.)
MartinEdic
· 1 year ago
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a directed research model, I just think that something entirely new is emerging, something that doesn't think of itself as a community. For lack of a better term I've been referring to it as the social media eco-system. The metaphor is fairly accurate as the entire swath of online communication media (as opposed to information media) are highly interrelated. The bewildering array of connections between social networks, micro-blogging, bloggers, blog commenters, comment streams like this one on Disqus, etc. isn't so much a community as an environment. a growing yet ephemeral environment. A meme can start, grow, evolve and die off quickly, often too quickly for traditional research to even identify its existence- yet it is capable of creating buzz that lingers or even expands. The obvious application here is risk and reputation management (PR) but marketers are also starting to understand the new model (even if our attempts to engage are all over the map!).
Jon Beaumont
· 1 year ago
Hi Martin. Interesting post and I understand your concerns re: research communities.
Personally, I believe there is space for both social media monitoring AND online research communities. I currently work for Virtual Surveys in the UK, which runs a number of closed online research communities. Before that I worked for Wave Metrix, a social media research company.
The two approaches - closed community versus buzz research - have different strengths. Buzz research is great for fast feedback and in-depth understanding of everyday consumer usage and attitudes. Particularly strong in consumer electronics. However, online research communities offer the ability to ask questions to uncover insights into areas that would not be discussed naturally or openly on the internet. For example, concept testing, NPD, advertising and brand communications development. I.e. stuff that isn't even out in the public domain yet, but you need an answer on how it might perform, what your customers think about it etc.
We liken online research communities to airships, somewhere in between rockets (surveys) and balloons (naturally occurring communities). (Bear with me on this!) Our communities (airships) allow for two agendas to be served... the community participants (balloon), who get to start their own conversations, but also the clients - the motor attached to the balloon that nudges it now and then to keep the conversation on course.
We find that our community participants love the experience; it's fun and engaging. They understand that there is a client agenda, but at the same time have the opportunity to interact with other consumers and the brand and start their own discussions. It's an adult approach to research, that is based on collaboration, co-creation and ceding control.
Btw, I have signed up to your Freemium account and am looking forward to giving it a test run; the service looks very smart.
Cheers Jon
PS I wrote this before I saw the other comments; hopefully not too repetitive!
Josh Bernoff
· 1 year ago
Hi, Martin.
As the coauthor of Groundswell I wanted to add some context for your readers.
We do devote one chapter in the book on ways to listen to communities and social networks -- that seems to be where you have focused. We also talk about marketing, selling, supporting, and doing product development with these tools.
If you do research, there are two basic ways to do it. One is to monitor existing social commentary, using tools as basic as Google Alerts or as sophisticated as TNS Cymfony. That's a great way to learn what people are talking about when it comes to your products and your market.
The other way is to set up your own private, moderated network. That's what Communispace does. It's way, way more informative than a focus group since it's continuous and intensive. Also, if you got a look into one of these private networks, you'd see that it looks and works a lot like any public network, except that the companies involved can ask their own questions. Even so, most of the activity in Communispace communities is user-initiated, not client-initiated.
Communispace and its competitors like Think Passenger are not the be-all and end-all of social media -- in fact, they're only one tool in a huge arsenal of techniques. But they can be useful.
One last comment: Forrester actually competes for research money with both the likes of Cymfony and Communispace -- but we recognize both as useful providers of research information. We're neither biased for them nor against them.
techrigy
· 1 year ago
Josh, Thanks for the insights- and for Groundswell which has been truly useful to me as a social media marketer. One thing I'd like to add: Please take a closer look at what we're doing as I think it's not only several levels beyond something like Cymfony but also far more widely available to businesses that cannot afford services that run into six figures. And Google Alerts has a major timeframe issue due to indexing taking place on an (apparently) periodic basis. They also do not index many social media sources which means you can miss conversations early in their influencing cycle.
Josh Bernoff
· 1 year ago
I appreciate the shout-out. I'd love to hear more about Techrigy and how it fits into the brand monitoring space.
techrigy
· 1 year ago
Josh, If you go to http://sm2.techrigy.com and sign up for a free account I'll upgrade you to a pro account for testing purposes. We can also do a demo via GoToMeeting with Aaron Newman, our CEO, if you're interested.
Julie Wittes Schlack
· 1 year ago
Hi Martin. I'm Julie Wittes Schlack from Communispace. Thanks for raising some important questions. I agree with you that an offering that simply tries to replicate traditional market research techniques, i.e. an online environment in which members are constrained to simply "having questions pushed out to them," is of limited value. However, I think that characterization of Communispace reflects a bit of a misconception about what we do, one that Josh Bernoff has already corrected in his comment.
I want to address your concerns about the validity of insights derived from communities in which members are given incentives to participate. If rewards are contingent on favorable postings or word of mouth, this would be a legitimate complaint. If rewards are skewing data quality (a challenge that panel companies face as the incidence of “professional” survey takers increases), this would also be a legitimate complaint. And if postings are censored or filtered with the goal of ensuring that only content that reflected well on the brand became visible, then one would be absolutely justified in challenging the credibility of that community site.
However, in well-run private communities, facilitation practices are explicitly designed to elicit ongoing, long-term engagement and honesty between members and the corporate sponsor. And when customers feel that they are in a genuine dialogue with the brand, when they feel heard, they engage more and with greater candor. Indeed, we did a study across 15 communities and over 2500 members demonstrating that not only do community members not display positive bias as a result of their tenure in a community, but if anything, they become more critical, precisely because they’ve become more invested in the brand doing the right thing. So just as it’s only your good friends who will tell you if you have spinach on your teeth or really do look bad in that outfit, it’s only the customers who have the greatest emotional investment who will tell you when you’re making a mistake.
In our high-engagement communities, members are participating weekly, and not just taking quick polls, but generating product and service ideas, critiquing and refining concepts, keeping diaries, creating collages, debating issues. They are giving regularly and thoughtfully of their time, to the tangible benefit of the sponsoring brand. A periodic, nominal thank-you gift for that time and energy is not bribery and is not inauthentic. It’s simply polite.
Beyond the issue of incentives, however, I’d like to suggest that passive social media mining and more private, intentional, and actively facilitated online communities of the sort that we and some other companies run are complementary, not competitive. We recently did some research we did comparing the speed, volume, and quality of insight derived by initiating conversation in some very large public forums, passive web mining, and interacting with customers in private, online communities. We found that web mining is a great strategy for tracking trends and obtaining largely “rational” insights about brands and customers. Indeed, it’s an ideal strategy for surfacing common complaints, perceptions, and awareness of one’s own and competitive products and brands, and also for tracking those elements over time. Private customer communities add dimension and nuance to those largely brand-focused, “rational” insights. They provide a unique and responsive forum in which to delve into and discover emotional triggers and responses in relation to the brand, and -- more importantly -- insights into the lives, feelings, needs, and indirectly articulated desires of current, potential, and/or lapsed customers.
Please feel free to download the Research Papers I’ve alluded to here at http://www.communispace.com/research/, and thanks for raising this important issue.
All Comments
At FreshNetworks we build online communities, and one of the uses that they might have for clients is insight. But we don't run online focus groups or other 'older' techniques. Rather we build communities and invite members to take part in conversations with brands and each other. It's specifically not about asking the questions but about listening to what people discuss themselves.
Of course, as you point out, this kind of community is probably harder to build. You have to create an environment that people what to enter and content and discussions they want to engage with. It's about good management of the conversations and the members.
If you get this right the level of insight you can get from an online community far outweighs a focus group. And you're right that just running a focus group online would be a real waste.
There's another benefit of getting the community right. Unlike Communispace, we don't incentivise people to take part. We don't need to. They get benefit from the community, from their peers and from the feedback loop that is created with the brand. Now that's a real change from traditional market research.
Organic communities are fantastic but they are also self-selecting. If 1% of your customers are passionate enough about your product to participate, you need to ask if their feedback maps to the 10% of your customers who are responsible for much of your revenue. Or the market segment that is currently a tiny part of your business but shows great promise for the future.
Focus groups, including the online versions, are a bit artificial, but you are able to have some control over who the members are, and create a group that looks more like your actual (or ideal) user base.
I think it's just really important to understand what you are after and the benefits and limitations of any particular approach.
(Full disclosure: in the past I have done some work for Communispace.)
A meme can start, grow, evolve and die off quickly, often too quickly for traditional research to even identify its existence- yet it is capable of creating buzz that lingers or even expands.
The obvious application here is risk and reputation management (PR) but marketers are also starting to understand the new model (even if our attempts to engage are all over the map!).
Personally, I believe there is space for both social media monitoring AND online research communities. I currently work for Virtual Surveys in the UK, which runs a number of closed online research communities. Before that I worked for Wave Metrix, a social media research company.
The two approaches - closed community versus buzz research - have different strengths. Buzz research is great for fast feedback and in-depth understanding of everyday consumer usage and attitudes. Particularly strong in consumer electronics. However, online research communities offer the ability to ask questions to uncover insights into areas that would not be discussed naturally or openly on the internet. For example, concept testing, NPD, advertising and brand communications development. I.e. stuff that isn't even out in the public domain yet, but you need an answer on how it might perform, what your customers think about it etc.
We liken online research communities to airships, somewhere in between rockets (surveys) and balloons (naturally occurring communities). (Bear with me on this!) Our communities (airships) allow for two agendas to be served... the community participants (balloon), who get to start their own conversations, but also the clients - the motor attached to the balloon that nudges it now and then to keep the conversation on course.
We find that our community participants love the experience; it's fun and engaging. They understand that there is a client agenda, but at the same time have the opportunity to interact with other consumers and the brand and start their own discussions. It's an adult approach to research, that is based on collaboration, co-creation and ceding control.
Btw, I have signed up to your Freemium account and am looking forward to giving it a test run; the service looks very smart.
Cheers
Jon
PS I wrote this before I saw the other comments; hopefully not too repetitive!
As the coauthor of Groundswell I wanted to add some context for your readers.
We do devote one chapter in the book on ways to listen to communities and social networks -- that seems to be where you have focused. We also talk about marketing, selling, supporting, and doing product development with these tools.
If you do research, there are two basic ways to do it. One is to monitor existing social commentary, using tools as basic as Google Alerts or as sophisticated as TNS Cymfony. That's a great way to learn what people are talking about when it comes to your products and your market.
The other way is to set up your own private, moderated network. That's what Communispace does. It's way, way more informative than a focus group since it's continuous and intensive. Also, if you got a look into one of these private networks, you'd see that it looks and works a lot like any public network, except that the companies involved can ask their own questions. Even so, most of the activity in Communispace communities is user-initiated, not client-initiated.
Communispace and its competitors like Think Passenger are not the be-all and end-all of social media -- in fact, they're only one tool in a huge arsenal of techniques. But they can be useful.
One last comment: Forrester actually competes for research money with both the likes of Cymfony and Communispace -- but we recognize both as useful providers of research information. We're neither biased for them nor against them.
Thanks for the insights- and for Groundswell which has been truly useful to
me as a social media marketer. One thing I'd like to add: Please take a
closer look at what we're doing as I think it's not only several levels
beyond something like Cymfony but also far more widely available to
businesses that cannot afford services that run into six figures. And Google
Alerts has a major timeframe issue due to indexing taking place on an
(apparently) periodic basis. They also do not index many social media
sources which means you can miss conversations early in their influencing
cycle.
If you go to http://sm2.techrigy.com and sign up for a free account I'll
upgrade you to a pro account for testing purposes. We can also do a demo via
GoToMeeting with Aaron Newman, our CEO, if you're interested.
I want to address your concerns about the validity of insights derived from communities in which members are given incentives to participate. If rewards are contingent on favorable postings or word of mouth, this would be a legitimate complaint. If rewards are skewing data quality (a challenge that panel companies face as the incidence of “professional” survey takers increases), this would also be a legitimate complaint. And if postings are censored or filtered with the goal of ensuring that only content that reflected well on the brand became visible, then one would be absolutely justified in challenging the credibility of that community site.
However, in well-run private communities, facilitation practices are explicitly designed to elicit ongoing, long-term engagement and honesty between members and the corporate sponsor. And when customers feel that they are in a genuine dialogue with the brand, when they feel heard, they engage more and with greater candor. Indeed, we did a study across 15 communities and over 2500 members demonstrating that not only do community members not display positive bias as a result of their tenure in a community, but if anything, they become more critical, precisely because they’ve become more invested in the brand doing the right thing. So just as it’s only your good friends who will tell you if you have spinach on your teeth or really do look bad in that outfit, it’s only the customers who have the greatest emotional investment who will tell you when you’re making a mistake.
In our high-engagement communities, members are participating weekly, and not just taking quick polls, but generating product and service ideas, critiquing and refining concepts, keeping diaries, creating collages, debating issues. They are giving regularly and thoughtfully of their time, to the tangible benefit of the sponsoring brand. A periodic, nominal thank-you gift for that time and energy is not bribery and is not inauthentic. It’s simply polite.
Beyond the issue of incentives, however, I’d like to suggest that passive social media mining and more private, intentional, and actively facilitated online communities of the sort that we and some other companies run are complementary, not competitive. We recently did some research we did comparing the speed, volume, and quality of insight derived by initiating conversation in some very large public forums, passive web mining, and interacting with customers in private, online communities. We found that web mining is a great strategy for tracking trends and obtaining largely “rational” insights about brands and customers. Indeed, it’s an ideal strategy for surfacing common complaints, perceptions, and awareness of one’s own and competitive products and brands, and also for tracking those elements over time. Private customer communities add dimension and nuance to those largely brand-focused, “rational” insights. They provide a unique and responsive forum in which to delve into and discover emotional triggers and responses in relation to the brand, and -- more importantly -- insights into the lives, feelings, needs, and indirectly articulated desires of current, potential, and/or lapsed customers.
Please feel free to download the Research Papers I’ve alluded to here at http://www.communispace.com/research/, and thanks for raising this important issue.