Who are these people?

We came across an interesting blog recently by Katie Harris to do with how members are recruited for market research online communities and whether ‘checks’ are in place to ensure the ‘right’ people are recruited. Space

We often get asked this very question. And really, the key point is that recruitment of members for online research communities is no different to recruitment for other market research methods. The same checks and filters need to be in place.

In recruiting members for our online communities, we populate our communities a number of ways, including using client databases, panels and friends of members. Rigorous screening is always carried out to ensure our community members are the people our client wants to hear from in relation to their research objective.

Recruitment for all market research needs to be conducted this way, regardless of the methodology used.

Did that catch your attention? What I’m really talking about is those wonderous web tools that provide additional information to round out the insights generated in primary research.The web offers a plethora of apps, widgets, tools and tricks to find out more about your subject of choice by tracking and searching for words.

For us, the relevance comes in showing our clients supplementary data that compliments the conversations we are having with their customers online. If they’re talking about the latest advertisement in our research community, we can tap into Google Insights for Search to see whether it’s featuring in keyword searches in the public domain. Google Trends gives us a search volume index on the ad we’re interested in and whether it’s changed over time. Kraft revealed only 3 days ago the name of its Vegemite line extension, iSnack 2.0 – just look at the spike in searches for Vegemite from Google Insights for Search.

Or if it’s words we’re after, Technorati allows us to search the blogosphere to find mentions of our subject.  Technorati tells us that there’s been 18 blog posts mentioning iSnack 2.0 at the time we posted. Or for what people are saying right now try Twitter Search where we can narrow our search on a number of variables such as positive comments only and location. And it seems that iSnack 2.0 hasn’t found many fans in tweetland or the blogosphere.

Then there’s the pure simplicity of Google News. Sign up, enter your brand/company/issue and away you go. Let the site deliver personalised news to your home page.

“Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.” Thomas Carlyle, 1795-1881, Philosopher, Author

This first blog coincides with an exciting time for the team at Latitude. We’ve changed our name from Latitude Research to Latitude Insights to reflect what we truly do each day.

And to coincide with this change, we felt it was important to create a broader voice for Latitude.   We recognise we are living in transformational times and want to connect to others who share our enthusiasm for creating stimulating  environment where insights happen everyday.

This blog will be dedicated to all things related to market research, online research communities, social media and any other observations we’d like to share with our clients and the world at large, including our own thoughts and experiences with research communities, trends in the industry and best practices.  And of course, we hope to share our insights.