It’s interesting to get different perspectives or definitions to do with online research communities (MROCs). Everyone has a slightly different take on what an MROC is; what it isn’t; whether they’re qualitative; whether they’re quantitative; whether they are heavily moderated and so the list goes on.

A recent blog about the continuum from online focus group to “true” online community suggests that online research communities may lean towards the spectrum of a heavily facilitated research tool.

It is a fine line, or balancing act, to make sure an online research community (MROC) is not over-managed or ‘heavily facilitated’. And by this I mean that they are not too ‘tightly controlled’ and ‘guided’ by the moderator.

However, some involvement is needed. I don’t believe any ‘community’ (online or other) can exist without some sort of ‘input’. All communities need someone (whether it be moderator or member), or even a group of people, to keep the momentum going. Otherwise, the community would naturally ‘peter’ out.

Think about any group you may have been part of, or any community you’ve been involved in (and not necessarily online), the chances are that if it was just ‘left to itself’ it would run out of steam. Or look at it from another angle, if you have a Facebook page for friends and family and never put anything on it or never use it, do you think any of your friends and family will keep visiting?

So going back to communities and MROCs, there needs to be someone (or even some people) in any community who takes a ‘leadership’ role and breathes life into the community.

And that’s what a moderator’s role is – to keep the community alive. That doesn’t mean ‘over facilitating’ but it does mean some involvement. Members still develop their own content and do ‘their own thing’.

While some facilitation is necessary, I think we need to be mindful of how we talk about online research communities so that people who have less experience with them don’t get the wrong idea, don’t you think?

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.