As a focus group moderator, I can’t remember how many times I’ve been ready to start at 6.30pm, with only half a room of mildly hungry participants all quietly waiting for the rest to make it through traffic so we can start talking (and eating). And when you’ve only got 90 minutes, well you want to make sure every minute counts.

So it’s interesting to examine what time conversations happen online, based on what is convenient to our community members. One of the greatest benefits of online research communities is the flexibility for members – they can talk anytime, anywhere so long as they have internet connection.

The graphs at left show it’s possible to have conversations with research participants from 8am in the morning to midnight. Here are some other points of interest:

- Mums with kids at home show a steady presence all day, from breakfast to bed time. There’s not even a real ‘trough’ in the conversations at dinner (proving once again they’re able to multitask by feeding the kids and talking to us)

- Small business owners want to converse during work hours and tend to go quiet after 6pm. Isn’t this when we typically want them to come to groups?

- Our communities with an even mix of males and females, or those which are male dominated show a real dip at around 6pm – usually after a late afternoon peak in visits to the community. This coincides with the commute home, dinner, and other post-work activities.

- People are ready to talk from breakfast time – not when you’d typically participate in market research.

So when respondents say, ‘No I’m having dinner’ they probably mean it. We’ve all got to eat sometime. But there’s 23 other hours in the day to chat if you belong to an online research community.

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.