The latest edition of Research News features an in-depth article on the rise of MROCs in the Australian research industry. Latitude Insights has been highlighted as a leading boutique agency who specialises in online qualitative research, and there’s a number of quotes from Dianne Gardiner, Latitude Insight’s CEO, included. You can read the article online by clicking here. Our client, Zoe Aitken from Cadbury, was also interviewed for the article, in which she talks about the benefits of immediacy and the depth of insights generated from this methodology.

There’s an interesting discussion about community size and response rates with Vision Critical talking about communities of 6000, and Communispace having 300-500. But then later on in the article, Kris Hartvigsen talks about participation rates of 40-50%. This is where we differ – with smaller, more engaged communities. If we had a 50% participation in a discussion we’d start to look into why members were not as responsive as expected. We don’t want to have conversations with only half the people in the ‘room’.

The good news for all of the agencies who are leading in this area, that there is a strong expectation that online communities will take off in 2010, and will be driven by clients looking for new ways to talk to their customers. And we’re ready to get the conversations going.

Age doesn’t matter, unless you are a cheese – Billie Burke

Billie Burke might be a long forgotten American actress, but I think she was on to something here – and certainly within the context of online communities. One of the great advantages of working with people online is that all those visual cues, which stop us from interacting with people who are ‘not one of us’, are rendered impotent.

Can you imagine conducting a focus group with 20 year old students, sitting alongside retired 65 year old schoolteachers? We’re quick to make assumptions about who a person is by the years they have lived, and even more so by their appearance, voice, body language, etc.  We fall back on grouping people according to demographics, not attitude nor mindset.

But what happens when age really doesn’t matter. Concern for the evironment or wanting a better deal from your bank or enjoying a chococlate bar is not an age ‘thing’. Why can’t we have valid converations across the generations not within them. Which, of course, highlights one of the benefits of using online communities.

We’re currently running a community for one of Australia’s largest financial institutions and our age range amongst the 150 community members is 19 to 69. Our youngest are students, our oldest are retired teachers, medical specialists, amongst other professions. The thing that holds them together is that they are all banking customers, and they all have ideas on how the banking industry can be improved. And their dialogue is made more interesting by the exchange of stories and experiences. By putting them together, we’re getting a richer understanding of their worlds at large, rather than narrowly focusing on the issues of their age cohort.

In another community we’re talking performance vehicles with members across a 43 year age range. Does this matter when they’re are talking about the love for their cars? Not at all. A 71 year old petrol head, loves the growl of their engine as much as their 28 year old counterpart.

It’s not to say we’re always going to throw the generations in together. But more often than not, lifestage, or attitude or brand relationship is a better foundation on which to build a community than how old you are.

The idea of ‘community’ used to be about physical location – a group of people living in close proximity. Then there’s the definitions concerning affinity through interaction; or shared characteristics; or shared interests. But what does community mean when we’re talking about the digital world? Communities obviously exist without members having ever seen or audibly spoken to each other. Web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang boiled the definition down to “Online communities are bodies of people joined together by common interests”. Naturally, but does the same definition apply to online research communities?

Firstly, in many instances the ‘common interest’ has been constructed by the researchers and clients. Our communities exist as such because we have identitied the individuals as sharing similar attributes, whether these are behavioural, demographic, psychographic, etc. Secondly, let’s consider the idea of being ‘joined together’. When a community numbers thousands, or tens of thousands, with some members inactive or barely there, are they actually functioning as a community?

So, this raises the issue of when is an online research community not a community but in fact an online panel. At Latitude Insights, we’d argue that smaller online communities are more engaged than those whose numbers exceed 300. Even then, communities of less than 200 demonstrate greater levels of individual engagement because members see that they are part of a private, finite group being actively listened to, versus being one of countless. Wouldn’t you be more likely to share your opinion if you knew it would be heard? And ultimately, as qualitative researchers, we’re about depth and richness of insights, not head counts.

That being the case, we like to think of our research communities as places where “you’re always glad you came”. Cheers.

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.