Engage and analyze

Editor’s note: Susan Roth is vice president, online qualitative, at TNS North America, Cincinnati. Deanna Lawrence is an associate on the global innovation team at TNS Group in London.

Today’s consumers live in a highly interconnected and networked world. Social communities such as Facebook, MySpace and Second Life have come a long way from being the exclusive domain of students and are now drawing tens of millions of users globally across multiple demographics. This new all-ages-inclusive Web 2.0 environment has created an opportunity for marketers to gain insight not only into what their customers are saying about products but also their attitudes, preferences, lives and ambitions.

Innovative companies have been quick to harness the power of social conversations. They understand the value of collective wisdom and collaboration to address a variety of business problems ranging from increasing the quantity and quality of idea generation to improving the quality of customer service. Businesses are learning to align commercial strategies and practices based on new methods of peer-to-peer interaction and sharing of information. Companies such as Dell, Procter & Gamble, Unilever India and others are all practicing and benefiting from this new way of thinking.

Online communities can be categorized as open or closed. Where closed communities are invitation-only, open communities are just that - they are open to anyone and include mass social sites such as Facebook or MySpace. Once in, individuals can join with smaller groups of friends, family and other like-minded people to create their own inner circles. These groupings are flexible, overlapping and ever-changing, much like in-person communities. The community becomes a filtered supply of insight and direction due to the exchange of information relevant to that particular target group.

There are several different types of online communities. Company-sponsored communities including Procter & Gamble’s beinggirl.com and those of M&M Mars are open communities. These are branded marketing tools allowing companies to create an environment for their customers and potential customers to get information, interact with the brand through games, contests and e-mail alerts, and to engage in discussion about the product as well as a broad range of topics. These sites build brand loyalty, extend the brand’s influence and give the consumer more touchpoints for interacting with the brand. Companies benefit from sustainable access to consumers who seek them out for brand-level engagement.

Starbucks had a shaky start with its initial online branded community. Tightly controlled and delivering no discernable payback, it caused members to disengage. The new My Starbucks Idea is an open and interactive site which directly involves consumers in the development of Starbucks products and services. Starbucks representatives openly drop into discussion threads and give updates on community-driven product initiatives - their tone less Big Brother and more a cheery affirmation of consumer-barista cooperation.

Jones Soda offers consumers an experience that captivates and inspires by promoting creativity and personalization. Consumers assist in shaping the product by sending in images for the label, thus encouraging them to share the brand message. Influencers and advocates propel direction, often establishing new brand positioning and setting the pace for expansion.

Distinctly different

Online social community research is carried out in both open and closed communities developed on behalf of companies wanting to research a particular demographic or interest group. The process for researching open versus closed communities is distinctly different.

In open communities, it is possible to broadly scan the topics of discussion within a category or age group. Companies such as Cymfony collect discussions and articles from millions of online and traditional media sources and provide analysis of social media conversations. Cymfony works with Web-traffic monitor Compete to provide clickstream-based “behavior mining” to analyze social media content by behavioral segments and determine how specific audiences feel about a brand. By correlating social media discussion within the purchase funnel they can identify which sites drive purchase and which do not. By analyzing discussion on these sites it is possible to improve understanding of consumer attitudes, to help spot and define emerging trends and to gauge reaction to disruption in the marketplace.

These open-community research techniques can be followed with more in-depth qualitative analysis of particular subgroups or topics to provide insights to drive product enhancements, communication strategies or to address brand imagery issues.

Sponsored, or closed, communities that are created for the purpose of market research allow end-user companies to explore customer involvement, usage habits, issues, values, lifestyles and preferences with a group that wouldn’t likely form on its own, such as the water filtration community discussed later in this article. By staying non-branded they can observe a more open flow of information including information about competitive brands.

Sponsored communities can be stand-alone communities created for understanding a particular category or target group or part of a proprietary panel. In this case, a subset of the panel is able to interact in the community while others participate in separate ad hoc online qualitative or quantitative research. Most communities run for six to 12 months or longer if the need persists and there is value in continuing.

New game

So what does this mean from a marketing research perspective? It’s an entirely new game. Just as Web 1.0 did with the introduction of online surveys, online focus groups and discussion boards, this new way of engaging the consumer is radically different. Online community research within sponsored communities is about creating an environment which allows authentic engagement in a trusted setting. It is the opposite of research in which questions are “pushed” at the respondent. In this methodology, we are the ones who are responding - researchers are the new respondents! The course of the discussion is primarily user-driven and it is the challenge of the researcher to follow the discussion and interject when appropriate but mostly to observe where the participants’ interactions lead and record related insights.

Collaboration is a key element of community engagement and in providing value for the client. Collaboration leads to co-creation and in this case, is between and among members of the community and importantly includes the researchers and clients as well. Because of this ability to cycle through member responses and client responses rather quickly, real-time development is possible.

Intrigues and engages

The key to success for research communities is creating an environment that intrigues and engages participants on many levels and allows them to feel at home in that space. It involves facilitating engagement, evaluating influence and observing the nature, quality and quantity of the interactions and responding (or not responding) as necessary.

This is challenging for researchers, as we are loaded with carefully-crafted, well-tested questions, specialized tools and techniques and qualitative and quantitative expertise to attain and analyze data and deliver findings and recommendations related to specific research objectives. In this environment, the researcher’s task is to create an engagement plan and platform which allows for multiple points of participation but also progresses over time in a way that follows avenues of interest for the participants while meeting the client objectives. This is a juncture where art and science meet.

Moderating online communities is vastly different than traditional qualitative moderating and encompasses both observation and enabled engagement. An engagement plan is one of the most crucial elements of the research design. It is the community version of a discussion guide and encompasses all engagement elements including discussion forums, polls, profiles, activities, games and more. However, it’s not wholly accurate to compare it to a discussion guide. While a discussion guide could be likened to a set of linear directions with a beginning and end point and with the occasional detour along the way, an engagement plan is closer to a complex map indicating various potential destinations. At each of those destinations, there are discussion questions, polls and events which can be dropped in as the discussion warrants. Flexibility is paramount here because this discussion needs to have time and space to evolve naturally so that the members feel that they are creating the community and driving the dialogue.

Allowing members to take ownership of the content encourages more thoughtful discussion and thus provides deeper context within those discussions. This becomes a naturally reinforcing phenomenon; as they see the dialogue develop in ways that are particularly meaningful to them, they in turn provide greater context and richness in their own responses.

As researchers, we insert breaches at strategic points but with discretion so as not to disrupt the flow too often. We’re trying to attain a depth of engagement that is not currently being attained with other methods. The richness of the interaction is driven by the variety of potential touchpoints as well as the fact that this is user-driven and thus members respond with authenticity. The sharing that occurs allows for influencers to emerge as happens in face-to-face communities but we can watch these, track them and test their impact. This peer-to-peer interaction provides a way of listening in that is unobtrusive and highly revealing and provides a holistic understanding of the consumer in context.

Once a community is established, clients can use it as a sounding board for new research questions that arise during the course of the year. The participants are at the ready for quick polls and targeted dialogues as well as the longer-term engagement plan. The range of insight spans broad topical issues to very specific research objectives. In comparison to traditional methods, communities provide sustained interaction and economies of scale for gaining consumer closeness. Because communities evolve over an extended period of time we can see how the dynamics of the community change as the market shifts.

New techniques

TNS created a community called Waterways for the purposes of illustrating a sponsored community and experimenting with a variety of new research techniques. This community consisted of respondents recruited from the TNS 6th Dimension panel who owned water filters. Only half of them had previously participated in social networking.

We started by creating an engagement plan that was based on a series of topics and issues related to health, environmentalism, conservation and filtration, presented to us by a client who agreed to participate and wanted to gauge the effectiveness of this new methodology. The outline included initial topics for discussion which would launch the community and provide some basis for understanding the members and each other. A series of additional lines of questioning and associated polls and activities were created to follow.

Like any moderated group, we laid out appropriate instructions including video introduction by the moderator, instructions on how the community would operate, FAQs, tech support info, etc.

We monitored participation throughout the study and at points when the conversation waned we interjected creative activities such as a collage contest and letter-writing exercise. Both were effective in boosting participation. More members participated in the letter-writing exercise, perhaps because it was easier and didn’t require any skill related to digital media, but the collage exercise still boosted participation as many members checked out the collages of others and posted comments. Note: Participants were given the option to create a digital or paper collage and mail, e-mail or scan/e-mail it in as they chose.

Stretches beyond

Analysis of online communities also stretches well beyond traditional qualitative analysis. Goals of analysis are to understand the content in terms of:

•  consistency and interconnectedness;

•  patterned or arbitrary dialogue;

•  topics, subjects, themes;

•  pace, tempo, pulse;

•  starts and stops;

•  etiquette (conformation to norms or rebellious behavior);

•  conventional versus quirky or activist thinking;

•  expert influencers - who are they; how and why they gain power.

All content is analyzed in context, which provides for rich, holistic learning.

Quantitative analysis is provided in terms of the health of the community, which involves participation rates, average time spent on the site, number and length of responses per person, top topics in terms of votes as well as participation and other diagnostic elements but also identifying important phrases and measuring co-occurrences.

In addition, quantitative analysis can address other areas, including:

•  Estimate critical properties of the community such as degrees of separation between members, time needed for messages to spread through the whole community, key sub-communities (to understand the substructure of the community or to identify areas where deeper qualitative analysis will yield the most value) and so on.

•  Identify important relationships between members, between members and discussion threads, between discussion threads and key concepts and any other subset of the entities that make up a community.

•  Build predictive models of certain outcome measures predicated on relationships and typical behaviors observed within the community.

•  Data can easily be integrated with other multi-data sources to deepen research findings.

Broad objectives

So when is it appropriate to create a community? Generally speaking, a community is best for meeting fairly broad objectives such as understanding consumer experiences and hearing their stories. It is also excellent for new product development, ideation and co-creation as well as creating a consumer-centric strategy and developing loyalty and engagement.

Communities can be used in brand and communications programs to inform communications strategies. They help marketers understand how messaging is being received in context of their target group, especially when the medium is Web-based. Communities can also be used to identify trends and create ongoing value by allowing marketers insight into these trends as they develop. Investigation into retail shopping behavior and consumption along with understanding business processes are other uses for communities.

This is a fast-moving area and we are seeing the rapid convergence of media channels, as the Internet, television and mobile applications become more integrated. At the same time, they are becoming location-aware, making them more targeted and allowing them to combine news, entertainment, shopping and business as never before. To fully leverage the new interactions, flexibility in design and business practices will become the standard as companies need to stay in the discussion to be successful. Collaborative interactions with consumers will enable genuine innovation and transformative competitive advantages.