Chapter 13
Some panel companies adopt community approach in order to improve the engagement of the panel members. The main goal for this is improving respondent retention and cooperation.
Companies reach the sense of community through different initiatives, such as ability of respondents to post comments at the end of the surveys, to post their own polls for other panel members, create their own discussions, use avatars and images and chat with other members. Companies also use some innovative techniques like focus groups and research communities.
The issues are that with this new community approach companies had to cede some control to their members. The experience of Toluna and OpinionPaid showed that members' most common topics were regarding their remuneration and incentives schemes. By improving engagement research companies mainly aimed to access wider range of ideas and inputs from the panel members.
The growth of social media usage will eventually bring brands to the point of creating and utilizing large brand communities. Number of brands are looking for creating community-enabled panels of 5,000-20,000 members by putting high value on engagement. Some companies will also use only their own brand panels for all their research.
One of the best examples of the above-mentioned method is Telstra – the largest telecommunications company in Australia. In September 2009 Telstra launched a new panel, which consisted of 18,000 members in order to understand the needs of their customer base of ten million.
The new term ''e-ethnography'' is used for that ethnographic and observational research that relate to internet in general and the social media in particular.
The need for ethnographic research was articulated by VP, Marketing Strategy for Coca Cola, when in October 2009 he explained that while they focus on understanding consumption and shopping behavior they need to understand the human condition by ''observing, listening, synthesis and deducing''.
Citizen research is the research when participants are recruited to work with researchers as collaborators to explore lives, as well as products and services. By using webcams and mobile phones they help research companies observe the real lives of the participants with the participants help.
In December 2009 a personal ethnography iPhone application was developed. The application allowed anybody to turn themselves and their device into citizen researchers.
There are also so-called natural communities. Natural communities are where people choose to go as opposed to where they are persuaded to go by the researchers. Discussions, self-help groups, different forums, social networks and mass groups are natural communities.
''Social graph is the global mapping of everybody and how they are related to each other'' according to Brad Fitzpatrick. Social graph studies look at the way people in social networks are connected and how they interact. This study also tries to investigate the phenomenon of the way some ideas, videos, photos and messages go ''viral'' and reach very large group of people on internet.
Market researchers become more involved in social media too. They network with each other. Most commonly they are involved in general network (they use mainly Facebook for that), professional network (LinkedIn being the most popular media), Micro blogging (for that they use Twitter) and different specific communities.
The main social media activities of marketing researches are the following: getting in touch with old friends, alerting contacts to their thoughts and activities, organize discussion groups, organize research events, prospect new contacts, look for a job, advertise a job and look for different services.
Besides that many marketing research companies maintain their own blogs.
Since social media have its specifics, using it for marketing research raises some ethical and quality issues. Most of marketing research companies have their code of conduct and different guidelines by which they operate. Those codes and guidelines are based on principles. The main principles are as follows:
- Do not harm
- Do not sell stuff
- Do no mislead the client
- Respondents cooperation is voluntary
In the chapter some ethical issues arising from the usage of social media are explained. Before social media was used in research it was very unlikely that respondents would meet each other. Now that cannot be ensured, that is why it is encouraged for respondents to disguise their real identities.
There is also an issue of safety and abuse. Now being behind the monitors there is higher chance for cyber bullying, flirting and planning to meet offline. That is something research companies should be responsible for and try to keep under control.
What should marketing research companies also try to control is that researchers do not get involved in any kind of brand advocacy and try to change people's mind by any mean.
Besides that it has been proven that well run social communities may promote the consumption of the brand products. So there may be an ethical question about involving ''harmful'' products such as cigarettes and alcoholic beverages.
The usage of social media is growing rapidly. More and more people use social media in their everyday life. They sign up to different social networks, share their thoughts in forms of Facebook statuses, in real time take and share photos and videos. People immediately respond to their friend's activities by posting comments and ''like''-ing statuses and photos. For some even, social media has become the primary source for news and information. Many keep their personal blogs, where they share their live events.
It is not surprising that with this global change the number of marketing research companies that use social media is also growing rapidly. It has many advantages since social media is the place, where marketing research companies may find large amount of available new contacts all in one place. Besides that it seems like social media may be able to effectively respond to the increasing demand of businesses to produce fast and actionable insights.
At the end of the chapter there are four predictions for what research will see happening in the upcoming few years. Basically it is predicted that most of the new marketing research techniques will continue to develop and become more sophisticated. Many companies will use brand panels as large portion for their research. The panels will be having heavy accent on community engagement and most probably in the future there will be new engagement means created. Besides that the citizen research will develop with many participant blogs and new applications and tools. The online research communities will also develop and there will be improvement to blog and buzz mining.
It will take some time before marketing researchers feel as comfortable with using social media research approach as they are with the traditional research at present. There will be need for testing some of the techniques and maybe modifying them to fit better the social media specific characteristics. But with the time marketing research companies will be able to meet the challenges of the social media and use most of the opportunities it provides.
