Page 244 - Social Media Marketing

chapter 8: ENGAGEMENT ON THE SOCIAL WEB ■a small number of screened participants—research communities provide a context for
more natural participation. This is not a criticism of focus group methodology: Clearly,
they are one of the tools that remain important in the discovery and design processes
for marketing campaigns, product features, and a lot more. Research communities
combine the basics of focus group research with the social structures and potential for
collaboration found in social networks.

The business advantage of a research community over a focus group is in its
longevity and continuity. Participants may be involved for months or even years. This
gives you the opportunity to develop real relationships with participants, and for the
research community members themselves to become very familiar with the brand,
products, or services being evaluated. As a result, the level of feedback—and the
insights that you can carry back into your business—can be quite substantial.

Research communities can be launched using services that provide turnkey
implementation as well as participant recruitment and community management, or
they can be built up from the ground just as you would build any other community.
222 Service providers such as Communispace and Passenger offer these types of purpose-
built communities as turnkey services. Take a look at these offerings if you are inter-
ested in this type of collaborative social application.

Research Communities

Using a community platform for extended research can provide in-depth insights into brands,
products, and services and the ways in which customers are likely to perceive them. One big
caveat: Because these are often fixed-time programs, be sure that participants understand the
terms, expectations, and when (if) their stay in the community will end.

Passenger and Communispace are two leading providers of research communities. You can learn
more about them here:

http://www.thinkpassenger.com/

http://www.communispace.com/

In addition to research communities, tools like forums, ideation, and innova-
tion platforms have a natural place in your collaboration program, making it easy to
extend these tools inside your business or organization. Support forums, for example,
provide a context for issue identification and resolution, and they do so in a manner
that naturally involves your own employees or staff. Support forums are a great way to
involve and empower customers and then connect them with your employees. By letting
customers answer questions for each other on basic or unusual (highly specific) cases,