When community members take over!

There will always be a gap between what a consumer shares and how a researcher interprets it. This disparity is created by a cultural, generation and/or knowledge gap. These different gaps make it difficult for a researcher to put things into the right perspective. Here,

community participants can help us out. By

becoming our co-researcher, they can find more and new insights that would otherwise not have been captured. Customers feel empowered and honoured when they are asked to become co-researchers. There are many ways to collaborate with co-researchers. In this article, our experience with co-researchers is

illustrated in three case studies from Campbell’s, Air France-KLM and Philips.

take overWhen community members

What to expect?

Co-researchers bring down the wall

The new buzzword in research industry is

‘collaboration’. Today, 8 out of 10 consumers are willing to collaborate with brands, 36% of whom prefer to do so in a branded research community (Social Media Around The World, 2012). In order for collaborations to be really successful, it’s key that there’s an equal relationship between all parties and that they consider each other as true partners. In Online Customer Communities, we consider the participants as equal partners. We empower them to start their own discussions and enable them to share (un)solicited feedback. However, the roles are still split: we are the researchers, they are the participants. For a successful collaboration, we need to challenge these traditional, distinct roles and examine the convergence of the roles of a researcher and participant.


Co-researchers bring down the wall

What would happen if we brought down these walls and turned participants into researchers? Our recent

case studies prove that community participants are not only perfectly capable of taking on the role as co-researchers, it’s also a way to close cultural, generation and knowledge gaps. These studies illustrate 3 ways of how community members become co-researchers: by moderating, analysing and fine-tuning our conclusions.

MROCs allow us to build an on-going connection with our participants. After the introductory period, we have gained their trust and participants know their way around in the community. Even members who were not familiar with communities before, learn quickly how the community works, what the role of the community manager is and what is expected of

them. Without introducing the official role of a ‘co-moderator’ we already see some members starting to behave as moderators in the social corner (i.e. the room to talk off-topic and start new discussions). This already shows there’s potential for empowering participants to be part of the research team and become actual co-moderators.


Participants as ‘co-moderators’

How to collaborate with co-moderators

There are various ways to introduce co-moderators into the community. We have identified two types of co-moderators: ‘by role’ and ‘by mission’


1 The role of the co-moderator

The co-moderator task ‘by role’ is endorsed as another moderator in the MROC of a specific room (i.e.

social corner). The co-moderator is encouraged to start discussions by him/herself, moderate, summarise and report back to the moderator. In the community “Come Dine With Me” which we ran for Campbell’s, the co-moderator took his role very seriously and started completely new topics in the Lounge.

“I really enjoyed being a co-moderator, it really felt like I was playing an important role and that I was being heard. Thank you for asking me to do that, I would love to do it again” (Co-moderator in the “Come Dine With Me” community)


2 The mission of the co-moderator

The co-moderator ‘by mission’ tries to complete a secret assignment. Instead of being ‘responsible’ for

one room, the mission for this co-moderator is to join an already existing discussion and stimulate the conversation to keep the topic active. Afterwards, as in the case of the co-moderator “by role”, they summarise the discussion and report back to the moderator. In the community we ran for Campbell’s, we asked participants to join the discussion “Your ideal restaurant experience” to find out extra insights in order to understand the total restaurant experience. For this role, the co-moderators were positively surprised also

“I accept the challenge and look forward to reporting back to you with my findings. Should be fun!” (Initial reaction from the co-moderator by ‘mission’)

Why you should work with co-moderators


In a brand new study with Campbell’s, we observed

that working with co-moderators increases the general engagement of the MROC. The conversation can be even more open as it is peer-to-peer, speaking the same language. Also the findings are summarized from a consumer point of view, not that of a researcher’s, thus bringing another mind and a different perspective into the analysis process. Using co-moderators also reaffirms to all participants that the MROC is about listening, sharing and collaborating together. (Luke et al, 2012)

Working with a co-moderator ‘by mission’ helps to keep the discussion relevant and dynamic. Plus, the questions are posed from a peer’s point of view, which helps close the participant-vs.-

researcher gap. Where co-mods by mission only ‘poke’ discussions on topic level, co-mods by role go one step further. They take over a whole forum (e.g. social corner) and collaborate with the members on a structural level, resulting in closer P2P relations and increasing the social glue of the community. Overall, co-moderatorship is perceived to be very rewarding both for the co-moderator and the other participants. Our experience with co-moderators already shows there are more opportunities for collaborating with participants as co-researchers. In the past year, we’ve done several studies to further explore the potential of co-researchers in the analysis stage.

“How interesting that you used a couple of the other members to help you and ask us questions too. It’s a great idea, they know where we’re coming from, and understand what we are talking about so it’s easier to talk to them” (A ‘Come Dine With Me, Australia’ MROC participant talking about a co-moderator)

Participating in crowd interpretation

Next to moderation, participants can also add value when they are involved during the analysis phase, also referred to as ‘crowd interpretation’. The rationale behind crowd interpretation is that analysis of data is biased by a researcher gaze. To get all potential interpretations and insights hidden in the data, we should to include multiple perspectives.

Recently, we conducted an insightment community in cooperation with Air France-KLM where we

wanted to detect new needs of transfer passengers. After an observational stage where each transfer passenger reported about their journey, we invited the community members to interpret each other’s contributions. Previous research (Verhaeghe et all, 2011) taught us that consumers who are knowledgeable about the topic are most suitable for interpreting research results. The crowd interpretation was done in a game. In the first round, members gave their interpretation of the input of their peers. In the second round, the original contributor could rate the analysis. For each correct analysis, one received points. Consumers who were best at the analysis (highest number of points) won the game and got a special reward. When comparing the results of the researcher group with those of the participants, we can conclude that

involving co-researchers leads to up to 21% of new insights, which would otherwise not have been reached. In other words: involving community participants in the analysis stage brings new insights to the table and helps researchers to close the gaps.

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Interpreting community data

Crowd interpretation of Gen Y community data

Dry-running your presentation for consumers

Another way to involve participants in the tasks of the researcher is by asking them to fine-tune your conclusions, almost like a dry-run for the community participants instead of the company. This technique was used in a recent study we did for Philips.

Last year, we set up a 3-week insight shaping community with 50 Chinese consumers, together with Philips. Normally, we would work with a native moderator. Due to time constraints, we had to work with a non-native moderator and the community was run in English, while the fear existed we would lose out in terms of the fine nuances in Chinese culture and society. To avoid this caveat and increase positive feedback loops for enriched information generation, we used 10 of our participants as our co-researchers in a process of crowd interpretation.After our analysis of the community outtakes, these participants were presented our findings and were asked to challenge them. In performing the task of crowd interpretation, these participants were asked to explain our findings from the Chinese cultural perspective, illustrate our findings with their own personal examples as well as go beyond our first

impressions. Working with co-researchers created truly unique insights that were key for Philips to find the right positioning in the Chinese market. We, as researchers and marketers, would never have uncovered these insights from an online distance (Schillewaert et al, 2012).

. take overWhen community members

Fine-tune researcher’s conclusions

Philips’ “Sleep Well” community with Chinese consumers

A new milestone in the researcher-participant relationship

Based on these 3 case studies, we have truly experienced the added value of co-researchers in communities, learned how and when to appeal to them and developed a future outlook.


1 Co-researchers help you close cultural, contextual and knowledge gaps

First of all co-researchers help you overcome a knowledge barrier. Community participants all share a strong interest in a brand or topic. The more niche the theme will be, the bigger the knowledge gap and the harder it will be to moderate specific discussions and draw the right conclusions.

Secondly, co-researchers can help you close a contextual blind spot. For example, we also conducted crowd interpretation for a GenY community in cooperation with MTV. The researchers involved in this GenY community were not all GenY members. Using crowd interpretation with like-minded peers of the participants generating the data helped us to overcome this generation gap.

Finally, the last case shows that co-researchers are crucial to overcome the cultural barrier. These co-researchers know their culture and go beyond the researcher’s first impressions.


2 Co-researchers are the ultimate level of community engagement

Another key learning of working with co-researchers is that it’s not for everybody. It’s an extra challenge that participants need to be interested in and perceive as an exclusive reward. Therefore, we consider co-researchers as the ultimate level of method engagement, rewarding selected members to become an official co-owner of the community.

5 levels of creating gradual engagement in Online Customer Communities


3 Co-researchers are the future of our profession

Participants are no longer used for exploitation for our research needs and have become our partners with whom we collaborate. When we put community participants into a different context such as a co-researcher, it does not replace the researcher. On the contrary, actually. It proves that we are building a long-lasting relationship with our participants; it’s a synergy. And sharing the responsibility for the community with participants reaffirms this new relationship. We believe this is the next step in collaborating with community participants and is the way forward for our profession as market researchers.

References


Luke, M., Cappuccio, R., De Ruyck, T., Willems, A., & Grant, R. 2012. Come Dine With Me, Australia. Proceedings for AMSRS Conference 2012.

De Ruyck, T. & Veris, E., 2011. Play, interpret together, play again and create a win-win-win,

Schillewaert, N., De Ruyck, T., Troch, T. & Wijngaarden, J. van, 2012. When information is hard to get creating positive feedback loops through engagement in online research communities,http://www.greenbookblog.org/2012/07/02/when-information-is-hard-to-get-creating-positive-feedback-loops-through-engagement-in-online-research-communities/

Verhaeghe, A., Schillewaert, N., Van den Bergh, J., Ilustre, G. & Claes, P., 2011. Crowd interpretation. Are participants the researchers of the future? Proceedings for Esomar congress 2011.

Verhaeghe, A., Hageman, C., Troch, T. & De Ruyck, T. (2012). Doing more with less. Proceedings for Esomar qualitative congress 2012.

http://www.greenbookblog.org/2012/07/02/when-information-is-hard-to-get-creating-positive-feedback-loops-through-engagement-in-online-research-communities/

http://www.greenbookblog.org/2012/07/02/when-information-is-hard-to-get-creating-positive-feedback-loops-through-engagement-in-online-research-communities/

Tom De Ruyck

[email protected]

@tomderuyck

http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomderuyck

+32 9 269 14 07

The research team

Anouk Willems

[email protected]

+31 10 742 10 35

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/anouk-willems/3/490/974

@AnoukW1

Annelies Verhaeghe

[email protected]

@annaliezze

http://be.linkedin.com/in/anneliesverhaeghe

+32 9 269 1406

Thomas Troch

[email protected]

@thomastroch

http://www.linkedin.com/in/thomastroch

+32 9 269 12 26

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research communities?

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Tom De RuyckHead of Research Communities

When community members take over!

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