FAQs

Market research online communities (or “MROCs” for short) are password-protected websites where a targeted group of people are recruited to take part in daily, weekly or monthly research activities around a shared topic of interest (e.g., a company, product, hobby, etc.). One simple way to think of them is like having a small, private Facebook of your own that you use just for research purposes. These communities are used primarily for the purpose of gathering independent feedback, listening to customers and developing insights, as opposed to other forms of online communities used for marketing, networking, customer support, etc.

Many see MROCs as a “faster, cheaper, better” type of innovation in the research industry. Since they are “always on,” they can reduce the time it takes to gather feedback and insight from weeks or months to a few days (or even hours). Over time, they tend to be very cost effective since they help companies save thousands in recruiting, travel, facility rental and incentives. Above all, they can be a much better methodology by providing researchers with the ability to listen to an audience, rather than simply ask customers question after question in a focus group or survey. It’s through ongoing listening via a private online community that companies are able to develop deep insights and ideas for innovative new products and services.

They are great for gathering customer feedback on a regular basis, studying a target audience and their needs, collaborating with people to develop new products and services, testing and refining product concepts, evaluating marketing communications and advertisements, and much more… Basically, anything you would think of doing in a focus group can be done in an online research community.

It’s a good idea to reach out to your community on a regular basis so that your community members have a clear sense of the expectations for participation. What “regular” means will vary by the company and community, but generally means weekly or monthly (e.g., a few topics a week or a few topics a month, spread out over the week or month).

Almost all MROCs are private and closed off to general public sign-up. This is because members are typically screened before they can join the community to ensure they match the desired profile of community members. In addition, making the site private and secure helps ensure that any concepts you intend to present to the members are less likely to “leak” to the general public (although this can still happen in any online research setting, so it is something to consider beforehand).

The “ideal” size is something of a debate among community vendors, but many agree that the smaller and more tight-knit the community, the higher your level of engagement will be. PluggedIN has had success with communities of around 50-150 members. However, it is not uncommon to have communities of 300-500 members or more. In general, the larger the community the less people bond with each other and the lower your engagement levels will be.

Most market researchers consider MROCs to be primarily a qualitative research methodology. Even though community sizes can be in the hundreds and surveys can be run inside of a MROC, many market researchers will still advise their clients to use MROCs for ongoing qualitative research studies. However, the feedback and ideas generated in an online research community can easily be used to inform further quantitative testing in conventional surveys, or help provide context around the results of ongoing survey research.

No methodology is perfect, and MROCs are no exception. As with any online research method, you lose the ability to capture facial reactions in the moment they are responding to a question. Also, having participants provide feedback on physical objects like a prototype can be difficult online when they can’t actually touch it. However, both of these drawbacks can be mitigated by having members share video responses to questions or sending physical samples of a product out to members (if possible). Finally, MROCs can take more time to coordinate and run than other methodologies, which is why each of the community packages offered by PluggedIN include services designed to help manage, moderate and analyze community feedback without a ton of personal time investment. In general, however, many companies are willing to deal with these drawbacks to take advantage of the “faster, cheaper, better” benefits that MROCs provide.

This will depend largely on your needs and budget. MROCs work best when they are continuous, since you can take advantage of the speed and efficiency benefits this way. However, we’ve seen companies use them effectively for a few months at a time, shutting them down when their research objectives are accomplished.

While you can technically build a very specific “community of purpose” for a limited time frame like a couple of weeks, you are probably better off running a more conventional online bulletin board focus group, chat-style focus group or traditional focus group instead. The real benefit of a community doesn’t start to appear until a couple of months in, as a result of working with your community closely over an extended period of time. In addition, you will be unlikely to see the type of “across the table” discussion in a week or so that you would get in a longer-term community, and this is where valuable user generated insights and ideas are formed.

If your company has fairly regular research requests (e.g., at least once a month), and these requests can be handled using a qualitative research approach, you may benefit from having a MROC available. If your needs for feedback are more sporadic, you may be better served by running short-term MROCs or other forms of qualitative research on an ad-hoc basis.

One way to think of a MROC is like a “focus group on steroids.” Unlike a focus group of 8-12 people, MROCs tend to have tens or hundreds of members. Also, rather than lasting a finite period of time (e.g., two hours), they last for many months or years, providing a companies with a continuous source of feedback and insight. MROCs have the advantage of giving research participants the floor to voice their concerns and discuss topics of interest to them, which you may have never thought to explore in a focus group.

MROCs are used primarily for qualitative research (with the occasional survey here or there), while panels are used mostly for quantitative research. In addition, MROCs tend to be private environments where members regularly interact with each other and a moderator, whereas panels usually do not encourage this type of interaction (although some panel platforms have added basic forum functionality to try and simulate a community).

You could, but there are a few drawbacks. First, if you’re worried about feedback getting in the hands of competitors then running your community on Facebook is just asking for trouble due to the public and social nature of the site (though this is technically hard to avoid regardless of the platform due to the fact that sharing online is relatively easy these days). Second, you are limited in your capabilities to sub-segment and define memberships based on segmentation criteria and screening attributes, as you are only privy to the information available in public profiles (unless you decide to violate Facebook’s terms of service). Finally, content ownership can be a big issue for many companies when it comes to research. When you run your research on Facebook, they own the data according to their terms and conditions. This can cause legal hassles for your company down the road, whereas communities run on a platform like PluggedIN’s have legal policies that allow you to own all feedback and ideas posted to your private community site. If you’ve already started a community on Facebook, why not use that as an “incubator” and invite them to a private online community just for research?

Yes. Your community is very unlikely to be a success if you just “set it and forget it.” Members need to be prompted with new topics, activities and content to react to or they will drop out. We recommend spending at least one hour each day facilitating your community, but your experience may vary depending on the expectations you set for your participants early on. PluggedIN’s “full-service” and “hybrid-service” community plans include a trained moderator that will spend approximately 45 minutes to 1 hour each day inside of your community posting new topics, encouraging conversation and supporting member contributions. Please don’t run a MROC if you don’t intend to monitor it, as you will be disappointed with the results and will end up wasting a lot of time and money in the process!

Participants typically come from traditional sources for sample, including customer lists, CRM systems, purchased lists, panels, facility databases and existing online communities.

The attrition rate will depend on a variety of factors, including the purpose of the community, incentive strategy, member interest in the topic, ease of use of the community site, quality of the moderation and quality of the topics/content posted to the site. Regardless of the factors, we advise people to expect anywhere from 5% to 10% attrition rates on a monthly basis. Recruiting new members is usually an ongoing process that happens each month or quarter, depending on the length of time of your community and/or budget.

Similar to a focus group or other form of market research, members in a MROC are often compensated for their time. However, there are some exceptions to this, including employee research communities or communities where members have a very strong affiliation with the brand and will participate out of love of a product or brand.

As with a focus group, the incentive amount will vary with the type of participant and how much you are asking them to do. Here’s a hypothetical (and common) example – You want to run an ongoing community and plan on asking a couple of questions each week. Your community is with your customers, who are Moms with children 8-12 (a fairly common consumer audience). In this example, PluggedIN would recommend a monthly incentive of $10 per person if they participate regularly in moderator-led activities. Using this as a baseline, you can start to scale up (or down) your incentive amount. As an aside, we find that incentives given at regular intervals to each member that qualifies tend to work better than a sweepstakes system to encourage sustained activity and contributions to the community.

We advise participants to expect to spend 10-20 minutes per week in a research community, although they are welcome to spend as much time as they want participating if they find the topics to be of interest to them. Of course, if you’re only launching new activities on a monthly basis this will need to be adjusted for the actual level of activity. A good “guesstimate” is about 5-10 minutes per topic you are running.

Before the advent of Facebook, the answer to this question would have been that younger audiences work best in communities. However, now that Facebook (and social media in general) has taken the web by storm, people of all ages and audiences will find participating in a MROC to be “like home,” especially on platforms like PluggedIN’s that purposely mirror the look and feel of popular social media sites.

B2B research communities are just as powerful as consumer communities (and sometimes even more powerful)! With the advent of professional social networks like LinkedIN, and the increased use of social media tools in the enterprise, B2B audiences find online research community environments to be just as valuable as consumers do. In fact, many B2B audiences appreciate the convenience of being able to participate at their convenience, and having tools to network with other community members.

Probably not. Stick with traditional methods like in-person focus groups or in-depth interviews.

Definitely. In fact, there seems to be growing interest in recruiting members from select locations so that companies can meet with community members in-person from time-to-time for traditional focus groups. We think these types of mixed mode research methods are great, and can help you coordinate them if you choose to work with us for your MROC.

It will depend on the plan that you select. If you choose the full-service package, you can spend as much or as little time as you want since PluggedIN will be taking care of everything for you. If you choose the managed self-service plan, we will take care of a lot of the “behind the scenes” work for you, but you will still be responsible for moderating each day/week and creating topics of interest for your community.

There are a variety of ways to measure success, but three good standards are cost, speed and action/results. First, did your community help you save money and eliminate costs in your research process that would have traditionally occurred if you did not have the community? Second, were your internal stakeholders able to make decisions faster than before directly as a result of having your community? Third, what kind of insights emerged and how exactly did those insights translate into corresponding action items? These are just a few things to use as a starting point on success measures for your MROC.

Yes. Communities can reduce or eliminate the need for conventional qualitative research methods like focus groups, although the ideal is to have a community as a supporting tool across all of your research.

This will depend on the vendor and how quickly you can get your internal teams together to discuss the initiative, but in general a community can be recruited, designed and launched in 3-6 weeks.

The cost for a MROC will vary widely according to a vendor. Early MROCs were expensive, often running $250,000 to $300,000 per year and taking significant resources to manage (both on the client and vendor side). With increased competition and recent technological efficiencies, communities can now be run for much less.