Results from an online community platform satisfaction study by Forum One have been making the rounds lately, and I thought I’d weigh in with a few thoughts I had as to how these results apply in selecting online research community platforms (since the study related more to all-purpose/marketing community platforms than research and insight communities specifically).

First, the not-so-surprising findings from the report:

• Chat is the least-used feature in these community platforms – In today’s time-strapped, fast-paced world, very few community members have time for real-time chats in communities, regardless of whether it is a “conventional” online community or an insight community.  While you can certainly corral them into the occasional chat session, most prefer the convenience of asynchronous discussions in a forum area, or direct messages from a moderator, to requests for real-time chat sessions.
• Multimedia Galleries follow chats as one of the least-used features in online communities – This also comes as no surprise.  While most audiences are comfortable sharing photos these days, many hesitate to take that next step into video on their own accord unless there is a clear benefit (read: incentive) to them creating and sharing a video with the community, and it’s simple for them to share.  I’ll caveat this by separating multimedia content shared in online communities from content shared in ad-hoc studies where members are recruited specifically to take video of a given task or subject (e.g., video ethnography or video chat groups).  In the latter, they are obviously going to share video since that is what they were specifically recruited (and paid) to do…
• Feature set of platform is the number one selection factor – This comes as no surprise, given that feature set is a unifying element that allows for easy comparison between platforms (for more thoughts on this, check out a previous post – “Online community platforms – the feature race is on“).  The UX geek in me wishes that something like “community member experience/user experience” or “ease of use” was on the list (and near the top)…

Now for some of the surprising findings (to me, at least):

• Surveys are the fourth most commonly used feature – Surveys and polls are fourth, which was even ahead of activity feeds.  In the context of marketing communities that do not have a research/insight focus, this is rather surprising.  I have seen studies where polls help increase engagement, but I didn’t expect them to be near the top of this list…
• Service and support by the vendor is in the middle of the list – Given much of the talk about how services are a critical element for many organizations embarking on online community initiatives, I was surprised to see this near the middle of the criteria.  I suppose part of it has to do with how this is more difficult to compare across vendors than the platform feature set…

I haven’t seen the full report, so I can only comment on what is in the summary post.  What do you think?  What (if anything) surprised you about this report?

-Matt