Just kidding    But now that I have your attention…

The title of this post refers to a recent request we received to build two 120 minute-long online research communities.  By no means is this post a criticism of this individual and their request (they acknowledged they were in a pinch and had no time at all to research the methodology – their client had merely asked for a community).  Of course, they were really looking for an online focus group so I suggested the names of a few vendors they could contact.  However, the conversation got me thinking…

Are we all hyping communities to death?

Calls like these make me worry that people are just looking for the word “community” in anything that they do because it’s the hot new thing, and aren’t stopping to think about what a community actually is, how the approach should be applied and what it’s good for (and not so good for).  Don’t get me wrong – companies like PluggedIN have benefited quite a bit from all the attention given to communities the past few years so I’m not complaining, but having so much hype and confusion around the term isn’t good for anyone in the long-term.

I have a feeling the dust will settle eventually, but I worry about companies that end up with a bad taste for “communities” when in practice what they’re really getting is what most qualitative market researchers would call an online focus group or bulletin board.

What is an online research community?

Of course, this also brings up the broader question of what a research community is, and that’s where things get a bit trickier…  Going back a few years to Forrester’s report “Will Web 2.0 Transform Market Research,” a MROC is defined as “captive interactive groups of people online joined together by a common interest, which are systematically harvested for qualitative market research purposes.”  Nothing in this definition explicitly states duration or size of the community, so I guess with a definition this broad an OLFG could be considered a form of MROC.

Jeffrey Henning (@jhenning) of Vovici put together a helpful chart with the variations of online research communities (“Online Research Communities by Type”) according to whether they are temporary/permanent and open/closed.  The chart includes OLFGs, although Jeffrey acknowledges in the comments that he de-emphasized them on purpose…

My take on it…

Having been involved in many OLFG, BBFGs, short-term MROCs and continuous MROCs over the years, I can only appeal to personal experience running each.  I can say “qualitatively” that even a short-term MROC (which I’m defining here as at least one month) has a very different feel (and value) than something that is a few hours or days long (like an OLFG or BBFG), but that’s just my experience…

What’s your take?

Is the buzz around communities going to help or hurt in the long run?  How do you define a research community (or insight community, market research online community, online research community or whatever you prefer to call it)?