There are quite a few questions to ask before you consider launching a continuous market research online community, but of all of them here is the one we’ve found is the best indicator of long-term success:

Can your company’s culture support a continuous MROC?

This really boils down to the following questions:

• Do you have a constant need for customer feedback?  Is there a consistent (i.e., weekly) stream of questions that need to be answered and issues that need to be explored on an ongoing basis?  While one could argue that having a continuous community available will help generate steady demand for insight, it certainly doesn’t hurt if the demand is already there since that will form the basis of topics for the critical first 3-6 months of the community.
• Are people in your organization willing to take the voice of the customer to heart as they make decisions?  Without an environment of open listening and dialogue, it will be difficult to get the full value of an ongoing community initiative.  Again, establishing an insight community could represent a movement toward open dialogue, but changing deeply ingrained attitudes toward customer feedback can be a time consuming and difficult thing to do…

If you have questions as to whether or not you can satisfy these conditions for an ongoing community, then perhaps a pilot community or short-term MROC would be a good way to “test the waters” and start to get people excited about the prospect of having continuous customer feedback…