Oliver Conner
For most of the twentieth century, the people of the developed world spent most of their spare time watching TV. This, according to internet theorist Clay Shirky, was a big waste of our planets cognitive surplus.
The cognitive surplus refers to the free time that has been afforded to us through the development of our post-industrialised world. Rising educational attainment, increased GDP and longer lifespans led to an abundance of intellect, energy and time – a cognitive surplus that craved a conduit.
When TV was the conduit, it created very little in the way of progress. We became unhappy, materially obsessed and anxious. Luckily, the digital revolution is beginning to change all that, and we are witnessing the emergence of a new online participatory culture.
Take, for example, Wikipedia – the example par excellence of what can be accomplished by redirecting the cognitive surplus. It was built on roughly one percent of the man hours that the US spends watching TV every year. And that is just the tip of the iceberg of possibility for online collaboration.
This short history provides an illuminating context for understanding the rise of the community based approach to research. As researchers, a large part of our job is encouraging people to spend their personal cognitive surplus with us and the clients that we work with.
Luckily for us researchers, and thanks to a certain Mark Zuckerberg, we are now at the stage where we have a massive population of people who have become expert at communicating online.
People of all ages are adept at using online communication tools, and we are seeing new shared languages emerge online. People use emoticons to express how they feel, they use frequent misspellings and abbreviations, and hashtags are assigned to create a shared reference point to a new concept or event.
So, now that the recent GRIT report suggests that market research online communities (MROC’s) are the fastest growing of all new approaches to research, and it is expected that they will come to account for 15-25% of all research spend, the question is – how do we engage respondents online and create effective research?
Community management
Online communities come in all shapes and sizes and are used for any number of purposes. Some last a short period of time and have quite narrow and focused objectives; others carry on indefinitely, picking up new functions as they mature.
Many of the early online communities evolved around the open-source software movement. Therefore, many of the first online community managers were computer programmers. This is great because it means that the community building process has been documented with a similar level of detail that you would find in a programming language.
Of course, all communities are different, and each community will be based on a client’s unique business needs. But in the same way that all the different websites we see on the net are built on the same programming language, all communities are built using the same rules and processes.
The keeper of this knowledge is the online community manager – a curious and multi-disciplinary job role that is reshaping the field of online research. The role requires a psychological insight into behaviour, a sociological understanding of group dynamics, a web developer’s understanding of web architecture, a marketer’s approach to recruitment and a journalist’s skill in copywriting. And of course, there are the skills of moderation and question design that you would expect from a market researcher.
It is the community managers role to define business objectives, conduct all the necessary research, recruit and engage with the members, keep things buzzing, get the stakeholders involved and provide the analysis and reporting that the company needs.
Researching and researching
The reason that community management falls so nicely under the researchers remit is because any thriving and successful community must be built on a foundation of solid research.
Research is needed to establish the design of the community from the outset and should inform every step of the community development process. This will involve establishing the demographics, psychographics and habits of your audience through a series of depth interviews, surveys or any other methods that you find applicable.
It is only through the acquiring of well researched information that you can conceptualise your online community, and ensure that it stays relevant and engaging to your target audience.
You should not approach an online community with a rigid methodological mind, it needs to be open to creative development, innovative and allowed to organically expand your objectives. However, no amount of processes, research or methods can help you if you haven’t got the one vital ingredient – interest.
For any successful community there needs to be a shared common interest that a group of people share and can form relationships around. This will ensure that you are providing an intrinsic motivation for people to become a part of your community, as opposed to, say, paying them and basing your community on extrinsic motivations.
The platform error
Quite often people begin thinking about their community in terms of platform – focusing on the website that they are going to build and launch. In my experience, the platform is one of the last things you need to be concerned about.
Your target audience might be more comfortable communicating on Twitter or via an email list than through a feature rich community website. It is important to research exactly how your audience are accustomed to communicating before you begin to think about platform design and functionality.
When you do approach platform build there are a range of options that you should consider. Before designing a website from the ground up or paying a large monthly fee for a propriety system, you should explore the potential of open source frameworks like Drupal.
As the world of web design coevolves with community functionality, open source frameworks like Drupal continue to provide a lot of the functionality you need ‘out-of-the-box’. Anyone with a slightly technical mind can deploy a decent website with community functionality without learning any coding in a matter of days.
Of course, the real goal of any platform is to make it invisible. Always sacrifice superfluous functionality for improved user experience.
You don’t need fancy tools and sophisticated platforms to build a community. Spend this time more productively by writing invitations and researching the kind of people you want to get involved.
A platform for the future
In the world of big data, online communities are a more intimate method of obtaining insight in a way that other methods, such as social listening, can’t.
For a brand, creative agency, research organisation or any other type of company, a well-managed community can help with ideation projects, keeping in touch with your customers, spotting trends, conducting longitudinal studies, exploring attitudes, testing campaigns, generating concepts in real time and more.
Aside from the research function, a community can help reduce marketing costs, enable more effective advertising, increase customer loyalty, provide recruiting opportunities, improve customer service and open up new revenue opportunities.
Any organisation that has community enabled collaboration right at its core will undoubtedly begin to transform itself. And as long as the platform is built to grow then it will be able to embrace the potential of any new social network from the many that are set to emerge on the digital landscape.
Just like the new and wonderful ways we will find to direct our cognitive surplus, the most innovative stages in online community management are yet to come – exciting times!
Oliver Conner is Head of Innovation at OnePoll
1 comment
I enjoyed reading this and made me think about a few things. If you are going to build your community or tribe, what in your opinion are the best ways to go about obtaining those followers?
Obviously, going to the places online of massive authority in specific niches and reaching out to those authority figures and providing value would be the first step. But in your experience, so it doesn’t sound like you are trying to steal their followers, would be the ideal way to build your own following?
With the advent of facebook pages and groups, the platforms can be easily setup with little to no cost. And like you mentioned, open source software like drupal and wordpress can be utilised to create a separate presence that one can control and not be at the mercy of the social media giants.
You got me thinking.