Over the coming months we are going to be taking an indepth look at the world of research communities and what lies behind them. Every week we’ll be touching on a new subject, topics will range from management to task conception, online creativity to relationships. Ultimately we are hoping to produce an in-depth, robust and infomative guide to online research commnunities; Face’s very own Community Management 101.

With online communities becoming increasingly popular in research circles and brands continuing to transfer their qualitative work online, the role of research communities, community managers and research teams is evolving.

As community functionality grows and new tools become available it’s very easy for clients and research teams to get carried away and throw everything at communities using all tools to the max, just because they can.

In this series of blogs we are going to explore the best routes for community managers and research teams to effectively use online community tools and create an interesting environment in which users can complete research tasks without pressure, tedium or stress.

And it is this I am going to start with, the environment; the website; the research tool; and whether you can actually, credibly, call it a community.

Are Research Communities Really Communities?

Research communities have always come under criticism for using the term ‘community’. Some people see them as forced gatherings using a research tool, rather than true natural communities and are therefore undeserving of the name. Some of the arguments against research ‘communities’ include:

• They are not organic
• People are usually incentivized to participate
• It is not a part of users natural internet journey
• They have start and end dates
• The community disappears when the project ends

To a certain extent I can understand these criticisms as, from an outside point of view, research communities must seem like a load of panel girls and boys being put on a website and told to complete tasks for a certain period of time.

However, I am a believer that at the core of every community there has to be a common goal, interest and/or belief, something that inherently binds the people within together. It is for this reason that I believe that research ‘communities’ can actually exist, rather than just being a couple of words shoved together to make a cool sounding buzzphrase.

It’s a fine line between research community and a website where research takes place. There are a couple of things you must do at the start of a project to ensure you start user engagement and interaction early.

Creating Your Community

If you bring together a group of people for a research project they automatically have unspoken commonalities before the activity begins. Usually in research projects people are recruited as they share similar demographics, opinions or personality traits. These instant similarities are one of the two main things you need to rely on to begin the transition from research project to research community.

The other reliance is you, the community manager, it’s your job to take the lead and encourage community behaviour. Initially by stating the commonalities between users and encouraging them to interact through tasks based around similarities.

It is these early tasks, and their wording, that will ultimately determine whether you are the facilitator of an online tool or the manager of an online community.

The wording and crafting of tasks is the most important thing when running a community as it not only ascertains your research outputs but also determines how your users will engage and for how long. Being able to create research tasks that are fun and exciting is a vital skill when running a community and it is this skill that I will begin to explore in my next post:

Writing Tasks for Research Communities – Part 2: What is a Task?

Coming Soon!