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Blog, Communities, Community Management

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5 Steps To Make Your MROC Rock!

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Market Research Online Communities (MROCs) are growing in popularity. And why not? They are versatile and allow for longer and deeper relationships with participants, giving researchers a glimpse into their lives and homes. But not every MROC rocks. These five simple steps from our London Managing Director, Job Muscroft, will help ensure that your MROC does.

You can also view Face’s MROCs to see how we do it.

Lego People

1) Have a Purpose

The best things in life and research start with a clear goal. To get your MROC off to the best possible start you need to be clear about what its role is in your organisation. Is it a rapid response test and learn environment where scale and data are key? Or a more creative place where collaboration and strategic thinking is required? Or both? A clear purpose will help you brief and select the right platform, sample and research partner to work with.

2) Give it an identity

We all need brands to help us navigate the world and the same is true within organisations and communities. Giving your MROC an identity will help to communicate its role within the company and will increase the likelihood of stakeholders engaging with it and crucially briefing the right kinds of projects. For community members it is even more important that they feel they have joined something they want to engage with for reasons beyond the transactional nature of the incentive. In short the right branding will help you gain the right buy in to the community.

3) Mix it up

When you are up and running with the community you must avoid the cardinal sin of taking the people on your community for granted. After the initial excitement of getting it launched this is easy to do – and it is also easy for people in your community to do the same and disengage if they are not stimulated. So how do you keep them engaged? Make sure you post regular missions is the first step – but don’t simply send them surveys, get them to take part in more reflective and creative tasks too. Members can bring their lives and ideas to you by uploading video diaries & images, sending SMS updates in real-time, or generating and rating ideas in forum threads. The key to keeping people engaged is to mix up the types of tasks and make it fun.

4) Bring it to life

The success of any research is judged by the value of the data and the strategic analysis that is provided to help clients make better decisions. This can sometimes be forgotten in the case of community research. Simply having access to a community is not enough for most organisations; stakeholders are busy people and need simple ways of engaging with projects and their findings.  Visualising data via a dashboard is a start, then getting clients into online groups and engaged in tasks really helps too. In reality it is crucial to produce regular easy-to-digest bulletins and nothing beats a great debrief to grab attention and share the value that MROC can produce. Research findings from MROC needs to be brought to life like any other research project if it is to gain traction in an organisation.

5) Feedback

People join MROC as they feel that companies want to listen to them and make their products and services better. It is crucial that this expectation is match by the experience members have when taking part in research. This makes the role of your MROC community manager very important indeed.  The community manager should set the tone of the community by being very open and responsive.  Dealing with questions and issues quickly and in a friendly style that builds trust and collaboration in the community. The Community managers’ job is made easier if clients are able to share some of the results or actions that result from MROC projects.

A commitment to giving quick, friendly and open feedback builds trust and leads to deeper relationship that will reduce churn and increase the quality and levels of engagement in MROC projects.

View our online communities here, or for more information here’s a guide to online community research that we presented at the University of Oxford Said Business School:

A Rough Guide to Online Research Communities and Community Management.
View more presentations from Face, the Co-Creation Agency

Blog, Future of Research, Innovation, Social Media

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The Researcher’s Role in Social Media Marketing

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In 2012 we are reaching a tipping point where marketing strategies are finally moving from traditional broadcast to content-led social media engagement. So the question I pose is, What role can researchers play in helping brands succeed in this brave new world?

Here are 3 areas where as an industry we can add real value to the new social marketing process:

Return on Engagement Specialists

The rules for this new model of marketing are still being written and this has led to a position where many digital agencies are still marking their own homework. With the larger investments being made in this space by brands, research agencies are well positioned to play the role of objective analytics partner. As researchers we should be offering clients advice on developing KPIs for their social media activity, helping them to design the right measurement framework, and making sure they select the right tools for social data collection. Beyond simple measurement, researchers also have the opportunity to help clients develop return-on-engagement models that demonstrate the link between behavioural data and the impact on the things that clients really want to measure, e.g. consumption.

Return on engagement
View more documents from Face, the Co-Creation Agency

Fanbase Analysts

Many companies are learning to listen to the conversations related to their brands and competitors. However, there’s more to social media research than tracking conversations by keywords. Brands are social entities. People establish connections with them (cognitive, emotional, functional) and these connections foster further connections to other people. As brands build audiences online, it is increasingly important to understand and map audiences and the content and passions that connect them. When brands understand their social audience they can design content and strategies to engage them more effectively. Research agencies will have an increasingly important role in helping brands segment their social media audiences and give strategic advice on strategies to engage them.

Mapping the Brand Graph: a study of the O2 audience on Twitter [UPDATED]
View more presentations from Face, the Co-Creation Agency

Content Co-creators

Generating content that people want to share is a difficult business for brands as the traditional advertising creative process is disconnected from the communities they want to engage with.

To create social ideas that have the potential to be loved and shared by people in communities it is important to involve them in the creative process. This is why co-creation as a methodology of developing and refining content will become increasingly common over the next few years. Involving consumers in the production and creative development of content via MROC and co-creation sessions is a process that plays to the strengths of community researchers and those planners with great facilitation and social media expertise.

MRS Brand Research Conference
View more presentations from Face, the Co-Creation Agency

Blog, Future of Research, Jobs@Face

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How to Land a Nextgen Market Research Role

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So you have heard that market research is changing and that the digital revolution is creating a wave of emerging roles that sound pretty interesting – so how do you land your dream next gen mrx role?

Woman being interviewed by a beast, all in Victorian era clothing

“Beast of a Job Interview, after Walter Crane”
By Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com on Flickr

Google yourself … see if you are easy to find, if you’re seriously hunting for a job you should be regularly checking and maintaining your online persona. It should be complete, relevant and consistent across different sites. A key tip here is not to talk just about what you’ve done on your profile…tell people where you want to be and specifically the type of mrx role you are looking for e.g. social media analyst.

Follow companies… do some homework and make a list of those companies that look like they could be a fit for your talents and make sure you engage with them in social media by following them on Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook etc. This will allow you to understand if the company culture is for you and more importantly will give you an insight into the type of thinking it produces. You can use this information when approach a company direct or of course when preparing for an interview.

Have a POV… what makes people stand out from the crowd when you meet them aside from personal chemistry, is those who have a point of view on the world. If you are serious about a nextgen job you should be engaging in debate around the mrx industry. There are lots of ways of doing this by attending conferences, via Linkedin groups, Twitter, or perhaps the ultimate expression is writing a blog where you can share your thoughts and start to create your own following. More engaged you become the more visible you will be as someone who people should take seriously and hire for an important role.

Showcase your skills… c.v.’s are fine and you should always prepare a concise and clear c.v one on no more than 2 sides of A4. A c.v. alone is not enough; you can stand out more by showcasing your work in a portfolio, showing the evidence of what you can do it much better than telling when it comes to landing a role.

Don’t be afraid to go direct… of course you should work with good recruitment agencies that have a network of MRX clients. However nothing beats going direct to a company and finding a way of working with them. It maybe that you can apply direct via their website or linkedin, but simply offering to intern or freelance can get you a foot in the door even when there is no job advertised. This really does work so don’t be afraid and give it a go!

Speaking of which… take a look at the current roles we are currently recruiting for at Face.

Blog, Co-Creation, Community Management, Future of Research

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Five Emerging Roles That Are Changing the Face of Market Research

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Following on from my last post – 2012 Resolutions for the Market Research Agencies – I wanted to talk more about how we make these resolutions a reality by creating new agency roles with distinctive new skills sets.

1. Technologist

The MRX Technologist is primarily responsible for keeping up to date with new digital trends and is able to help the agency develop and pilot new research methodologies. This may take the form of designing new platforms from scratch or being the lead decision maker when it comes to buying 3rd party software. Alongside innovation, the Technologist plays an increasingly important role on project teams where the research briefs are UX or Service Design orientated.

Skills: User Experience, Digital Project Management, Data Analytics

2. Community Manager

Communities are social places and need to be nurtured by people who are experts in digital communication. With the rise of MROC’s the fastest growing role in MRX agencies is that of the community manager. In fact, most of the problems associated with bad MROC research is when the agency does not have this person on the team. The Community Manager is responsible for setting the rules of the community, setting the tone of voice, making a personal connection with members and ultimately ensuring good quality engagement with the project. The Community Manager is also increasingly leading the way when it comes to applying game mechanics to research and is growing in influence when it comes to shaping research projects.

Skills: Copywriting, Video production, Project Management

3. Social Media Researcher

Real time social media monitoring is now commonplace but many companies are still struggling to interpret the data and use it to make strategic decisions. This knowledge gap is being filled by the Social Media Researcher who is responsible for developing strategic KPI frameworks for social media tracking programmes and harnesses social media data to help answer ad hoc brand, product and comms briefs. The Social Media Researcher is quickly becoming a very important role, as they are both an objective and strategic voice advising clients about the ROI of their growing digital spend.

Skills: Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, Social Media strategy

4. Co-creation Consultants

Companies are opening up and embracing more collaborative ways of working with third parties – including their consumers. Co-creation Consultants are responsible for the successful interaction between all parties on a project. Many of the touch points for this type of co-creation occur in workshop environments of one kind or another that require very skilled facilitation to get the best out of a wide variety of participants. Co-creation Consultants cover a wide range of disciplines, most often those from innovation, brand strategy and planning backgrounds.

Skills: Facilitation & improvisation, Planning, Qualitative Research

5. Big Data Scientists

We are living in the age of data, enabling companies to be more forward looking. Big Data Scientists are hot property in the research world as they are responsible for developing predictive data models & algrorithms using a wide range of data sources including dynamic social media data. Big Data Scientists primarily come from computer science, hard sciences, engineering and business backgrounds.

Skills: Mathmatics, Statistics, Computer programming

Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Insights, Trends

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2012 Resolutions for MR Agencies

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1. Learn how to tell better stories

We all know a good and engaging story when we hear it and our clients are no different! 2012 should be the year in which we take the art of MR storytelling seriously. Let’s ban the 100 slide reportage debrief and develop the skills of our teams to communicate findings in more engaging ways. Spend 10% more time on thinking about how we tell the story using imagery; video, graphics and customer voices will make a huge difference to the reputation of the MRX industry.

2. Ask less questions and listen more

As researchers we like asking questions. If we are totally honest, most of us think we know the answers before we run our surveys and are simply testing our hypotheses. Today, we live in the age of social media data – consumers globally are talking about every aspect of their lives 24/7. We no longer need to second guess and ask as many questions about what consumers think and feel with so much data available. We just need to develop the skills of our teams to listen and interpret more.

3. Stop using the word respondent

We have all done this. But is it not time to stop using this word to describe people who we work with in research projects. In 2012 we must encourage our teams to develop collaborative skills so that we can see consumers as people who we can co-create value with rather than as lab rats to carry out tests on.

4. Have more fun

The MRX industry has a pretty dull image and we need to ask ourselves why. A large part is because we need to try harder to be creative and have fun with our clients. We should be encouraging our teams to spend time experimenting, by piloting new ideas with clients. In a world where things are changing so fast, this is not only essential but fun.

5. Don’t just embrace change – drive change

Above all in 2012 I think there should be an acceptance amongst researchers that the pace of change we are seeing in technology is just going to speed up and that the old certainties of Quant and Qual research are over. It is only then that we can help shape the skills of our teams to adapt to the challenges of a world where so much data is available and where consumers expect to collaborate with brands.

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