short-term research communities

Tight timeline? Tight budget? All in a day’s work.

In the age of Facebook, we see what our friends have been up to, reply to what they’re saying, look at their photos and videos, and follow their lives through online communities. This is also the most natural way to develop deep consumer insights today.

By combining photos, video, webcams, and text posts amazing things can be accomplished. A concept can be posted to a community in the morning, commented on from all over, refined and re-posted, and finalized by the next day. Consumers can show us their homes, families, neighborhoods, shopping trips and cooking routines by posting videos to a community. Consumers can engage in discussion as they watch each others’ videos. And, more can be learned from ethnography in two days than two weeks in the real world.

If you’ve been to a conference in the last year or two you probably know all that. What you may not know is that you don’t need a big budget or a large proprietary customer community to benefit from the online community research revolution.

A small community of the early adopters of your new product might be the most cost-effective way to understand how it’s faring in the marketplace. Maybe a community recruited from your most passionate users is the key to how to expand your brand. Could you understand your competitive position better from interacting for a few weeks with your principal competitor’s customer base?