Facebook is extremely popular among seventh graders.  The rules require an account holder to be at least 13 years of age.  However, some other parents apparently look the other way and allow their children to join before they officially become a teenager.

I consider myself lucky that my son doesn’t mind being Facebook friends with me.  This experience has been educational. 

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that teens treat online information with a much greater sense of irony and lightheartedness than adults.  It’s popular to create fan groups for ridiculous concepts in order to make friends laugh.  In addition, it’s extremely common to list friends as relatives.  In other words, one friend might be designated as your father, another as your cousin, etc.  It’s all a joke.  Isn’t that the kind of thing you would have used Facebook for at that age?  Of course you would have.

From a research perspective, the key lesson I draw from these observations is that we need to be vigilant not to look at teen social network data in the same way we look at similar information about adults.  Question everything from age, to family relationships, to interests.  If you look at it without the intended sense of irony, you will draw incorrect conclusions.

I’ve recently been experimenting with Foursquare, an increasingly popular service that enables you to “check-in” using a mobile phone at various physical locations such as restaurants and retail stores.  You can also use the service to leave tips for others about specific locales, like what the best dish is to order at your favorite restaurant.  Like any social application, Foursquare allows you to connect with friends who use the service, giving you real-time updates on your friends’ check-ins. 

As an early technology adopter, I’m having fun with Foursquare.  While as of yet it’s no Twitter, Foursquare is a cool way to connect, learn, and share information about the world socially using technology.  As the service increases in popularity, its content will certainly become more and more compelling.

Applications such as Foursquare that use the GPS feature in phones are increasingly common.  Messages sent through Google Buzz and Twitter have an optional location-specific GPS code which allows the placement of your message on a map.

The possibilities for GPS-enabled mobile applications are virtually endless. 

This begs the question, naturally, of how the market research industry can take advantage of this trend.  Could we work with application providers to recruit respondents?  This opens up the possibility of highly accurate geographic targeting.  It also gives us the ability to intercept respondents at the precise moment we need them.  Imagine serving a customer a mobile phone survey just when they check into a Starbucks.  There could also be interesting implications for B2B respondent recruitment.

Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

Following is the transcript of the interview.  The audio may be found at our podcast site, Podus Operandi.

Dana Stanley: Hey Tom, how are you?

Tom Anderson: Good, how are you?

DS: Good, thanks for taking the time to participate in this podcast.

TA: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

DS: Sure. Well, I wanted to, have some time with you because, you’re doing a lot of different things that I think are interesting to people out there in the research industry, and you’ve innovated in a number of ways. I wanted to get some time to ask you about that and let people consider some of the things that you’ve done.

TA: Great.

DS: So, Let me start out by asking you a little bit about your background and your company, Anderson Analytics.  It probably would be helpful for you to start out just kind of talking about how you got into research and talk a little bit about what Anderson Analytics does.

TA: Sure, I’ve been in market research for about 14 years or so. I started out with an internship at ACNielsen/BASES and then moved on to NFO, and in 2000, I had a chance to work for a dot com, so that’s where I first started getting into social media. Then, more recently, when I went back to grad school again I got into Data Mining and specifically Text Mining, and that’s why in 2005 I started Anderson Analytics as an online research firm: surveys, online discussion board focus groups, but also leveraging text information.

DS: What kind of academic study did you do in your graduate work?

TA: I did a Masters in Economics in Sweden, and there was an area studies component as well so I did my field work in China. And then an MBA at the University of Connecticut in Marketing Research and International Business.

DS: How did you get interested in Data Mining?

TA: I had a professor who was interested in the leading edge of Text Mining and Data Mining, and I, started working with him, and also SPSS.  After I was done I managed the Starwood account on behalf of TNS. And obviously, they had a lot of open ends, doing one million completes per year. Starwood wasn’t able to do much with the open ends at the corporate level, so I saw Text Mining as an obvious way to leverage that.

DS: So I think there are a lot of people out there that you know, have a general concept of what Data Mining is, but they really don’t know the first thing about how to do it, or I think more importantly how to think about what’s possible with it.  Can you give some examples of the ways that you’ve innovated with Data Mining and some things that you’ve done for clients?

TA: Yeah, I mean it really varies, from analyzing and segmentation is often a key area obviously, in many cases. We’ve done a lot of work with CRM data.  The client obviously collects a lot of data in doing business. So that’s usually a good step to start. Unfortunately, there are a lot of data silos, so trying to get marketing research to work more with direct marketing or CRM, loyalty etc., in leveraging multiple streams of data can be difficult. Obviously you can do a segmentation on just CRM data or you can do a segmentation just using survey data, but we’ve found the most powerful ones are the ones where we’re able to combine both of those. But for Data Mining you know, sometimes there are specific key objectives that you go in there with, and other times, it’s an exploratory to find out what trends you can find.  Data Mining is discovering patterns and so, when clients are able to or are willing to go in there, and this is the case with Text Data as well, there are certain things that we’re looking for, usually, and then there are other things that we discover that we weren’t really planning on.

DS: So how do you approach a set of data, you know, without getting too specific or certainly into anything proprietary, but how do you approach, essentially a mound of data when you come across it?

TA: Well, it again depends a lot on what kind of data it is and where it’s coming from and what the objectives are, and also whether it’s just quantitative data or text data it’s also rather different.  So for Text Mining, which we’ve been doing more and more of, we find that text data can come from a number of sources. Survey open ends are an obvious one, screen scraping, or blog mining etc. is another one. But we’ve analyzed, call center log data, emails, as well.  We’ve set up some best practices, in dealing with Text Mining, and part of that is the AA-Text [Anderson Analytics Text], basically validation through triangulation. So we’ve used a number of Text Mining softwares, not just what we call tactical Text Mining, which looks at what’s being discussed: verbatim concepts and sentiment, but also emotional content analysis software which looks at the words people choose to use, and that tells us something about their state of mind and their emotional needs.

DS: Well, that’s interesting. With the proliferation of web sites and companies not just having one web site, but having multiple sites, I imagine that’s a big source of data for you as well. You mentioned screen scraping?

TA: Yes, often a client will ask, ‘can you scrape the web for us and tell us what they’re saying about our brand?’ And I have to explain that nobody can do that, nobody can get everything. Facebook, for instance, is very valuable, they have a host of the more personal web. Google has everything that’s public, and Facebook has our personal conversations. But that’s [Facebook] a walled garden, so most of that data, or pretty much all of it, is not available for screen scraping.  So in our projects, we tell our clients that it’s much better to carefully scope out and understand what you’re going after, which sites are important.  In many cases you’d be surprised at the kinds of products that are being discussed and have discussion boards dedicated to them. Everything from knitting to guitars to obviously video games and cell phones. But in those cases where the client has a product that is not being discussed as much, then I advise them to, why not look at sites where their target demographic is active, screen scrape that and and understand what their customers are discussing, and what makes them tick, so that you can then incorporate that into your marketing?

DS: OK, so lets see, so you are quite active in social media, you’re involved in a number of things relating to the research industry, on Linkedin, and Twitter and whatnot, so I want to ask you about your approach to social media and some of your thoughts of how the research industry can benefit from participating in it.

TA: Yeah, I think there’s a big opportunity - in a study that Anderson Analytics does every year among senior level marketing executives of MENG, the Marketing Executives Networking Group - social media and social networking, blogging etc. came to the top this year in terms of buzz word trends they were frustrated and tired of hearing about. On the other hand though, we found that they also felt that they were very important, so the frustration lies in not understanding how to leverage that. I think the first step in understanding how to leverage it, is to understand which of your customers use it and how they use it and how.  You really need to understand social media and social networking in order to understand how to best leverage it for research as well. I view social media, Twitter, Blogging, Facebook etc…as concentric circles. You know there’s a certain percentage of the population that touches on all of those forums and then there are others that you reach on just one of those. I was an early adopter of LinkedIn, for personal business use, and from there on started using Facebook, and then started a blog, basically because we were doing blog mining and I wanted to understand it from the blogger’s perspective. I really had no, intention of blogging, I wasn’t a blog fan at all. Didn’t read any blogs at the time really, I didn’t think I could blog.   I started blogging a bit, and quickly noticed that we got four times the amount of traffic to the blog as we did to our web site, which had been around for, several years, and had advertising etc.  From there on, Twitter was a logical move because Twitter’s great for driving traffic to blogs. So I’ve talked to a lot of new media gurus like Seth Godin, and Guy Kawasaki, and adopted a lot of what they think, such as sharing information more openly. Not worrying so much about what’s proprietary etc., and Guy Kawasaki in terms of how he uses Twitter.

DS: What would you advise people who, are not early adopters, but who maybe have some of that sinking feeling that you mentioned the marketing executives having earlier, that this is something important, but I simply don’t have the time, maybe people are a little intimidated.  What would you advise people to do to kind of maybe babystep in and get involved?

TA: Well, I think the first step is just getting on one or two of these networks. I mean, for business Linkedin is critical. So I think that’s the best step, and then you know, for personal use, maybe Facebook. But you really start understanding it once you start using it. I’ve talked to social media managers at companies that haven’t, tried too many of these social networks. Whether you believe in a certain social network or not - not that you should try all of them, but I think you have an obligation if you are working in marketing, to at least give the three or four major ones a try.

DS: I suspect there are a lot of researchers who are increasingly being asked about these things or being asked to measure these things in their research.

TA: And I think at the, at the strategic level, a lot of executives think Facebook is something their children use, and that’s not something that adults or their customers use. Either they haven’t seen the statistics, with one in three Americans using social networks and 60% of the online population, or they haven’t obviously gotten on there, and they don’t know that the fastest growing demographic, on Facebook recently has been women over the age of 35.  Often children or daughters inviting them at first, ‘friending’ them, and then maybe deciding to ‘unfriend’ them, and then mom says ‘no, no, you’re keeping me on there so I can see what you’re talking about’. But also, beyond that, obviously boomers and the WW2 generation is getting on Facebook as well to keep in touch with their family and share pictures and so forth. Business networking, I think is moving a bit away from not just Linkedin, but is now also happening on Facebook. It’s nice to see the personal side of people you’re meeting with in business as well.

DS: Yeah.

TA: And I think there was some apprehension to that, do people need to see what I do in my personal life? But I think that’s evaporating. Huge social changes are coming. One thing we see for instance in our work with college students is that, whereas Linkedin tends to skew more male, Facebook skews more female and younger.  So I think, in the future, women are going to be more connected, or have a better networks than men and that’s obviously a change from, from the current status, which you can see by looking at Linkedin’s demographics.

DS:  Interesting, I think Facebook is an interesting case because I think a lot of people are confused about, well not confused, but maybe have mixed feelings about, as you mentioned mixing the personal and the business, but I have noticed an increasing number of people, I myself have more work contacts on Facebook, but I do have to say that whenever I put a link to my blog post up there, my mom is the first one to, to ‘like’ it.

TA: Yes…(chuckles) well, I mean, everybody has different viewpoints on social media, on social networks and different strategies, and who’s to say which strategy is right, but I’ve noticed my strategy on each of the networks has changed over time. How I used Linkedin, who I connected to and didn’t and Facebook as well. And you can see that probably by the number of connections people have on the various networks. But, there is no right or wrong way per se.

DS: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.  I want to ask you, you mentioned Linkedin several times and I did want to ask you about NextGen Market Research, which is your group on Linkedin. Tell us about that, and what’s behind it, what the philosophy is behind it, and what kind of things people can expect if they check it out?

TA: Well, a lot of the groups on Linkedin, and there are obviously many, and a few in market research. For most of these it has been pretty much all about growing the total number of members for each group. Pretty much from the outset, I thought it would be nice to be a bit more careful about who got into the NextGen Market Research group. So at first it was for US professionals who had 7+ years experience in marketing research, and I ended up easing up on those restrictions, but what I didn’t ease up on was trying to keep it about serious discussion. So in other words, people aren’t allowed to post promotional messages about their own company.  So I have to follow that rule myself as well on the board. But because we follow these rules, there’s much more discussion in this group I think than any of the other groups. A lot of the threads have 12, or 20 or more comments, so I get a lot of positive feedback about the group.  So it’s been a very interesting way to communicate with fellow market researchers. It’s something that none of the trade orgs really at the time were offering, now they all have various groups, but they aren’t as strict about moderating their groups as the NGMR group.

DS: So people can just go ahead and click on the group, then you have some sort of validation process?

TA: Yes, Now it’s invitation only, but either myself or sometimes my assistant helps me. But pretty much I try to read all the applications and if they at least fit one or the two requirements then they’ll get into the group. And there’s the board rules that are posted there, so that people know. Basically it’s best practices for discussion board groups, which have been around for quite a while, especially in the really good forums with good community.  But with Linkedin, there were a lot of salespeople getting on there just trying to drive traffic and had no idea of good discussion board protocols.

DS: Interesting, where do you see all this heading in the next few years in the research industry? You mentioned the associations are getting more involved. It seems like more and more people are getting involved in social networking, and yet there’s still a long way to go. There’s a lot more, there are a lot more people who aren’t involved.  What are your thoughts on the direction of, where we may be in a few years with all of this?

TA: Well, again there’s an opportunity here and hopefully marketing research will take it. I like to think of it as it’s as big as when the internet came along and marketing research was rather quick, especially in the US to migrate surveys to the online forum. We have another such opportunity now with social media and social networks to try to leverage this, if we don’t do it, then other areas, you know whatever you call it, business intelligence or other areas of marketing will do it alone their way. But I think market researchers can add tremendous value in terms of getting good actionable consumer insights. But social media does present a lot of challenges. Often market researchers still don’t have the budget to play and experiment on social networks.  Other than recruiting panelists from Facebook, how do we get all that link analysis and feedback. You know, one of the ways that we’ve experimented are Facebook applications. But we realize we have to sometimes piggyback with Marketing to get the budget, so maybe they have a dual purpose. But, we follow obviously the guidelines of ESOMAR and MRA and are clear about what will be used how. In a project we did last month for instance, it was a beta test, and we needed three thousand participants within three weeks to take part in this beta program and we had a limited budget so we used social media. The client didn’t feel the need to have a representative sample, and arguably, you don’t really know how your online panelists are recruited anyway, in many cases. And since they are going to be using social media to market these products that we tested for them anyway, it seemed logical to leverage social media for that. It was extremely successful, we did use a small group of online panelists as well so that we could measure to see what the results looked like, but that’s one of many ways obviously, or two of many ways you can leverage social networks.

DS: Yeah, there are really two strands if you think about it, there’s how researchers use social media for methodology and there’s also how they use it for their own marketing and connecting with other researchers as learning.  And I think that those are both undergoing an evolution.

TA: Right.

DS: So, Tom, if people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

TA: Best way, is to go to our site [http://www.andersonanalytics.com]. We have contact information there. They can email inquiries@andersonanalytics.com. Feel free to shoot us any questions.

DS: Excellent, well thank you very much, appreciate your time.

TA: Thank you Dana.

You can read my post at this link:

http://www.mra-net.org/perspective

Many thanks.

Following is the transcript of the interview.  The audio may be found at our podcast site, Podus Operandi.

Dana Stanley:  Hi Diane, how are you?

Diane Hessan:  I’m great, thanks.

DS:  Thanks for taking some time today, I appreciate it.

DH:  My pleasure.

DS:  I wanted to ask you about your company, Communispace, it’s a company that has gotten a lot of press, it operates in an area that’s very hot, market research online communities.  I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you got into this and let people know, who may have heard of Communispace, but might not know much about what you do.  Give an overview of what you are doing and how it is different.

DH:  Sure.  So, first of all, what we do.  Communispace, as I always say to people, Communispace does one thing, and we’re basically trying to do it better and better all the time.  That one thing is that we generate consumer insights via online communities and we do that right now for about 100 major brands.  What people don’t always know about us, is that we have been doing it for 10 years.  So, we jumped into this space when no one had heard of social networking or social media.  We didn’t know that is what it was, we were just interested in how the web, there was a great application of the web, which was to get people to have conversations with each other.  But we have been doing this for a long time, so we have built over 350 communities over the past ten years.  And in the process, learned a ton and also made a lot of mistakes.  The way we got into it, was that we were actually doing something completely different.  We started a company in 2000 with the intention to be a collaborative software application.  So we wanted to use the internet to help employees within companies share those practices with each other, give each other advice and insight and things like that and that’s how we started the company.  We raised venture capital based on that, and had some early clients like Sarah Lee and Chase Manhattan Bank, which was still Chase and not J.P. Morgan Chase at the time, and they were using our software for employee collaboration.  I will tell you that it was a very difficult business for us.  People were buying from us, they thought it sounded like a great idea, but in general, we had a terrible time getting people to use the software.  It just, at the time, was not a natural process for employees to go on to our communities to look to their colleagues for advice and insight.  And we, basically, it was a very competitive space, we were having a hard time helping clients get value from it, and as I say, we had a lucky day.  We were at Hallmark in Kansas City, and our client was about to launch an internal community for floor managers and basically had an idea that we might be able to do something even better if we created a space for their consumers.  And so, we basically built the company based on an idea from a client.  We went ahead and our first community in November of 2000, was the Hallmark Idea Exchange for Parents, which ended up being spectacularly successful and a real breakthrough for our client and that changed everything.  That was a community of moms who were there to help Hallmark innovate into the future and we tried that and it was on fire, and we’ve been working getting better at that ever since.

DS:  You referred to communities, how do communities in your mind differ from custom panels?

DH:  Basically, the primary difference to us between a community and a panel is that the holy grail of community is that the people in it have relationships not just with the brand but also with each other.  So, in a panel, the typical model is that you have a large group of target customers and essentially you are - you are sending a survey out to them and they fill it out and of course, if you are doing it online, you can do that fairly quickly, but there is not a lot of interaction with each other.  There are some panel applications now where you can have a bulletin board or things like that but it’s pretty much the client asking a question of consumers and getting the information back and usually those are surveys and pretty statistically significant quant-type stuff.  In a community, the people - there are profiles, everyone knows each other and usually, you’re not only in conversation with those customers, but they are coming back to you with ideas, and they are also having conversations with each other, which of course, if you are a market research junkie and you love listening to customers, the really fun stuff is to learn what customers are saying to each other that potentially you forgot to ask.  So that’s really the trick with the community is how do you build an environment in which people can build relationships and know each other and therefore, trust you and open up their lives and potentially share things with you that they might not share if it were a traditional survey or something like that.  Now, because the holy grail of community is this kind of intimacy and relationship building and interaction, usually communities have a lot more research functionality to them.  So, in our communities, you are not just able to do a survey or a bulletin board, but we’ve got lots of other really interesting tools, a brainstorming area, an area in which people can do chats or things like that.  An area where they can kind of document trends that they see going on.  Places for them to upload and create videos, photo galleries, things like that.  So everything is about getting the people to talk to each other, rather than to just to go one way to the client.

DS:  How much time do the respondents spend in a community on average?

DH:  Our numbers - well, the average for us is the average person will spend about 20 minutes per week.  That’s based on who the person is.  I’ll give you an example.  If you have a community and the average age is a baby boomer type age, which is mine.  We all, we go into the community, we’ll say gee, Tuesday is my day to go into the community, there are multiple activities for me there.  In our communities, basically, our clients are doing three projects every week.  So, about 150 different projects per year.  If it is an older population, they’ll go in once a week and do everything at once.  If it is a younger population, they are in the community, every day, sometimes only for a few minutes, they might do one thing, but the trick is with keeping younger people engaged, there has to be something new sitting there every day.  It’s about 20 minutes a week.

DS:  What do you say to those who might worry that interacting to this degree with a brand would influence people’s feelings about the brand and make it more positive over time.

DH:  Right —- positive bias.  Well, we’ve got, we’ve done about 18 different studies on positive bias.  So, let me first of all say, that what we’re trying to do in these communities is make the customer come to life, and things like that.  You would not use Communispace to do some really scientific, let’s make a multi-zillion dollar decision sort of thing, you wouldn’t use Communispace to forecast a market size.  You wouldn’t use it to do a segmentation study or something like that, so I am not trying to imply that everything you do is scientific.  We have done 18 parallel studies with various clients.  Taking a look at what our community members might say in a particular situation versus what a larger quant panel might do.  And in 17 of the 18 studies, the answer has been the same.  What we generally found when our Ph.D.’s look at it, that actually we don’t have positive bias, that over time, the members of our communities become slightly more critical.  Which is kind of interesting but, think about it Dana - if you and I don’t know each other that well, I might say to you ‘hey, how are you doing, you look great, blah, blah’, but if we are really close friends, I actually might say, ‘hey, you know, funny-looking hairdo’, or whatever else.  So as you build relationships, and what I am talking about here, is the relationship between consumers and the brand or the sponsoring company, because they do know what the company is.  They actually work a little harder and we find that people tend to be really critical when they need to be.

DS:  Ok, what is different about the way that you approach online communities relative to some of the other companies out there?

DH:  Well you know, I think there are a lot of companies that are now getting into this space.  For the first four or five years at Communispace we literally kind had everything to ourselves.  People would say, who else does this?  And we would say, well nobody else does it, you could obviously - there are other uses for your dollars or you could try something like a panel, different set of objectives.  Now, all of sudden, this space is exploding and lots of people are in there.  There is a recent Forester Wave that was done in the space where Forrester analyzes all the companies and I think right now people feel that what differentiates us the most is our model which is pretty much full service.  So the people who work with us tend to be large companies where they just don’t have the bandwidth to even think about building and operating the community on their own.  So, we have the ability to sell our software to a client and let them do everything but most of our clients don’t fall into that space.  So if you think about how to build a community, you’ve not only have to set up a site, but you have to do the planning and strategy for it, saying ‘what are we going to do, what is the long term plan?’, things like that - the community is great if it’s going on forever.  So you have to figure out the plan, you’ve got to figure out which target consumers you want in there, you have to figure out how to recruit them, screen them, bring them on board, make them happy, make them feel heard.  You’ve to know how to create and to facilitate all sorts of activities, you have to be able to analyze what they’re saying and report it out to the organization.  You have to figure out whether to give them appreciate gifts and how much.  There is a lot of, quote, best practice to this.  So if a client wants us to come in and just to the part where we build the community and they do everything else, we can certainly do that, but we’ve never had a client that has wanted us to do that.  So, we have a full service model.  The client has us do everything that I just mentioned, and then the role of the client is to drive the activities, to figure out which questions are really important and which research projects they want to do in the community, and then they’re also responsible, obviously, for kind of managing that within their organization, reporting the results out, making sure that everyone is listening, things like that.  But we do all of the heavy lifting, and each client usually has a team of three people that are doing that on an ongoing basis, and that team over time gets to learn about them and their issues and things like that.  I think that’s the main thing, is that we are just very – we’re very experienced at the service piece of this and we are great at engagement, we know how to get normal target consumers to come in and stay in and continue to participate and be engaged and to be willing to kind of open up their lives to clients.  So that’s a long way of saying, you know our experience over the past nine years is that although we put millions of dollars every year into our software, but this is not just about having good software. 

DS:  Do you license your software to marketing research consultants?

DH:  We have worked with some marketing research consultants who want to do that.  Again, when we work with market research companies, sometimes, very often what they’ll say to us is we want to do all the work and then eventually, it’s a huge amount of time and effort for them and it doesn’t mean that people don’t have the skill to do this, it is just, this is all we do, so we have gotten to be very good and very efficient about how you make all of this stuff happen.  But yes, we do work with market research companies, and we also work with a bunch of advertising agencies, so the planners and ad agencies.

DS:  How do you see online communities changing over time?

DH:  Well, right now, for us, I think the way our communities will change over time is, let me start all over again, ask me again Dana, sorry.

DS:  How do you see market research online communities changing over time?

DH:  I think there are a couple of areas.   First of all, technology is changing dramatically.  And so, over time for instance, whereas most of our members are now participating in these communities, sitting at their desktop, we are now experimenting with all kinds of ways for people to basically be on site giving us feedback.  So if we’ve an IT executive in a community, that person can be shopping at Best Buy and taking a picture of something and basically sending it back into the community and having the software authenticated, so people will be more mobile and therefore the opportunity to participate in the communities will be more mobile and there are all different kinds of technologies that we are experimenting now so we now have capability for community members to be able to do whiteboarding or collaging or all different sorts of storytelling that involves technology that we just didn’t have a couple of years ago; so that’s one.  A second one is that we are seeing communities become more global over time, so we do have clients from all over the world, but even in the US, lots of our communities have members from five, ten, fifteen, twenty different countries and I think that clients will start to use the communities to really help drive their global strategy so that is just kind of a content objective.  I think those are the two main things.  Communities will probably also be more integrated with other things that clients are doing.  So for instance, right now we’re working with a lot of market research firms who have big, huge quantitative panels and we’re kind of going back and forth with those firms as partners, so perhaps the panel supplier comes back, and there are all these interesting statistics but they don’t really understand the why behind the results, and maybe the slip into our community and we really explore the why or perhaps out of our community, we do a lot of stuff in the fuzzy front end of the innovation process, maybe there is a really interesting idea that comes out that then we might want to validate through some other method, so I think we will begin to integrate with many of the larger companies that have other sorts of tools that would do something we don’t do.

DS:  OK, one of the things I hear sometimes is market research providers that have some sort of panel technology or community technology say that they have said to clients, we can do what Communispace can do but we just charge a lot less.

DH:  LAUGHS.  I will tell you, if they do what we do and they charge a lot less, they’re probably losing a ton of money on it.  So, here is what I would say.  Number one, if they are charging a lot less, they are probably just kind of giving you the tool and not doing as much on the service end, so that would be one reason that a community would be less expensive.  I mean, when we are doing these, we are doing everything.  I think the second thing is the amount of work that gets done.  So sometimes, people will build a community and then they might do one or two projects a month.  What we are doing, it depends on the service level of the client, but for most of our clients, we’re doing somewhere between ten and fifteen projects per month, so the intensity of this is huge and that’s just doing everything and reporting out and things like that.  So, we usually kind of tell people to kind of take a look at apples to apples but what’s the service level and what’s is the level of activity, those would be the two things to compare.  So, I do think in our communities we are charging some significant money.  I’d say the average Communispace community is probably between $15,000 and $20,000 per month, but if you start dividing that up with how many projects you’re doing, we might be doing 12 projects, that could be the equivalent of 2-3 focus groups so people actually get a really fast payback on our communities and I think that’s why, even in tough times, we have got about a 90% client retention rate, it’s pretty easy actually, to prove the value.  So, if somebody says they are doing the same thing as we are, my bet is that they haven’t done it very much, or it’s not an apples to apples comparison, or they’re just losing their shirts.  LAUGH.

DS:  Ok, your community sizes, my understanding, tend to be 300-500 people?

DH:  Yes.

DS:  And what’s your philosophy around optimal community size?

DH:  Well, our communities are either really small or really large, depending on what your perspective is.  So, the main metric we use for our communities is not how many people are in the community.  The metric that we use is that how many people are actually participating, number one, and number two, if they are participating, how much work are they willing to do?  So you might say instead of 300-500 people, maybe you have a 5,000 person community but the question would be, of those 5,000, how many are actually participating and sometimes, they’re pretty small numbers.  And then secondly, if they are participating what are they doing?  Are they just willing to kind of do a quick survey for you or are they really willing to work hard?  So, in our communities, we’re getting participation rates, in many of our communities, of 70-80% of the members actually in there doing stuff, which is really high.  I mean, if you think about the world of communities, sometimes you only get 1% participation rates, we’re getting 70-80% participation and we are getting people who are willing to do incredible things for our clients and spend lots and lots of time - go mystery shopping, do field trips, make collages, do videos of their home, take pictures of their pantries and on and on, so that’s what we are really looking at, is the intimacy inherent in the communities that we have is you know what we call the holy grail of community, and that is our sweet spot.  Sometimes people call it netnography, but if you think about how much money companies would spend on an ethnography or a one-on-one interview or a focus group, or the like, we are able to take what they are doing there and really scale that experience and yet, very often have enough people responding where you can get some interesting quantitative data.  So, that’s the number that has really worked for us.  We have done smaller communities, and we’ve done much larger communities but the sweet spot tends to really work is 300-500.  Now remember, what we are looking for here Dana, is not necessarily statistical significance, what we’re looking for, is what we are trying to do for clients, is to try and get them real insight.  To generate things from the community that they have actually never heard before, or that might transform their perspective or that might help lead to a breakthrough in their business.  So if the goal is insight, then that is the number that works for us in our experience.

DS:  How do you get people to engage at such high levels?

DH:  Well there’s a lot of secret sauce and best practice.  Some of it is pretty obvious.  Think about it, if you’re a member of a community what would engage you?  Number one, people love feeling heard, and it is unbelievable what consumers or customers, we’ve done – we’ve got young guys, we’ve got baby boomers, we’ve got gastroenterologists, IT executives, financial planners, you name it, we’ve kind of got the whole gamut but all of those have one thing in common, it is just unbelievable what people will do for you if they really feel that you are listening.  If they really feel that they have a voice in what you’re doing moving forward.  And so, a lot of what we do is to work really hard on making sure that people know that what they’re saying matters.  There are other things that get people engaged; one is they start to build relationships with each other and so they come into the community and it feels like a place where they have relationships, where they have things in common, what we call social glue.  The third one is that we‘ve been able to directly track engagement to variety of activities.  And, by the way, people go to our website, we have a four person research team and all they do is study this stuff and the white papers are available on our website.  But, for instance, if you do a wide variety of activities and make in interesting, rather than just a bunch of surveys, we can get participation to go up.  So sometimes, we’ll have a client that just wants to do a lot of surveys in the community and we’ll demonstrate to them that by making things more interesting they’ll get participation to go up.  And then another thing that we do is refresh the membership.  If people aren’t participating, we will ultimately ask them to leave and bring some new people in.  So there are a lot of things but those are just a few examples.

DS:  I also wanted to ask you how you utilize social media.  You, as an individual, are an active user of social media, and my understanding is that Communispace uses social media as well.  Tell me about your philosophy around those tools.

DH:  Well, first of all, we think that what we do is social media.  It’s not social media as in ‘let’s get a whole bunch of people into a community’ and if you pretend to listen to them they will go out and buzz about you.  It is not that sort of thing, but for us, the fact that people are engaged in ongoing conversation and connection to each other and to a brand is basically that we are kind of market research meets social media, or what Forrester would say is that you look at social media and you divide it up by what the objective is and were the use of social media either for listening or the use of social media for what they call embracing, which means co-creation, involving your customers or consumers in innovation product development, things like that.  We also use a lot of social media tools.  So, depending on the objective, we might have our community members using Twitter and sending their tweets into the community.  Or, we used Facebook and lots of other kind of funky social media tools.  So, we’ve an innovation group called the Futures Team and the’re always looking at really interesting social media tools and processes that we can connect right into our communities.  And, it’s been a lot of fun to experiment with all of those.

DS:  OK, thanks for taking some time this afternoon, I appreciate it; it’s been very interesting and educational.

DH:  Well, my pleasure, thanks Dana.

DS:  OK, talk to you soon.



You can find the audio podcast of this interview here.

Dana Stanley:  Thanks for taking some time today, Kathryn.  It’s good to talk with you.

Kathryn Korostoff:  Thanks, it’s nice to meet you in person, finally.

DS:  I’m glad you could take some time because I think people will be pretty interested to hear about Research Rockstar.  So, tell us what Research Rockstar is.

KK:  Research Rockstar is an online training company dedicated to the field of market research.  Really, the essence of it is that there are a lot of people today, not necessarily even all full time market researchers, who really need to understand the best practices in conducting market research.  Now, obviously there are a lot of options for people today who want to learn about market research, but really most of them are in person.  I wanted to take it online to really make sure that market research training was very easy and simple and widely accessible.

DS:  What are the types of training that are available through your company?

KK: It’s all web-based, so basically somebody comes to our site and they can sign up for free membership, or if they want access to all of the classes, they can sign up for a VIP or higher level membership.  And then basically they log into their membership page, and they see a list of classes.  They just click and view.  It’s as easy as using YouTube.

DS:  And what kinds of companies are using your service now?

KK: Most of my clients right now are end-user folks.  So, not people who work at market research agencies.  Because honestly a lot of those people will send their staff to, say, Burke for more intensive training.  And there are definitely some topics that are definitely better to be trained on in person.  For example, I would never do focus group moderator training online.  I do believe that that’s a topic that really needs to be done in-person.  But for a lot of topics, the people I’m dealing with are folks that really just need a quick, easy introduction to a topic.  For example, a lot of the end-user folks who, maybe they have experience doing customer loyalty tracking, but have been tasked for the first time to do some product concept testing or some message testing.  So they’re knowledgeable about market research, but maybe not that particular topic.  Well, they can come on to the Research Rockstar website and in between 20 and 55 minutes watch an online class on the topic of interest.  So they’re getting the jargon, they are learning enough to be able to either write an RFP or get started on planning their research in-house.

DS:  What if they have follow-up questions?

KK:  Oh, we are definitely accessible.  In fact I get a lot of email dialogue, a lot of telephone dialogue going with customers.  Which is actually great because very often their questions will give me ideas for new classes.

DS:  What are some of your most popular classes?

KK:  Right now the ones that are most downloaded off the website are the customer satisfaction class, the message testing class, and one on how to hire market research agencies.  So, the one on how to hire market research agencies, I think is really interesting because that was really borne out of feedback I’ve gotten from a lot of end user folks who said you know, I’ve hired market research agencies before and it hasn’t always gone perfectly well.

DS:  I’m shocked!

[laughter]

KK:  Either they had a bad experience with the agency they hired or the process of getting everybody in their organization to buy-in what the project was about and then hiring an agency, reviewing the proposals ended up taking up so much longer than they expected.  You know, people these days, they think about—especially in the world of online research—‘oh we’re going to do online research, we can crank out in that out in a few weeks.’  But then, they forget that it can take two to three weeks just to hire an agency.  And so this class was actually was based on feedback from questions people are always giving me about how to write a market research RFP, how to hire an agency.  And so, in that class I give very practical guidance on, literally, how to define your objectives, how to define the scope of a project so you can write a great RFP.  You know, frankly, if you write a crappy RFP the proposals you get back aren’t going to be very helpful.  You’ll get a lot of people making different assumptions, you’ll get, you know, it’ll just be all over the place it will make comparing proposals and choosing proposals very hard.  But I provide some very specific guidelines on here’s what the RFP should look like, here’s what it should include, so you do get proposals back that are going to be very meaningful.  You can make a decision much more quickly.

DS:  You’ve also written a book.

KK:  Thank you, yes I have.  The book is actually on the same topic.  The topic is, the title of the book is “How To Hire and Manage Market Research Agencies” and it is available on Amazon, and I also have seven or eight reviews of it that are online now on Amazon.  And the book has been a real fun project for me because I love to write.  I’ve always written a lot of articles, I’ve always published a lot.  I’ve never done a book before, so it was fun to take a lot of my ideas and really get them down.  I guess not really so much on paper as on the computer keyboard, but it was a really great process. I enjoyed it.

DS:  Great, well, congratulations.  Now, what qualifies you to do this kind of training?  What’s your background?

KK:  Thank you.  I’m glad you asked.  I’m really glad you asked.  So, I’ve been doing market research for 25 years, and I’ve been on both sides.  I’ve been an in-house market researcher and I’ve also been on the agency side.  Early in my career I did market research in-house, including at Motorola, and we had a pretty nice-sized market research department there.  So, I really understood the pain of being an in-house researcher.  I understand the challenges people have.  You know, especially when you’re working in a company with a very diverse client, an in-house client base.  You know, if you’re doing market research on the client side, you’ve got a lot of clients internally you have to deal with, many of whom are not educated about market research.  In fact, some of my clients at Research Rockstar are market research managers who sign up for memberships because they want their in-house clients to watch the courses. 

DS:  Interesting.

KK:  So, because, I mean, how many times have you heard market research managers inside the client side complain, ‘Well I just spent $100,000 or $200,000 or more on a big study, and I couldn’t get my internal clients to use it?  It just collected dust.  It was just too much for them.’  Well, have them watch the 40 minute class on product concept testing so they understand why certain methods were used and what the pros and cons are of different methods, and what they can do with the research once it’s in.  So, I really do understand the client side issues since I did my time on that side.  Later, I ended up starting my own research agency, Sage Research, which I owned and operated for 13 years.  We were a full service market research agency, quant and qual targeting the high tech space.  So our clients were big high tech companies like Cisco and Hewlett Packard and British Telecom and other big techy sorts of companies, a lot of software companies.  Some tech companies that I can’t name because they have policies against that but I will say very large handset manufacturer and a very large both high-tech b-to-b and consumer electronics manufacturer and, in the course of Sage Research, I personally directed over 600 primary market research projects.  I have personally moderated hundreds of focus groups and personally done a lot of quant work, although in the later years of Sage, my staff wouldn’t let me touch SPSS because I wanted to program it in syntax and they all wanted to use the pull down menus.

DS:  That sounds like a great service.  With the cuts that so many companies are having, not just to their research function, but also their marketing function, I can imagine there is more demand than ever for this type of content.

KK:  Well it’s interesting, because online training as an industry is really booming.  I mean the statistics I have seen from many studies, and as you can imagine before I started a new business, I did extensive research, gathering all the information I could and the growth in the online training space is really phenomenal, and some industries have done a really great job of providing a wealth of information online.  In the market research world, there are a few organizations, I won’t name names, that have some online training, but if you actually look at the content, most of it is basically a webinar that was recorded and stored.  And that’s fine, that’s valuable content, but it’s different than actually planning a class from start to finish.  It’s a very different feel, so our classes at Research Rockstar are basically, it looks like an animated PowerPoint that’s fully narrated and has user controls, so you have a clickable table of contents.  So if you are on a slide that is on a topic that’s a little off point for you, you can click to another slide that looks like it would be more interesting.  And you also have user controls, you can stop, start, go faster, go slower, that sort of thing.  And when you are looking at a stored webinar, you are listening to questions that are being asked from audience members that may not be relevant to you.  Sometimes, frankly, in a webinar the speaker may be pontificating extensively on a particular subject that could be off point.  So it is a different quality of experience.  There really isn’t a great source up to now for online training in the market research space.

DS:  Great, and do you have plans to expand your content?

KK:  Absolutely, I am always getting great ideas from folks and of course, you and I are here at the MRA Conference in San Diego and I have gotten some really great suggestions from people here.  So right now, there are 12 courses that are available online.  There are three additional classes that will be available - that will be added by probably about three weeks.  They are all in process right now.  I am hoping to have 20 classes, total, by the end of 2009.

DS:  And do they all currently target end-users, or is there content for research companies, data collection companies, etc.?

KK:  That is a great question.  Well, what is interesting is I actually do have a couple of agency-side clients, and what they have done is they are using some of my content with their newer employees as a way to you know, maybe we are not going to necessarily send you to a $3,000 class on customer satisfaction training yet, but at least for this week, let’s have you take a 45 minute class online and at least get you the basics for now.  But I would love to do more topics that are more geared towards the agency-side folks.  Yeah, the thing is, I think that the agency-side folks, some of them do do their own in-house training for their staff.  What I am really interested in with the agencies is working with agencies who want to educate their customers.  So as an agency, somebody needs to run an agency, I know how challenging it is, when, for example, you get an RFP from a client that wants to do a big say market segmentation study.  But you can tell from their RFP that they don’t know anything about market segmentation.  It’s hard because, on one hand you want to educate them so they can get a better end product for themselves.  On the other hand, you know, it can almost a feel a little too salesy, too aggressive, if you try to educate them too much.  And obviously there is always the suspicion of yeah, you are ‘educating’ me so that I will buy from your agency and you know, are your motives pure and is the information I am getting pure?  So what I would like to say to those market research agencies is, ‘If you feel like you need to educate your clients, on the client side, so that they can be better customers, then you can point them to Research Rockstar and have them take the relevant class.’  Who used to have that old tag line, an educated consumer is our best customer.  Is that Syms?

DS:  I’m not sure, but it’s a good quote.  I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about one of my favorite subjects and one that I know that you are fond of which is social media. and you ‘re a big user of social media and Twitter in particular.  Share some of your thoughts about how you have used that to grow your business and what successes you may have had.

KK:  Yeah, I have - Twitter has been huge for me.  I just started in February of 2009 and here we are early November 2009, and I have over 800 followers and it’s all organic.

DS:  And for those who don’t use Twitter a lot, that’s a lot.

KK:  That’s a lot.  I think that makes me - I am in the top 10 of market research Twitterers, which astounded me and so, in terms of the number of followers.  Twitter has been great on two sides.  One is I have met some really great people like yourself on Twitter.  And sometimes, this has led to interesting joint ventures and joint opportunities.  For example, I met Jeffrey Henning of Vovici on Twitter and just a few weeks ago we ended up co-presenting a webinar on multi-lingual surveys.

DS:  Fabulous.

KK:  It was a great topic, it was something that I was really interested in.  He was doing the webinar anyway, and he met me and said ‘Oh, why don’t you co-present this with me, since it is a topic that you are knowledgeable about as well’ and it was a lot of fun.  So sometimes, it has been those sorts of ventures that have come out of it, and then, frankly, there have been some clients who have found me on Twitter, I can’t say a ton, but there have been some and actually, one in particular, who has become just a huge advocate for Research Rockstar and spreading word of mouth for us.  So there is a segmentation model there, I suppose.  People who are on Twitter, who become your customers, are more likely to advocate, I don’t know.  There’s something there that deserves some research.

DS:  It’s a testable proposition, I suppose.

KK:  I’m sure it is.  And then I also do a lot on LinkedIn.  I’m active on the various market research groups on LinkedIn, and I just try to use it as an opportunity to spread knowledge and best practices about market research, which is something I am really passionate about.  Just making sure people are doing market research in a way that is really responsible in terms of ethics and also really high quality in terms of the methodology choices.

DS:  Excellent, and if people want to get in touch with you, what is the best way?

KK:  Well, on Twitter, I am available as @researchrocks.  And of course my e-mail is just my name which is a long one, kkorostoff@researchrockstar.com.

DS:  Thanks very much for your time.

The audio of my interview with Eric can be found here.

My interview with Jen may be found by following this link. 

QpixlL Logo

QpixL’s tagline is “questions are more fun with pictures.”  From their website:  “Snap a pic and ask a question. Real time answers from your social network of friends.  Take a pic with your iPhone and ask a question. Question is published to your Facebook profile and displayed in your Facebook friends feed and/or sent to your Twitter followers for an answer. No registration. No Logon. Just quick answers.”

One picture, one question - open ended questions only - nothing precoded.

So what to ask?  Well, I recently grew a goatee for the first time, so I decided it would be fun to ask my Twitter followers and Facebook friends their opinions on my new look. 

QpixL surveys can only be launched from the iPhone, not the website.  I went ahead and downloaded the app.  Here it is on my phone (arrow added):  

Once I launched the application, I was given the opportunity to log in using my Facebook and Twitter accounts, which I promptly did:

As you can see from the screenshot above, QpixL gives users two ways to load a picture.  “Pics” allows you to select a photo already on your phone, while “Snap” gives you a chance to take a picture within the application (using iPhone’s camera).

I initially attempted to use the “Pics” option.  However, there were two problems.  First, I was not able to reformat the picture I selected, an option which is presented under the “Snap” option.  Second, and more importantly, when I posted my first question to Facebook and Twitter, my photo suddenly flipped left 90 degrees and I was pictured sideways!  I quickly deleted those links and tried again using “Snap.”

This time it worked.  Here’s how my question appeared on Twitter and Facebook:

Facebook:               

  Twitter:

Clicking the link brings you to a simple web-based interface.  On the iPhone it’s Safari; on a computer it’s whatever browser you’re using.  And they all pretty much look the same.  The respondent is presented with an interface for providing an answer, which looks like this: 

And now for the results!  I’ll let the first two answers I received speak for themselves:  

Obviously, QpixL is not going to be replacing fully interactive online surveys anytime soon.  But researchers should think creatively about using this and other innovative technologies to help their clients collect data.

One example:  I could see value in a company posting a QpixL survey to its corporate Facebook page and Twitter feed which garners quick qualitative feedback from a customer conference or a new product launch. 

By recommending these types of innovative methods, “traditional” market researchers not only help clients gather useful qualitative information, but also help them increase social media interaction with key constituencies and communicate that their opinions are valued.

And by the way, for the record, Queen’s Brian May is welcome to contact me at dana@operandigroup.com.  I’ll be waiting.

Full Service Research Company - Full service research companies primarily concern themselves with the design and analysis of the research. Most outsource the actual collection of the data. Very few have their own phone data collection capabilities. However, it’s increasingly common for full service researchers to program and host their own online surveys in-house while procuring their sample externally.

Online Sample Company - Until recently this category would have been labeled “Online Panel Company.” However, while panels have proliferated, other online sample sources have increased market share, most notably river sample (respondents sampled in real time from the web) and social network sample (respondents sampled from social networks). Most online sample companies’ primary business is providing sample, but the majority also offer online programming and hosting. Some have moved more toward a full service data collection model, coordinating offline data collection for clients as well.

Online Sample Broker – Online sample brokers have arisen to help navigate the dynamic and often confusing world of online sample. With new panels launching and old panels merging, with new ways of recruiting respondents emerging, and with constant client requests for hard-to-find samples, some have come to rely on brokers who don’t have their own sample sources but make it their business to keep up on sample availability and manage the sample acquisition process for clients. The online sample companies themselves are also involved in sample brokerage, with often substantial volumes of sample trading hands directly between companies who are in many ways directly competitive with one another.

Full Service Data Collection Company – These companies typically handle multiple data collection modes – online, phone, in-person and mail. They coordinate survey programming or production as well as all sample management. They also usually handle all crosstabulation, data file creation, and translations, which may or may not be outsourced.

Phone House – There are relatively speaking very few pure phone houses left; most have morphed into data collection companies offering both phone and online solutions. In most cases they procure sample for clients and produce data files and crosstabulations.

Online Programming Company – Some companies specialize in online survey programming and hosting. These companies tend to be involved in relatively complex studies and may have advanced capabilties to program in Flash and using other technologies.

Research Technology Provider - Some companies offer technology solutions such as online qualitative methods or digital fingerprinting. In most (but not all) cases they integrate with many different survey platforms but do not typically program and host the entire study.  Specialist providers of custom online panels fit into this category.

Survey Software Company - Survey software companies typically either host studies on their servers (possibly using an ASP model) or install their software on client servers so they can host studies themselves. This category includes the many DIY (do-it-yourself) online survey providers.

Data Processing House – These companies focus on crunching the data once the survey is closed. Many of the other types of companies on this list use these specialists to handle data file and crosstab creation. 

Translation House – As the name suggests, these companies focus on translating surveys into different languages.  For many online survey software packages the translator can enter the translation directly into the software.

Please share your feedback on this taxonomy. It’s a starting point but there’s plenty of room for more detail.