Guest Post: Social Media Conference Part 2

Part 2 of my thoughts from the recent IIR Social Media/Communities conference, focused on how communities are being used by the corporate research function in place of, or in addition to, “traditional” methods.

As an aside, I used quotation marks above because the notion of “traditional” vs. “next generation” research was a commonplace at the conference. But it’s also an example of sloppy thinking in my opinion. There was no consistent definition of what “traditional” means, other than that it is somehow not quite as neat-o as “next generation” MR, a crude de-positioning which doesn’t exactly advance our art.

Most of the social media-based research examples were in addition to, rather than replacing, other methods research. A typical example was Paula Alexander (Burt’s Bees) remark that her community had replaced the $30K package tests they used to do, but otherwise was “another qualitative data point” in a suite of various methods of engaging with customers.

The only example of a near-wholesale replacement of other methods by communities was Dawn Lacallade from Solar Winds – and a fascinating case study it was. As a very young company whose customers are uniformly tech-savvy IT professionals, Solar Winds had the advantage of centering its corporate research function on communities from the beginning.

Solar Winds’ community (Thwack) is the centerpiece of most of its insight generation, though the company also recourses to surveys. Thwack is a large, active community and Dawn gave compelling examples of how they had been able to integrate community insights into product development to speed time-to-release and reduce costs.

Other themes I heard from multiple community managers:

• Long-term communities eventually resolve to around 90% non-active participants or “watchers”, 9% light contributors and 1% heavy contributors regardless of topic, country, etc. This may not be as bad as it sounds. By making participation easy you can use watchers to validate insights from heavier users. You can get light but direct feedback from light contributors, and have deep and direct engagement with heavy contributors.
• MR community results are immediate, whereas social media monitoring results are ruminative, should be sat on and considered despite their immediate availability. Nevertheless there are huge risks to treating community results as too immediate or quantifying them quickly, before they have been thought through by the community manager/researchers.
• If using a community for new product development, confidentiality issues are unavoidable. As Caroline Dietz of Dell remarked, any time you are testing a product you are taking a risk. You just have to accept that competitors are observing, and shame on you if they learn first. You also you need to have a mechanism to take ideas to a private forum for further iteration with engaged community members.
• Theo Downes-Le Guin