Online methods are transforming qualitative research – stretching the possibilities, challenging the boundaries – and increasingly being adopted by digital marketing agencies as well as traditional research companies. Its such a fast changing area that its hard to keep up, but some of the key questions researchers are asking are:
- Is it really quicker and cheaper to work online?
- What’s the value of online listening?
- Why is everyone building communities?
- What can you do online that you can’t do in person?
- How immersive research is changing the possibilities for engagement
- What is the leading edge in online research technology?
How do I know when to choose online?
Online expands the possibilities for qual, so its not always ‘how can I use online instead of face to face’? It’s ‘how can I use the right combination of methods to give me the answers I need?’ If your question is just about using online focus groups as opposed to in person, you will find that, despite the claims of many of the platform providers, you cannot do everything online. You may be surprised to find that you can do many visual exercises and projective techniques. Combined with the ‘online disinhibition effect’ and the immediacy you get, there is indeed potential for ‘candour’, as many US sellers claim. The dynamics and the relationships are not the same, so you have to think carefully about the type of information you need to elicit to make the project a success.
If your question is about the other methods, then there is so much you can do online that would be impossible in person, particularly in building longer term relationships (bulletin boards, communities), task-based immersive research that can both capture ‘moments of truth’ and allow respondents and researchers to reflect on them, ways of listening to spontaneously generated conversations (listening, netnography) and ways of collaborating with people online ( crowdsourcing, co-creation).
See my article on Research Live ‘ The Right Place, at the Right Time’
Quicker and Cheaper?
You still have to recruit, incentivise, prepare your questions and topics, moderate and supervise the fieldwork and analyse the results. Some online techniques can give much larger volumes of results than you are used to. So the big difference is in travel and venue. There are low cost ways of doing most things online (Skype, private social networks, free analytics tools), but they tend to be high effort since they are not designed for research. So its worth paying for a professionally designed platform to be the venue for your research. You get respondent management tools, multi-media for questions and answers, templates, routing, transcripts, and in some cases analysis tools. And the cost varies – its impossible to generalise.
Online can be much quicker. If you have invested in social media monitoring software or a community, results are fast. (Some vendors even talk ‘real time’). For everything else it depends on the type of relationship you want to build with respondents, the inputs and the analysis. Here its not necessarily quicker than doing the same in person – its just a whole lot more convenient and scalable. But most people use a mixture of the two, as each brings its own benefits to an understanding of the consumer.
As you will see, ethics and privacy issues keep arising with certain kinds of online research. The very definitions of what is public and what is private are being challenged by online behaviour. ESOMAR has released some Guidelines for Social Media Research and the MRS ones will follow in January 2012. However the whole privacy debate will become much larger in the coming years as many of the companies operating in the online research space are not members of a research organisation or are threatening to leave. Then it will be a matter for Data Protection and consumer groups, as Internet users increasing become aware of the extent to which they are tracked and their information is gathered and sold.
Quick definitions and links:
Social media ‘listening’ - the use of software to search and analyse social media, blogs, and other sources on the Internet, and to process terabytes of information into measures relevant to brands and organisations: typically sentiment analysis, trends, influences and influencers, and sub-sets of the ‘conversation’. More …..
Netnography – not even mentioned on the list below (it takes time) but can be a valuable in-depth and culturally-focused look at natural communities on the web. More….
Bulletin boards – asynchronous, can handle larger numbers of people who participate in their own time. Increasing called by much more sexy names such as ‘communities’ (not to be confused with really large and long MROCS), forums, blogging and co-creation platforms etc. This is where online starts going way outside the bounds of traditional qual research. More….
Online immersive research – using the technology of mobile, tablets and webcams to get consumers to capture ‘in the moment’ thoughts and experiences – and often something like a bulletin board to reflect on them afterwards. A fast growing sector, especially as in some countries people have better access to smartphones than to the Internet. Its ethnographic, but don’t imagine its the same as a traditional ethnographic approach. More….
Online focus groups – using an online session room as a venue, and largely being carried out via chat. They still have a role, especially for projects that don’t require as much analysis, and in international research. More….
MROCs (Market Research Online Communities) to distinguish them from all sorts of other communities that have different functions. Can be very large and very long, (and therefore very expensive) are very appealing to clients who have immediate access to tame customers, and also have a number of drawbacks. More……
Co-creation and Crowdsourcing. Growing out of the open source movement, crowdsourcing has gone in a number of directions, some very clearly for social benefit and others for private benefit. More….
It seems the guidelines will be needed, as there is growing interest from clients and researchers in these methods. The chart below is from a Green Book Industry Trends survey in Fall 2011; therefore US based, as you can see. While it might be possible to criticise this research on technicalities, the very clear message is that brands and organisations want really fast access to what consumers are saying about them spontaneously in social media – as well as captive audiences of their customers in online communities. Communities allow for fast polls, qual research, ongoing new product development, a client can ask a question one evening and have the answer the next day.
So the question is, where is ‘traditional research’ going to fit into all this? Increasingly digital specialists, text analytics developers, even community managers ARE NOT RESEARCHERS.
