Inside community: What is it and what are its advantages?

-Inside community: What is it and what are its advantages?

This article was written by: Jessica Cruz

Review and adaptation by: Ivan Casas

Is nothing new that traditional market research techniques are becoming less relevant and obsolete when we talk about consumer engagement. We just need to compare the time and experience of responding a traditional survey, for example, with the time that we spend in social networks through our smartphones participating and sharing opinions about subjects of interest.

Within this new scenario, the insertion of online communities with format or “look and feel” of a social network becomes critical for Market Research. An online community can be used to obtain insights, develop a relationship between brands and community members, listen, engage and promote dialogues with their consumers.

Online communities can deliver an informal setting that transforms market research in an organic, ludic and social experience. This helps in the collection of powerful insights and improvement in the relationship between brands and consumers.

Now, imagine that inside an online community you have “sub-communities” that can be exemplified as fan pages from Facebook. Let’s imagine, as well, that these fan pages can be customized and have contents and activities on a specific subject or subjects. It’s very probable that members of that “page” are people who are interested in the subject just like in a Facebook fan page and the level of engagement is higher than in a generic community. This concept already exists in our eCGlobal community. Those “pages” are called “inside communities”.

Inside communities are pages or sub communities that exist inside an online panel. Our inside communities have incentive programs that use gamification techniques and we can also offer full-service market research (planning, execution analysis and written reports) to obtain insights, making the decisions fast and precise.

One of the main advantages of having an inside community is cost reduction and the speed at which the research can be executed. By investing in an inside community over one year of research, for example, each study that you perform can cost you 3 or 4 times less that contracting 1 ad-hoc study. Additionally, you can execute the study at any time with little planning and obtain insights rapidly (in a matter of hours or days, depending on the study).

Inside communities are divide in three types. Public, Private and Enterprise. The public inside communities are open to any member (panelist) interested in participating on the specific theme of the community. The private inside community is not open to every member; we recruit members by invitation only based on specific profiles and the community is typically sponsored by one customer or brand who gives all the specifications on the profile of the users they want in the community and the look & feel of the online community.

In both the private and public inside communities, the participants need to be part of the parent community (eCGlobal) and they can navigate from one community to another one they have access without having to login again, just like with fan pages in Facebook. However, in the enterprise community this is not the case; members don’t need to be part of eCGlobal and if they want to navigate to another inside community from eCGlobal, they have to login since the enterprise community is hosted separately from other inside communities.

Do you want know more about inside communities? Do you have any questions or comments? We can help you! Contact: contact@ecmetrics.com

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