Vision Critical Podcasts - Transcripts

How can online communities fit into a corporate research plan?

Today we’re going around the block with Ellie Sykes VP of online communities.  My name is Caroline Hickton and we’re going to talk to Ellie about how an online community fits into your corporate research plan. Hi Ellie.

Ellie

Hi.

Caroline

Thanks for joining us again to talk and dive a little more deeper into online communities.  It’s an exciting topic and I’m glad to be able to rely on your expertise for sure. So maybe we could start.  For a researcher looking at possibly doing an online community and creating an online community how do they start when they have their annual corporate research plan in front of them?  How can they find ways to integrate it?

Ellie

So typically as an organization you’ll sit down and plan out for the year all things that you know for sure you’re going to do.  So, you might know that you have some concept testing that you have to do, some advertising pre-testing, maybe a little bit of ad tracking, probably something related to customer satisfaction and maybe a cross country road show of focus groups.  When you’re looking at that and finding that out, you’re trying to figure out how are we going to access these people how are we going to find them.  Really when you develop an Online Community and Online advisory group that’s your own, you have access to these people whenever you want.  So u can take all the things that you would typically do either in a focus group or in a survey or in a simulated environment that you might have built in your head office.  You can transfer all of those activities into the online environment.  We can build you a simulated store.  We can set you up with online discussion forums to learn all the qualitative things you need to know, we can set you up with surveying tools.  You can take all of those traditional things and build them into this tool. The other thing it enables you to do because you have access to these people on an ongoing basis is that you can reach out to  them then whenever you need to.  If for example you had a board meeting yesterday and a really big issue came up and you need to reach out to people right away to find out  what they think about it because it is going to impact the direction your company, you can do that the next day.  Sit down and design a survey, sit down and design some questions to interact with some people in a discussion form, launch it, and get feedback within a couple of days.  It’s no  longer the 4-6-8 week turnaround that you’re looking at if you’re going to launch a study.  The other thing is in an online environment there are a lot of things that you just can’t do in a regular study.  With our fusion tools, we really enable so many different things that would have never been able to be done before.  One more thing to add is that, when you’re interacting with people qualitatively and quantitatively in your community, it really is about building relationships and engagement on an ongoing basis and you understand these people on a very deep level and they know a lot about your business as well and they really become special advisors for you.

Caroline

Wow that really covers a lot of dif things from qual. and quant, it sounds great but as someone looking at it objectively, you know I kind of wonder if I can do everything as a researcher that’s in my plan online and do it faster, what’s the catch? What are some of the things that a researcher should look for, watch for, or be prepared for?

Ellie

That’s a great question.  We customize all of our communities for our clients.  So we have for example if you’re going to build a group of hockey fanatics then we make it look like an environment where hockey fanatics will want to interact with you, and that takes a little bit of time. You also have to reach out and find these people, so unless you have your own list, we have to develop a recruiting strategy that’s going to meet your needs and we have to go out and find these people so there is an upfront time investment.  And then on an ongoing basis just like regular research you need to have somebody on the client side who’s in control, who is managing the internal client needs and who’s _ with us to get the job done.  Anything and everything is possible, but it takes some financial investment it takes some time investment

Caroline

What if there are some people who don’t have that time investment or don’t have the resources or they have a small dept but still have those high expectations of doing the research, is there anything you can suggest for them on how to integrate it and still do what they need to do, and still go home at night and enjoy their evening or weekend?

Ellie

Vision Critical’s sister company is Angus Reid Strategies, and they are a full-service research consultant company with expertise across all verticals and with specific methodologies.  They are a great resource to call upon if you need to have somebody interact within your advisory group, within your community and to provide insights and inspirations back to you if you don’t’ have the time to manage it yourself.  They’re a fantastic resource to be able to work with, and because they’re our sister company, they have a deep knowledge of how our tools work.

Caroline

That’s great, thank you again Ellie, really appreciate the diving deeper into the online community. Hopefully this podcast will help other to see how this will fit with them. Thank you

You’re welcome.

Caroline

Just before you go, can you tell us a quick story with a brush of greatness that you’ve experienced.

Ellie

Sure, well living in Vancouver there are a lot of movies being filmed here, and a lot of TV shows.  I wish I could say I was at the Gap shopping and Arnold Schwarzenegger walked in, which happened to one of my girlfriends, but I don’t have quite that good of a story. My story is I was walking down Robson street one day and there was this guy in front of me wearing a leather jacket and I thought I recognized his hair from the back, crazy thing that always seems happens to me, and it turns out it was Eric Estrada.  I don’t know if you know who he is, but he was on CHIPS, which was a big cop show back in the 80s.

Well still that’s very exciting. Thank you so much ellie and if any listeners have any comments or questions our email is podcast@visioncritical.com.  I’m Caroline Hickton, and thanks for listening.