Once again you provide for a stimulating discussion. Right after I read your posting I received an invitation to “Join our Community & WIN!” from irewards (indigo books). I believe there could be good value for both contributors and the company alike however; the devil is in the details with these Online Communities.

It should be clear what the motivations are behind the Community. With the irewards it is clear. They want to sell me a selection of books that I choose, they want me to add content to their website with book reviews and they want me to recommend books to my friends so they in turn can market to them. They are trying to cultivate the “mavens” as coined by Malcolm Gladwell in “The Tipping Point”.

As a marketing professional hats off to them for a clever strategy and being clear about what they want to accomplish.

Where I get concerned about the “On-line Community” is the potential for confusion between passive marketing and market research.

For years market research was conducted over the phone. People were asked for their opinions on products and services on the basis they would not be sold anything and their responses would remain anonymous thus ensuring the feedback was unbiased as possible. It often relied on people’s good will and recognition that it somehow would benefit them with improved products and services down the road despite the possible presence of a small incentive to participate.

One of the side effects of a focus on certain products or services in market research was that respondents go away with an enhanced awareness, familiarity and even likeness for a product they never thought about before. However the holy grail of market research was you do not cross the boundary between a thirst for insights and helping you client directly sell its wares.

Enter the proliferation of telemarketing. Telemarketing is killing market research over the phone for a number of reasons. First it’s the majority of calls that a household will receive. With call display and “telezapping”, electronic dialing, necessary in both MR and telemarketing, go unanswered. You see 1 888 on call display and you don’t pick it up. Sure telemarketing has a right to exist; however, what really annoys me is the telemarketing call that is guised as a market research call. Hello we are from XXX (said really fast so as not to legible), I am not selling anything and would like to ask you a few questions about windows”. At the end you are either passed over to a supervisor to “verify” your answers or you get a call a few days later about “window replacement”.

Marketing research is moving on line. Respondents find it easier and more convenient to use. It is much less intrusive. Market researchers are finding it more accurate for a number of reasons plus they use different questioning techniques to provide more robust analysis for their clients. Market research firms have developed panels, however, these panels differ from the online communities described in your article, as the panel member knows that there individual responses are not shared and no one is going to market to them as a result of their involvement or the answers they provided to questions. The MR firms clients get unbiased results to make decisions and the respondents cooperate on basis their information remains anonymous.

If the motivation for getting you on a marketing panel is not clear and people find out that they are being sold instead of being involved in a market research project they will stop responding to all calls for on line involvement. If I am in an online community directly with a company (such as Indigo) I know that I am I am going to be marketed to. If I am in an on line community through a third party provider I need to know why I am being asked to join and what happens with my information.

Perhaps this new emerging industry needs a code of ethics or an association standard so as not to discredit on line involvement for all involved… consumers, on-line providers and MR firms?

I was thinking in some of this topics that you have described while reading the reply in your previous post. Are these communities the same? Is the same of studying rats in a “controlled ambient” or in a “natural one”? Are they going to do the same things?

Extrapolating the example of the rats, in my view it will be the same of a bunch of people consuming while other observe them, and they know that they are going to be observed, so they can act different. I’m not implying that this should or would happen always (to act different - not natural). First because we are always performing personages in our daily life. But it will be “natural”, or less “natural” when we know that we are going to be analyzed by what we are doing? Or it will be just another personage that you are performing during a set time?

I think that this topic raises again the old questions from naturalistic and non-naturalistic research. Participant observation x simple observation x ethnography x etc. To what point our presence (even virtual) is influencing the results, the field, the data, the informants…?