With community members available at your fingertips 24/7 (and a portion of your budget dedicated to a MROC), it can be tempting to want to launch as many topics relevant to internal customers as possible.  However, it's critical to balance moderated activities each day/week between topics relevant to your organization and topics relevant to the community members.

This may sound like a fairly obvious tip, but the temptation can be strong.  The risk is higher attrition rates among members, who become frustrated with the lack of attention to their needs and eventually leave.  

We recommend trying to keep a 2:1 ratio of company-relevant to member-relevant topics in order to ensure there is sustained interest from community members.  Otherwise, you'll end up spending more money and time constantly recruiting new members due to high attrition rates.

Just another tip from your friends at PluggedIN.  If you'd like more, check out our paper on "10 Tips for Creating Successful Online Research Communities."  Happy MROC'ing :-)

I promised to share some of our 10 Tips over the course of the next few weeks, so here’s one that we’ve found to be pretty valuable in our experience running market research online communities - “use it or lose it!”

Use it or lose it!

One of the most important factors in running an online research community is ensuring that you pace the activities each week and provide enough “content” for people to react to. As we’ve mentioned in other posts, the “content” of an online research community typically revolves around the ongoing research activities (discussions, surveys, etc…) that you’re presenting to your community. If you don’t provide enough (interesting) content for people to react to, then you’ll quickly find yourself losing the interest of members.

Our recommendation

We recommend a baseline of 3-4 research activities per week over the life of the online research community. That doesn’t mean that is all you can run. In fact, you’ll likely end up running many more activities than that. However, planning for a bare minimum in your facilitation plan ensures that you always have something going on, even if you don’t have the time that week to dedicate to new topics.

How do I know if I’ll use my research community enough?

Don’t worry too much if you can’t think of enough to cover off-hand. With the right amount of research planning you’ll find that you have more than enough to cover. Take a hard look at how much qualitative research you do now. Are you running focus groups on a fairly regular (monthly or bi-monthly) basis? Do you receive a lot of “ad hoc” requests for research? Chances are, you’ll have more than enough for people to react to.