One of the biggest initial decisions in setting up a market research online community is the appropriate size of the community. Unfortunately, there is no clear consensus among MROC vendors as to the “ideal” size of a research community. It’s likely the debate will never really be resolved, but I’ll do my best here to outline my position on why smaller communities are generally the best way to go…

Some MROC providers tend to recommend much smaller community sizes (on the order of 50-500 members). These companies contend that communities are a primarily qualitative methodology and therefore a smaller sample size is sufficient to get an idea of the range of potential answers/issues. Other MROC vendors tend to recommend larger communities, suggesting that they can be used for a variety of qual/quant applications.

At PluggedIN, we feel that smaller is generally better, with a few caveats… We tend to see communities as a “game changing” qualitative market research tool. Quant researchers have had their heyday with the innovative panel management tools that have been developed over the past few years. They already have the toolset to tap into an audience for quantitative research needs. In this sense, I completely agree with Brad Bortner’s (of Forrester Research) report on the segment (which can be purchased here ).

As I see it, the advantages of a smaller (defined here as 50-500 member) community are as follows:

• The ability to really get to know an audience - With a smaller community (especially on the order of 100-200 people), it is much easier to get to know the audience and learn about members. As a community moderator, I can say from experience it’s much better to really study a select group of people to get to know the segment rather than focus on how many responses you are receiving. I like to really get to know the audience when I’m digging for customer insights, and it helps when it’s a smaller group. This also makes it easier to understand the context for a given response to a research activity.
• Less tendency for social loafing - When community members know they are one of thousands, the tendency to sit back and let others do the real work can be strong. In a smaller community, people realize they need to pull their weight and that their individual contributions are more meaningful to the overall success of the community. That is important to have when your goal is to receive in-depth, insightful comments from the community.
• Ability to focus on the feedback - Imagine launching a discussion in a community with 2,000 members. I would guesstimate you would receive maybe 400 or so responses in a fairly active community. No one (including the moderator) is going to take the time to read through all 400 responses. Unfortunately, this means that the valuable “across the table” conversation tends to suffer. A better goal is to get around 40-50 individual responses to a discussion (and maybe even less!), which is far less overwhelming for both members and moderators, and leads to a higher quality discussion.
• The “exclusivity” element - Feeling like you are part of a select advisory community of 150 is “qualitatively” different than feeling like you are one of thousands selected to provide their opinion. That leads to members that are more committed to the overall goals of the research community.
• Quality over quantity - The tendency with a larger community is to focus on quantitative metrics for success of the community. When you focus on how many responses you got to a given activity, you’re missing the point entirely. The focus should be on the depth and quality of the insights emerging in the community.
• Dunbar’s number - I won’t go into too much depth here (I’ll leave that for a future post), but Dunbar’s number is based around the idea that people can’t make more than approximately 150 connections/relationships with other individuals before group cohesion starts to break down. More on this (rather complex) concept is outlined on Wikipedia here ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number ). The communities I’ve moderated around that size tend to be better than larger communities. Maybe I’m a bit biased though, knowing this principle beforehand
• Lower cost - Last, but not least for many research community buyers, is the cost of setting up a research community. At thousands of members who have been recruited specifically according to a pre-defined set of criteria, that can get expensive. Add to that the cost of incentivizing members (beyond a simple sweepstakes strategy), and you are talking “hard costs” for the community in the tens of thousands each month/year. That can get to be cumbersome when what you are really looking for is the output and qualitative research insights. As with any type of research, cost should ideally not be the final determining factor. However, it usually weighs fairly heavily into the upfront community design decisions.
  

To be fair, there are times when going with a larger community can make sense. One situation is when you have multiple segments to study and you don’t think it justifies setting up multiple communities. In these situations, it might make sense to combine segments in a single community and split them up once they have arrived. Another situation is when you want a hybrid of qualitative and quantitative feedback. Having the larger set of members to recruit from will likely result in the ability to run surveys more effectively.

Where I’ve seen companies go wrong is when they try to get the “best of both worlds,” by creating a large community for research and hoping that by virtue of size other marketing objectives will be solved. In my experience, that is not the most appropriate use of a market research online community.

PluggedIN has taken something of an “in between” position. We strongly recommend smaller communities for most applications, given many of the advantages I outlined above. However, there are times when a larger research community make sense. To that end, we created a Neighborhood community product that revolves around qualitative feedback, and a Nations product that revolves around a hybrid of qualitative and quantitative feedback (potentially with multiple segments).

If you’re looking into setting up your own research community, just be sure to carefully consider your objectives and how you intend to use the community before determining the appropriate size. The vendor you choose will likely help you make the appropriate determination.