Here are 5 ways to think about the success of an online research community:

1. Progress & Level of Understanding

Did the research community deliver on the objectives you were trying to achieve? What did you learn about your customers? What did your customers share over the life of the community and would this have been possible without the community venue?

2. Replacement or Supplement

Were you able to effectively use the community venue to supplement, refine, or replace some of your non-community research needs over time? How much cost savings did you realize as a result?

3. Internal Stakeholder Satisfaction

How do your internal teams and stakeholders feel about the output from your community research? Did it give them access to insights and ideas to help them be more effective -  compared to the other types of research?  Did having this ongoing venue make you more efficient and speed up product/research cycles internally?

4. Cost/Benefit

Thinking about the output from your community, could you have found this information through another research method? If you were to try to get the information somewhere else, how much time and money would it have required?

5. Affinity & Loyalty

How do your customers feel as a result of participating in this research? Do they feel differently about your brand and the direction of your organization? What are some ways you can use community tools with a wider group of customers in the future?

Is it possible that a research community can influence future purchase decisions and loyalty to the organization sponsoring the community?  It's likely... 

A 2002 study for the Harvard Business Review by Paul Dholakia and Vicki Morwitz suggested that merely running a single customer satisfaction survey had an impact on customer decision making and loyalty.  If this is the case with a single survey, what impact could an ongoing research community have on customer satisfaction and loyalty, given that customers are contributing their feedback daily or weekly basis?

While we've never studied this specifically, our own observations of member feedback and behavior suggests that an online research community positively impacts the perceptions of members toward the sponsoring organization.  (I should note here that we are always careful to temper this potentially positive disposition with unbiased and carefully constructed questions, as this is our role as independent community managers and researchers). 

The ethical dilemma

Is this ethical?  We've blogged before about why it is wise to completely separate research objectives from marketing objectives, and have suggested that this a main reason many online research communities remain separate from other online community and social media initiatives. 

One should always avoid "sugging" (selling under the guise of research) at all costs.  The temptation to market in an online research community can be avoided with independent moderation from an outside research organization and a carefully designed facilitation plan.  

That said, this potential impact on satisfaction can be a useful tool if you're a researcher trying to convince a skeptical marketing or sales team to contribute customer sample for a research community (as we've seen happen before), or working with a CMO to convince them to open the budget up for a private research community.   

The takeaway...

Is this reason alone to setup a research community?  Absolutely not.  There are many benefits to an online research community that go far beyond the potential impact it can have on customer satisfaction, purchase decisions and loyalty.  

Companies should be listening to their customers all the time anyway with the more "altruistic" motives in mind (e.g., a geniune desire to improve products and customer experiences).  In my (humble and somewhat biased) opinion, the potential impact of ongoing monitoring of customer feedback goes far beyond the enhanced loyalty of a handful of targeted customers...