‘Synergizing natural & research communities’ nominated for ESOMAR Best Paper 2010-2011
“Towards a perfect synergy between listening into conversations on ‘natural’, and on ‘research’ communities”, that’s is the name of our paper nominated by ESOMAR for ‘Best Paper of 2010-2011’. Annelies Verhaeghe, Tom De Ruyck, Stephan Ludwig & Niels Schillewaert all from InSites Consulting worked on this in collaboration with Carel Vereijken, Danone Research, the Netherlands.
A small synopsis of the paper :
Research panels are under a lot of pressure: response rates are clearly in decline. It has never been harder to motivate people to participate in all different types of research. Thanks to the rise of social media, a whole new stream of consumer information became available. By using methods like ‘social media netnography’ in which online conversations and stories are observed, researchers can dig into this online source of textual and visual information to not only find the answer to research questions, but also to get answers on questions they did not ask. In this context, the dominance of interviewing as a research technique can be questioned.
Unfortunately, not all questions can be answered by observing online conversations as we always will have questions that need to be addressed through interviewing. How to ask these questions best? An authentic, interactive and engaging way to get connected with contemporary consumers are ‘research communities’: participants are brought together on an asynchronous discussion platform around a research topic of the groups common interest.
The fusion between listening into conversations on natural communities and asking questions on research communities will be illustrated by a study conducted together with DANONE Global R&D.
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