Doron Meyassed – Director & Founder Promise Communities

Felix Koch – Consultancy Director Promise Communities

Social Media Research Conference – MRS

29th September, London

Drinking our own Kool-Aid: How 236 consumers have changed the way we run communities

What we will cover today About Promise and the research

5 things about co-creation we didn’t know

before we created our own community

Q&A

We are , a consumer-centric Insight, Innovation & Strategy consultancy.

In the last 4 years we have run over 48 online co-creation programs with participants from over 50 countries.

We thought it was time to create a community for ourselves…

We wanted to know:

1. What consumers love & hate about online co-creation

2. Why they take part

3. How they’d improve the experience

Promise

Community

Promise

Community

Participants joined us from 6 established Promise communities

1. Warm-Up 2. Status-Quo 3. Participation 4. Innovation 5. Closure

2 months, 5 phases, 20 official activities

The process

236 members generated 14,130 qualitative contributions (that’s about 11 comments every hour for 2 months)…

…in return for 60 hours moderation and one £8 Amazon voucher per participant (on average).

Source: Promise Research.

Community Panel

MROC Co-creation Community

A word of caution: participants were top contributors from co-creation communities

MROC Co-creation Community

A word of caution: participants were top contributors from co-creation communities

Community Panel

These consumers have developed more than a dozen new products & services

About Promise and the research

Q&A

5 things about co-creation we didn’t know

before we created our own community

1. Because I can

share my views & interact with

a brand or company.

Because I can interact with

others & meet like-minded

people. Because I receive

rewards

Source: Promise Research, unprompted responses, 394 data points in total.

Top 3 reasons why members participate in online co-creation

2. 3.

In social media we are often told to take the brand off the centre stage, to somehow hide it away – for co-creation this is the wrong thing to do.

To engage consumers, we need a barn that needs raising, we need the company as raison d’être of the community.

So what?

Unless confidentiality is a HUGE issue, don’t run un-branded communities.

1. Having a strong

impact on the decisions of the

brand or company.

2. Higher financial

rewards, rewards for quality

contributions.

3. More social status, peer recognition.

Source: Promise Research, unprompted responses, 378 data points in total.

Top 3 things that would make members contribute more

1 2 3 4 5

20

100

80

60

40

Impact Score (Quality & Quantity)

6 7 8 9 Rel

ativ

e, a

vera

ge

par

tici

pat

ion

Sco

res

X

X

X X X

X

In the past we found that level of feedback correlates with participation

Source: Promise Research based on 6 co-creation communities.

So what?

Provide regular feedback what the brand is doing (or not doing) with any results – it’s going to be the cheapest way to increase participation you got.

Source: Promise Research, Top 2 boxes, n=170.

feel that being part of the community has made them more creative and able to express themselves 38%

Top reasons why community members think communities make them more creative:

1. They have the platform tools to express themselves simply (audio, pictures, video)

2. Communities are longitudinal and allow them to develop skills and confidence over time

3. They feel safe and not being judged 4. The bar for ‘results’ has been lowered

Source: Promise Research, unprompted responses, 322 data points in total.

So what?

A community is an extremely powerful way of unlocking consumer creativity...

to unlock it provide tools, lower the bar, don’t judge and wait.

22% of community members

reported to feel close towards the host brand before joining the community.

This figure more than doubled after joining the community (49%)!

Source: Promise Research, n=170.

Cherish. Acknowledge. Use for co-creation.

Measure bias regularly. Refresh. Use for refinement and evaluation.

Less engaged community

members Usually no significant bias found in quarterly surveys

Fans

So what?

MR tells us to fight bias and exclude fans at all cost. Don’t - or else you will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Identify & cherish the brand fans and measure/refresh the rest.

Consumer Anthropologists: Up-skill community members and turn them from respondents into researchers.

Our members will become researchers themselves; we will skill them up in basic research techniques & encourage them to bring the world around them back onto the community

Community Teams: Divide community into small collaborative units that compete with each other over time.

And finally we didn’t know… HOW MUCH they dislike the term co-creation!

Thank you.