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| Measuring What Matters: Emotion Centric ExplorerCommunispace: Julie Wittes Schlack and Ed Chao At Communispace, we use an innovative methodology called Emotion Centric ExplorerTM. The methodology utilizes free association to enable participants to reflect, recognize, and describe their feelings without constraint or judgment. Like a freewheeling conversation with a psychotherapist, what participants choose to talk about, and how they talk about it, provide deep insights into their emotional state and underlying beliefs. By uncovering consumers’ underlying emotions, Emotion Centric Explorer provides invaluable understanding of a concept’s strengths and weaknesses.  | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| Invested: Engaging Hearts and Minds through Prediction MarketsCommunispace: Julie Wittes Schlack At Communispace, we have been actively exploring ways to incorporate some principles of “gamification” into the concept development, refinement, and testing that’s done in our private, online communities. We know from vast experience that when people are motivated to invest more in answering questions – when their hearts as well as minds are engaged in a task – the quality of their responses is likely to be better. And we hypothesized that a Prediction Market, in which participants invest points or play money in their predictions about which concepts are most likely to succeed in the market, would do just that. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| Think Outside the (E-Suggestion) Box: Co-Creation in Private Online CommunitiesCommunispace: Michael Jennings and Julie Wittes Schlack The paper outlines our approach to customer-driven ideation as an alternative to other co-creation and crowdsourcing strategies. We'll also illustrate our Informed Ideation methodology through a study we conducted to uncover unmet needs and generate consumer ideas within the home-office product category. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| Research Report: Does Community Membership Lead To Positive Bias?Communispace: Manila Austin In 2005, we designed a study to explore and address a common concern in the marketplace at the time: Namely, that online community members would become brand fans as a result of interacting with each other and sponsoring companies over time, and that, as brand fans, their feedback would be overly-positive, systematically skewed, and untrustworthy. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| The "64% Rule:" What Real Customer Engagement Looks LikeCommunispace: Julie Wittes Schlack This study of participation trends in 246 Communispace communities comprising 86,275 members, explores the variables that influence participation and customer engagement. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| 10 Best Practices for Managing Online CommunitiesCommunispace: Jen Adams, Siobhan Dullea, Andrea Evans, and Beth McCarthy Based on our collective experience, we’ve developed ten best practices for managing private, online communities. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| Beyond the "Other" Box: Giving Customers an Independent Voice in Your CommunityCommunispace: Katrina Lerman Acknowledging that customer conversations are beyond one's control can be both a difficult and liberating step for marketers. But over the course of recruiting and facilitating more than 250 small, private online communities for a wide range of clients, Communispace Corporation has long argued that organic conversations between customers provide companies with invaluable insight into their lives, needs, and concerns – and do so in a much less static and controlled fashion than traditional, one-way methods. Likewise, allowing customers to initiate dialogue both with each other and with the online community's sponsoring company is a more genuine and strategic form of brand involvement than limiting “customer control” to a one-time, closed-ended encounter like letting them choose from a list of flavors or package designs. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| Creating a Culture of ParticipationCommunispace: Manila Austin and Katrina Lerman Within the growing world of online customer communities, some endeavors are more successful and vibrant than others. We at Communispace wondered how the traditional notion of “survey fatigue” would translate to online communities, and if it might have an impact on which communities continue to thrive. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| The Fifth 'P' of Marketing: Participation—Size MattersCommunispace: Katrina Lerman and Manila Austin In this new era of "conversational marketing", the measure for engagement in a community isn't the number of people logging on. Rather, it's how actively people participate in the community. Original research from Communispace investigates and analyzes member participation in private online communities and demonstrates that size matters in generating high rates of customer engagement with a sponsoring company or brand. When a few hundred members are participating on a regular basis, the quantity and quality of the content is deeper and richer than from large public sites, with a dramatically more rewarding member experience. This study looks at participation along three dimensions: frequency-how often members contribute; volume-number of contributions made by each member; and the bystander or lurker rate-those who contribute vs those who observe. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| Size Matters: When Insight is the Goal, Small Communities Deliver Big ResultsCommunispace: Manila Austin, Michael Jennings, Julie Wittes Schlack, and Katrina Lerman As brand “communities” of all shapes and sizes become an expected element in the marketer’s toolkit, an increasingly urgent question is: How can companies use customer communities to the greatest effect?
When the goal is to achieve deep customer insight and relationship, smaller, private and branded communities are a more effective strategy than large, public ones. In this paper we demonstrate how smaller communities outperform larger ones in many respects crucial to this objective.
In a companion paper, “Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs in Small Communities: Why Size Matters,” we offer some insight into why small, private and branded communities are compelling—and necessary—for consumers and marketers alike. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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| Meeting Business Needs by Meeting Social Needs in Small Communities: Why Size MattersCommunispace: Julie Wittes Schlack, Michael Jennings, and Manila Austin This paper draws on the social science literature to present hypotheses about why smaller online communities fulfill individuals’ range of social needs, and in doing so, are more effective than large communities for gaining breakthrough customer insights and building long term relationships with customers. | DOWNLOAD PDF
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