Online marketing research methods and tools are on the rise and so is the demand for effective people to facilitate and moderate the studies that use them. Among these methods is conducting online market research online community (MROC) studies. MROCs are intended for asynchronous or long-term studies. MROCs are primarily utilized by market researchers and created with specific activities to better understand the consumers’ motivations, sentiments, buying habits, and interests through their responses over a period of time.

Looking for the right platform to build an online research community is a crucial market research move and so is getting the right person to tend to and look after that community. The online community manager will be responsible for managing all the obtained information, organizing all the activities, and making sure that there’s an active participant engagement within the community. This is why appointing the right person for this role is one of the essential elements of a great market research online community.

If you have considered becoming an online community manager, check these out and see if these are something that you already possess or if there are skills you should improve on:

• Objectivity

In order to connect with a company’s existing and potential consumers, you need to be a good listener to the community and you need to know how to look out for recurring patterns in their habits, opinions, and insights.  Look at all the obtained information objectively whether positive or negative because the key here is to make sense of all that data, be able to convert it into actionable insights, and ultimately help improve your client’s business. 

• Moderating skills

This skill involves striking a balance between trusting the community members to behave appropriately and keeping everything under control so nothing blows out of proportion. Your focus should be on obtaining data, encouraging community engagement and discussion, and making sure that instructions on all activities are clear in order to prevent confusion and misunderstandings from arising. You should also be able to utilize the chosen platform accordingly so participants can choose from a range of activities such as open-ended text responses, stimuli mark-ups, sort and rank tools, polls, etcetera and accomplish it with ease. There are instances wherein respondents wouldn’t tell you everything. Sometimes they will even fake it. This is why it’s important to just keep all the gathered information for further study on consumer behavior. 

• Organizational skills

Working as an online community manager for a market research project entails dealing with a number of activities to gain a variety of data. You are to manage multiple activities, communicate with community members, track feedback and make sure every important information is grouped together. Some online community managers use spreadsheets that they update daily to keep track of everything and make sure nothing goes amiss. 

• Strong Analytical Background

If you’re serious about the online community manager role, you have to embrace the analytics part of it as well. You need to know how to decipher data, be able to tell which data is needed and important and have an effective means of measuring it in order to determine what efforts are working and what isn’t. That’s why you need to be critical when it comes to tracking metrics, analytics, and KPIs. 

• Recruitment skills

Your research studies may run for a short period of time or a long period of time which means you are bound to lose participants along the way. In addition to that, this type of community will most likely have a more limited number of participants because of its requirements in demographics and the like.  That being said, recruitment is also an important attribute. 

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Choose a robust, engaging, and flexible online community platform for your bulletin board projects. ChatterBox is a powerful yet user-friendly platform that can enhance your asynchronous market research projects. Get more details about our online bulletin board solution so you can manage your online communities seamlessly.