On-line virtual communities (social media)
One mechanism for keeping in touch with your customers and allowing your customers to keep in touch with each other to gain insights such as best practice, or to solve each other's problems is to build virtual communities on-line or to link in to or listen (read) into social media such as Facebook or Linked-in.
Used effectively they can be an excellent way of building dialogue with customers from a marketing point of view and a source of ideas and feedback. But also, it should be remembered, are a means of communication in their own right and so need some form or PR-type management. Notanant is an example of a generalised virtual communities or social networking system that we created.
It seems bizarre now, with everyone connected to some form of social network, but this page was talking about 'virtual communities' several years before the arrival of Facebook or LinkedIn. Now it seems something obvious that market research must work with social media and can build it's own virtual communities and that the business has to interact and work with these new groups. We describe a virtual community as a group of people or customers that come together to exchange ideas and information. We've even built our own social networking platform Notanant which offers a generic framework for organising complex on-line communities.
Using social networks
Social networks offer the ability to connect individuals and to build waves of concensus and action. They also offer the chance to capture discussions and communications about brands, products and companies in real time and they are increasingly being used with sophisticated targeted advertising to reach individuals and then attempt to monitor and convert sales. On applications like Facebook and Google networks, cookies are used to track customers across websites and to share purchase behaviour data.
Privacy remains a big issue for discussion, but many users use social networking sites unconcerned by the privacy implications. For companies, this means that social networks can provide a warts and all view of their market. Naturally social networks continue to develop and though there is value in the broad network, we'd expect some level of balkanisation to emerge as businesses carve out niches within the market. For suppliers there is a need to be able to develop and delivery apps and applications to tap in to these markets.
Building your own communities
A second approach is in building your own communities. These can be for market research, and possibly online, or via smartphones and connecting these with behavioural monitoring. We have built online communities using Notanant and have experience in programming in PHP, Java, and Javascript