We’re releasing a great new piece of functionality today that will give you greater control over the look and feel of your insight community.

Prior to today, Community Administrators (CA) could only change the background image used on their community (like Twitter). From today, CAs have more control over a number of design elements, including the header, project name, background image and the section title header colours.

If you are already using IdeaStream™, you’ll find these new controls in the Admin Centre under the Setup tab. Just select the Theme sub-tab and you’ll see all the new controls.

Please note that this new functionality is only available to those using the very latest IdeaStream interface. If you are unsure as to whether or not this applies to you, please contact your Account Manager who will clarify.

If you’d like to find out more about how IdeaStream can power your insight communities, email us@dubishere.com

Director of our North American operation, Kerry Hecht, will be at the Future of Consumer Intelligence conference in San Francisco today and for the next few days. If you’re there and would like to meetup, email kerry@dubishere.com

The conference spans, aggregates and integrates primary research, trend information and behaviour-based data to give a 360 degree view of our industry, so don’t miss out.

More information can be found here at http://www.iirusa.com/consumerintel/homepage.xml#.UZJAnStAQmU

Onboarding is a term usually found in HR circles used to describe the mechanism through which new employees obtain the skills and knowledge to do the job and become good employees. Here at Dub, we use the term to describe the process of getting people logged into an insight community for the first time, and making sure they have everything they need to complete the activities set them.

Why is onboarding is important?

Most insight communities have certain time pressures. Members will have been recruited one way or another, and with an associated cost. This means you want to get the most from them in terms of their time and focus engaging with the activities you’ve spent a lot of time and thought designing. The shorter term insight communities create greater pressure on the need to have members logged in and ready to go at the earliest opportunity. You don’t want to waste the first few days of your community helping people who can’t logon or who have difficult remembering a password they themselves created! (Believe me, this happens a lot!).

So with someone in your team responsible for the task of getting people logged on and ready to go come the first activities, you’ll maximise your engagement, reduce support costs and have much happier members ready and willing to give it their all.

Who should do the onboarding?

It’s not that you need to have a dedicated person with the sole responsibility of on boarding, but it helps if you define the role clearly, create some basic guidelines and assign one or two people in your team, or even in your external support team. Dub can help you with this, and from what we’ve seen to-date, it really makes a difference and removes a lot of headaches.

What about off-boarding?

Getting your members up and running is one thing, but doing a good job of closing down the community is another, equally important task. Always thank people for the time – during the community as well as at the end – and share some of the key insights with them. Offer them the chance to share their community experience with you – you might learn some new tricks that help will help you motivate the next community you run. And where you are paying cash incentives, make sure they are paid out quickly, otherwise you risk the wrath of members eager to spend their hard-earned cash at the weekend!

If you’d like to understand how Dub can help you get participants on board, contact us@dubishere.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or +1 310 997 5779

There’s a great new article appeared on ESOMARs website that examines the argument of mobile app vs mobile browser when it comes to research technology. Here’s a snapshot of their conclusions:

App vs. Browser: the pros and cons

Key benefits of the mobile survey app

• Engagement. A better respondent experience with better use of screen real-estate and controls can increase engagement and improve response quality
• Integration. Can integrate seamlessly with on-device features such as alerts, barcode scanning and capturing video, audio and photos which are not accessible to the browser.
• Geo-located. Easier to inegrate geo-tagging and even geo-triggering within the survey.
• Advanced surveys. Apps can support more tailored research designs, such as diaries, games, choice models or unstructured interviews. In addition, in conventional online surveys, such techniques, often rely on Flash, which many mobile devices do not support.
• Offline collection. An app can continue to deliver questions and store responses when there is an intermittent internet connection.

Key benefits of the mobile browser survey

• Instant access. Does not require a level of trust and engagement for the respondent to download and install an app before participating, which can restrict apps to work only with mobile panels.
• Coverage. By supporting a broad spectrum of devices, especially simpler devices, it offers better population coverage,and avoids ‘device bias’.
• Cost. It can be very costly to develop and publish a mobile app for a single survey, whereas mobile browser surveys are generally built-in generic survey-creation tools. However, some generic app-creation platforms are now starting to appear.
• Mixed mode. Dual-mode online/mobile survey tools cater fully to unintended mobile respondents in conventional online studies who want to take an online survey on their mobile device.

Dub’s mobile technology is built on HTML5, meaning it’s in the mobile web app camp. Despite this article focusing more on quant than qual, we echo the benefits of the browser-based approach. Our clients have talked a lot about the ease of access and use, and the fact that both the desktop and mobile experience for participants are aligned, meaning they dont have any additional learnings to make to adopt the tool.

To read the entire article by Tim Macer go here. To find out more about how IdeaStream™ Mobile can capture those real-life moments as they happen, contact us@dubishere.com

Hello everyone, my name is Rupali Mahida and I’ve just joined the Dub team as an intern. This year, I am graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and plan to pursue a career in market research in the future. As a Psychobiology major, I’ve had the opportunity to explore human thought and behavior from both a psychological and biological perspective. As a part of the requirements of my degree, I completed a large research product testing the effects of emotional valence on human recall and recognition memory. It was through this experience, that I became particularly interested in how qualitative and quantitative information can be used to derive meaningful insights about how people process the world around them. Hence, when I was considering what career path to pursue, I knew that market research would enable me to use this understanding in a productive way in order to drive business strategy.

One of my best experiences in undergraduate was studying abroad at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England where I had the opportunity live in the UK for a few months. Thus, I am even more excited to be a part of Dub given its strong client base in both Europe as well as America. Furthermore, Dub really stood out to me as a company to be a part of because of their focus on providing software that allows qualitative researcher to facilitate insight communities. Given the constantly evolving social and technology environment in which we live, I truly believe that these communities provide a more innovative and progressive way to gage consumer thought patterns. Therefore, I’m eager and excited to advance Dub initiatives in any way I can!

Rupali can be reached at rupali@dubishere.com

We’ve noticed an emerging trend among agencies to use the term ‘pop-up communities’ to describe the short-term qualitative community. There’s no real criteria for these as we see it, other than the duration – they come and go quickly. But dig deeper into the make-up of the ‘pop-up’ phenomena (think pop-up retail, restaurants etc) and you start to see some interesting insights that can be applied to pop-up insight communities.

Pop-up retail stores come onto the scene all of a sudden, creating a hive of interest and activity. They whip consumers into a frenzy as they play on the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), then disappear in an instant. They somehow feel exclusive, for the chosen few, and offer great social and emotional reward and cred to the consumer. You’ve got to be there when it happens, otherwise you’re just not with it! They are often setup with a specific purpose in mind – to launch a new product or create some buzz around the brand – but can them morph into something completely different.

As bulletin boards stagnate as a research methodology, and pop-up communities take there place, people take part in new social experiences that mimic their own social networks and deliver exciting new relationships with the like-minded. The concept of the ‘pop-up’ should be leveraged as the excitement of the new and exclusive can deliver some great participation in communities. It’s a form of gamification if you like, but more genuine that than. And once complete, who’s to say the pop-up insight community can’t become the marketing community, or the place where innovation accelerates.

Ok, pop-up insight communities might not sound new, but if researchers understand what motivates and seduces consumers before, during and after the pop-up, they’ll get better results.

Teens can be one of the least reliable when it comes to conducting any kind of qualitative research and online qualitative is no exception.  Hours can be wasted trying to track them down to complete a series of activities in a quality fashion.  The key to all of this is bringing the activities to them.

One thing we do know is that teens are online – all of them, all the time.  They’ve also never known a pre-internet (and smartphone) world, so communicating online is as natural for them as talking.  But just knowing they’re online isn’t enough.  We need to understand how they communicate, where they communicate and what motivates them to communicate beyond the normal monetary incentives.  It’s as equally important to recognize their limitations.

No surprises

Without giving away too much about the research, teens and their parents should be given an overview of the activities and what’s required at the recruiting stage.  This prevents people from over promising when they’ve got too many additional commitments through school, sports or other activities.  It also allows them to plan if you need to see them in action with their friends or family.  Research projects fall down the list of priorities when real life competes.

Social activities: a great way to share and connect

Teens with similar interests are eager to connect with each other and comfortable in online forums.  They are used to conversations that are presented as threaded.  That said, satisfying a research goal isn’t going to be their primary motivator.  They will want to present themselves, see what others have to offer and how they stack up against their peers.  Consider making all activities, that aren’t sensitive in nature, social – but only let them see what others are saying after they post about themselves.  This can easily be accomplished on IdeaStream^tm through the use of our online blogs and discussion boards.  If you tell them they will be able to browse through other posts, videos and comments after they complete their activity they will be more motivated to complete.

Why won’t they finish the last three activities???

One frustration I hear about constantly is the loss of interest from teen participants.  Halfway through the project, response rates dwindle and no amount of money seems to be able to change that.  While discussing how to approach this, one researcher suggested launching all activities (or most activities) at one time – allowing them to chose the ones they want to complete and in what order they’d like to do it.  They’re told upfront that they must finish three-quarters of the exercises in order to receive their incentives.  This puts them in control.  She indicated that more often than not, all respondents ultimately end up completing all the activities.  This idea seems to make sense if you are flexible with how you can structure your research.

A teen and their phone – The love story

It’s no secret a mobile phone is a teens best friend.  From texting, tweeting, organizing friends and sharing media, phones provide a way for teens to reach out to their inner circle and to the masses.  IdeaStream^tm Mobile allows us to reach into their worlds with similar ease.  Not only does mobile allow you to capture ‘in the moment’ insights but it removes barriers to getting information from them in the form of text, video and pictures.  Whether they are sitting in their room at night, on a break at school or out with their friends – we can reach them and they can reach us.  Don’t be afraid to ask them to get creative with these tools – use them in conjunction with other technologies and most importantly – make it fun!

Using sequencing as an incentive

People like immediate gratification – especially teens.  You can build a reward system into your research through sequencing.  Consider locking special games, polls or privileged information behind an activity you really need them to complete.  Response rates shoot way up when a perceived reward is available immediately.

At the end of the day – Kids will be kids

Teens are more independently minded and have greater purchasing power than ever before, but alas they are still kids.  They live in a world where their attention is being competed for by any number of outside sources – so patience and perseverance is key.  Hopefully some of the suggestions we list above can make this road a bit less bumpy for you.

It’s St George’s Day today here in the UK. For those of you that don’t know who he is, then he’s the patron saint of England. As is tradition with famous birthdays, Google has produced a fine doodle for the day (some of which you can see on the left).

It’s also a very significant day for people in England as it’s the celebrated birthday of playright William Shakespeare.  Both Shakespeare and St George had a fighting spirit and determination for their craft that made them part of folklore. We hope to bring a little of that to our work every day