What next for online research

Went to quite a buzzy Warc conference on the above topic last week… thought I'd share my, hopefully balanced, take-outs: 1. Everyone was talking about reframing attitudes to consumers, who, in the 2.0 climate of open-ness and democracy are to be seen as active brand stakeholders rather than passive vessels for marketing. Research is being encouraged to 'reframe' its attitude - to listen rather than ask questions, to reconceive respondents as 'research participants' - and researchers are well advised to get into co-creation… fair enough but actually, as I've said on this blog before, I'm not entirely sure whether this really is a million miles away from how good qual would regard consumers already… 2. That said, online communities and environments do offer interesting new opportunities for product and concept development. I believe 'open source' development is being adopted by people like BMW - but I particularly like the idea of using Second Life for products of an experiential nature - (See this article on hotels in Second Life) as a playful online environment may well generate some freer thinking than traditional offline npd research. These forums are obviously useless for fact-based research but could be a lot of fun and very productive for a bit of blue sky idea generation. 3. Some of the most interesting developments seem to be happening in quant, which seems to be becoming far more multi-facetted and sensitive online than it ever was off…importantly, the web allows both online interviewing but also measuring and diagnosing what is already there. Was quite impressed, for example, by the accuracy of prediction curves for the success (sales) of films based on online WOM. 4. Quant is gaining a quasi qual side - given lesser time and physical constraints online, there's far more opportunity for open-enders in online vs offline quant surveys, going even as far as 'story telling'. Clearly, quant researchers are much less well equipped to interpret these - so new hybrid techniques or hybrid researchers may be emerging 5. Information Management will emerge as key topic for both clients and researchers - whether it's blogs (research-commissioned or already existing), online communities or indeed qual-type answers within a quant survey - there is ever more data out there and there's a real danger of a. information overload and b. people jumping to uninformed conclusions. I'm wondering for example who analyses and contextualises the entries on a site like P&G's Capessa? Qual researchers would be obviously highly qualified to do so but do we really want to spend a lot of time at our desk sifting through pages and pages of online text, not all of which (to be kind) is likely to be hugely relevant to our clients? 6. Online qual is a supplementary method - or needs supplementing by offline interviewing. Existing blogs - and possibly increasingly social networking sites - are clearly useful to help us to get 'up the curve' at the beginning of a project and can help in trend spotting. Research commissioned blogs can make use of the confessional nature of the medium especially for sensitive topics and can make for a far more interesting-to look at and 'life-like' online diary. But I'm not convinced of the benefits of online groups beyond cost and ease of recruitment for EXTREMELY hard-to-get targets. Yes, offline groups are artificial and not ideal in many ways and people are likely to over-rationalise their ideas but at least as a researcher you can look into their eyes, see their body language and, let's face it, talking in the physical presence of others is far more likely to reveal emotions than the more left brain activity of writing down thoughts in the presence of a 'virtual' moderator...