Pop up, pop in, pop out. Confused?

Over the past few months we have seen an influx of shorter term online communities – or ‘pop up’ communities as we like to call them. Maybe you have seen our latest campaign with the Meerkats.

So what is a pop up community?  It is an online community used for research purposes, whereby as the name suggests it is something that can be up and running quite quickly and something that won’t stick around for that long, typically lasting anything from 2 weeks to 3 months.

Pop up communities can also provide clients new to research communities with the opportunity to dip their toes in the waters – essentially allowing clients to get the full on community experience without having to make a longer term commitment or investment.   

And why pop in and pop out? Well that’s exactly what clients can do – they can pop in and out (or go on and offline) as often as they like during the duration of said community to watch the insights unfold, in real time, as they happen.

These communities are really versatile and we have recently completed a number of objective focussed projects ranging from 6 weeks testing new haircare products to completing a 3 month video diary exercise where members were set financial challenges to having a one month forum with 4 themed healthcare topics.    

By the way, this is not to say that there isn’t still a place for longer term communities because there definitely is and I’ll write a blog about these at a later date.

In the meantime if you’re thinking about getting your feet wet and you have a business objective that you think could be suitable to warrant a pop up community then feel free to give me a call to discuss in more detail.

Anthony Shephard, Head of Online Communities