Guest Post: Greg Heist

This is posted on behalf of Greg Heist, Director of Research Innovation, Gongos Research. He will be a Speaker at The Market Research Event for the presentation of: 'Collaborate & Innovate: Building True Research Partners' As the Director of Research Innovation for Gongos Research, Greg Heist is responsible for guiding the innovation strategy at the company. From white-board concepts to product development, Greg and his team ensure that innovation supports a primary role ' to make the research process more engaging for consumers and more meaningful and powerful for corporations. A practitioner with over 16 years of research under his belt, Greg is a visionary at heart. He believes we are in the midst of an evolution in the way we conduct research, and he plans to help pave the way. He and colleague Mitch Sanders, Ph.D., co-authored a white paper appearing in Quirk's October issue which puts online communities to the test. The article answers crucial questions about data quality and new types of consumer experiences in an online world. Here is an excerpt from the article titled 'Are Online Communities Driving a New Research Paradigm'? Over the past several years, online communities have developed into powerful platforms for engaging customers in extended conversations. As more and more corporations embrace online communities, many market researchers are eager to pursue a more sophisticated set of research applications within them. General Motors was among the first in the industry to take private online communities to this next level in order to substantiate the application of consumer insights. Broadening their scope, they needed online communities not only to act as a vehicle for interaction and observation, but also to carry statistical weight. GM's experience, and the experiences of other companies pursuing quantitative results, suggests that the industry still yearns for answers to significant questions about the quality of insights generated by online communities. The article is useful in that it will point to the potential for online communities to represent a new research paradigm.