Companies 'Friend' New Focus Groups

BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Time suckers like Facebook and Twitter have given rise to the trend of businesses using social networking to catch customers' attention. They're building fan pages and asking the public to "friend" them, they're Tweeting sweater sales, and, more and more, they're encouraging two-way conversations, creating exclusive online communities in which customers serve as virtual focus groups.

With a private online community or panel, a company will invite a targeted group of customers -- a few hundred or so, via e-mail invitations -- to take part in online discussion groups, surveys and a variety of other opinionated interactions that let companies know what the customers want. (The e-mail addresses generally come from list brokers or existing customer databases.) The communities are carefully facilitated by moderators who represent the company, which is how they differ from, say, the comments section on an old blog post. Customers rarely receive monetary compensation for their time, but they participate anyway for the simple reason that it's nice when someone listens to you, especially a big company.

"Listening is a really underrated marketing strategy," says Diane Hessan, chief executive of Communispace, a Watertown, Mass., company that specializes in online customer communities for clients such as Kellogg(K Quote), Kraft Foods(KFT Quote), Hewlett-Packard(HPQ Quote) and Godiva. (Godiva has used online communities to realize a variety of information about its target audience, including the fact that for many women, fancy chocolate is an impulse purchase.)

"People are used to people talking at them or pretending to listen," Hessan says. "The idea that you actually have the chance to effect major change is very cool to people."