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16 QRCA VIEWS FA LL 2 014 www.qrca.org The Participation Economy C O N T I N U E D tomers, employees, suppliers, alliance partners, etc.) to participate directly in the brands and organizations they care about and create the future together. Crowdsourcing can help participants in these engaging, always-on communities to be "social with a purpose" by collaborating with other community members and brand experts. This approach is particu- larly useful for market research projects where the goals are: 1. Reduce the risk of relying on input from a handful of stakeholders with disproportionate influence on new product design; 2. Gain insight into emergent global trends to inform disruptive brand, product or social innovation; 3. Discover the "positive outliers" in the community who are predictive of emergent attitudes and needs. New skills for a qualitative future Qualitative and mixed-method research- ers have the opportunity to play a linch- pin role in this modern era of participa- tory marketing. However, qualitative research at this scale and scope requires some new skills. A comfort level with social software platforms, mobile tech- nologies, and analytics tools will be essential. For example, the use of unstructured text analytics software to help find high-level patterns in the mas- sive volumes of written discussions and answers will be needed because the hand coding of text contributions from thou- sands of participants just isn't practical. Today there are user-friendly, but power- ful, commercial software packages that can help practitioners find contextualized thematic word and phrase patterns in the discussions and submissions of partici- pants. These high-level patterns provide guideposts for further probing and inves- tigation activities to refine and validate any early findings. And qualitative researchers needn't be afraid of quantitative methods. A qual>quant>qual research design can organize and streamline large-scale insights programs. The crowd can add human computation value in the quanti- tative phase by helping rank, rate, and prioritize emergent qualitative themes. They can also provide stories, images, and examples in the final qualitative phase to illustrate the research findings and bring the data to life. The rise of persistent crowdsourcing research communities may mean practi- tioners will develop a deeper advisory working relationship with fewer clients. Coaching and educating clients on the benefits of adaptive, long-term research programming and analysis will also be important. Everything old is new again Listening to people in a natural setting. Observing behaviors over time. Finding and watching the influencers in a community. Looking for predictive trends. Helping research participants to share as-yet unar- ticulated needs, wants, hopes, fears. These are all classic qualitative research tech- niques that can now be scaled in social crowdsourcing communities that are emerging as an important channel in the Participation Economy. Customers and citizens increasingly want transparency, recognition, and reci- procity. If organizations invite them in to contribute alongside their employees, they will participate in ways that will sur- prise you – often solely for intrinsic rewards. It's worth noting that by "participation" and "co-creation" we mean really inviting stakeholders inside an organization's velvet rope to be creative, to roll up their sleeves, and get to work solving problems − mak- ing sense of the Big Data flow that is growing every day. This is a persistent relationship that treats customers as peers, not just wallets and opinions, but beating hearts and creative minds. "Qualitative researchers have the opportunity to play a linchpin role in this modern era of participatory marketing."