Ramius Corporation

Overview

Ramius is an award winning developer of online community systems and enterprise social networking platforms. We’ve delivered innovative, technology-based solutions to many of the world’s leading companies for over a decade. We’re passionate about the potential social software has to transform the way we work, communicate and share. Our unique history and extensive experience of online communities, brings a unique and fresh perspective to Marketing Research software.

Recollective, our software platform built specifically for marketing researchers, was launched in November 2011. It offers the leading edge in private, brand-ready software for conducting qualitative research via Marketing Research Online Communities (MROCs). Being compatible with all devices, Recollective can be used on any smartphones, tablets or operating system. It also integrates with existing online quantitative solutions to enable researchers to build hybrid studies.

Ramius offers Recollective for sale through partner research agencies or as one-off implementations to enterprises that wish to conduct their own research.

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Supported Methods

New Qualitative Research Method	Product / Tool / Platform
Mobile Qualitative Research	Recollective
Online Discussion Board Focus Groups & IDIs	Recollective
Diaries, Journals, Blogs	Recollective
Online Communities (MROCs)	Recollective
Qualitative-Quantitative Hybrid Market Research	Recollective
Interpretation & Analysis Tools	Recollective
Emerging Solutions	Recollective
Video & Multimedia Production and Editing	Recollective
Other Supported Methods	Online Panels, Idea Generation / Crowdsourcing in our Sixent Enterprise software.

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Platforms and Services

Recollective

Recollective is an online community solution designed in collaboration with researchers to enable industry-leading qualitative research. Recollective’s intuitive social features mean your participants are highly engaged to provide deeper, better quality insights more cost effectively than ever before.

Recollective is compatible with all smartphones, tablets or desktop computers running a modern web browser. That means you can involve participants from any location using any device at any time to get instant access to insights as they are gathered. Run one or multiple studies simultaneously, segment participants and setup Activities to guide them step-by-step to provide valuable insights and opinions.

Recollective lets you collect insights using:

• Questions with text and photo responses
• Polls (single / multiple response)
• Prompts to push participants to other activities or integrate with external survey software
• Online journals
• Video uploaded from desktop or mobile devices
• Discussion Boards (whole community or selectively by segment)
• Private messages for asynchronous in-depth interviews
• Image Heat Maps (coming early 2012)
• Sort & Rank tools (coming early 2012)

Responses to any of these tasks can be socialized among participants to take advantage of community effects and insights in comments and Facebook-style like / dislike ratings. Each response, discussion, comment or private message can be excerpted and coded within the software using highly innovative tools. Those excerpts can be collated into customized reports and transcripts – all generated by researchers on demand. Transcripts are professionally formatted for export with images, comments and excerpt notes embedded in line.

Recollective also provides a complete suite of management tools that make it easy to run research communities over extended periods, including:

• Excerpt any sentence, paragraph or whole responses and add multiple codes to excerpts
• Backroom comments for private collaboration between researchers and clients
• Private “To do “task lists
• Pending Review lists for work management
• Quick statistics
• Bulk upload of participants
• Segmenting of participants
• Online Code Book with archiving of old codes
• Customizable transcripts based on activity, segments, time and more
• Customizable reports based on excerpts, discussions, activities and messages

The whole platform is cloud-based, customizable and easily scalable to add participants, studies or time. At the site level, Single-Sign-On and SSL encryption offer additional integration and security options should they be necessary.

Ramius provides technical setup and support as part of the base fee, with optional services for setting up discussion guides in studies and advanced style or look-and-feel changes.

 

Sixent Enterprise for Customer Innovation and Crowdsourcing Ideas

Ramius also offers Sixent Enterprise, a platform for very large scale panels and customer communities. Sixent includes online communities, social networking between participants, file sharing, blogs, photo sharing and collaboration tools.

Sixent Groups enable communities to be built for ideation and innovation sourcing that make it easy to tap into employee or customer ideas and insights. Based on the concept of crowdsourcing where ideas are voted up and down, the Sixent Idea Management feature enables the best ideas to rise to the top to reflect the prevailing customer or participant opinion. Ideas can be further discussed, matched to existing ideas and managed through a process you define to an end state.

Sixent supports segmentation of participants and has powerful visibility and permission controls to selectively share content among broad groups of participants.

 

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Distinctive Features

• Ready for use on smartphones, tablets or desktop computers without the need to download separate Apps or sacrifice functionality
• Online excerpting of any part of a participant’s responses, overlapping excerpts and on-demand reporting and export of excerpts
• Applying multiple codes and backroom comments or tasks to excerpts
• Customizable reporting and transcripts generated on-demand by the researcher
• Suite of research tools for qualitative studies all included as standard
• Video tasks with excerpting and production of highlights reel
• Integrates seamlessly with third-party survey tools for hybrid studies
• Short or long term studies with the ability for multiple separate studies to run simultaneously
• Can be entirely self-setup and managed without intervention by Ramius if desired

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Market Research Applications

Online qualitative research

Recollective is ideally suited for the following uses:

• Online community-based research
• Qualitative research structured around a sequence of tasks that ask for text or photo responses
• Online journals
• Video activities
• Combined Desktop / Mobile research
• Hybrid qualitative / quantitative studies

That includes applications such as product innovation, product or service planning and concept testing, ad or communication testing, prototype testing, customer or employee feedback studies, consultation or longitudinal studies.

Marketing Research Panels

Sixent is best used to maintain ongoing engagement with a large panel of customers. Often participants from the panel will then be selectively drawn into a Recollective study for specific research projects.

Sixent can also be used to build sustainable Voice of Customer or Employee Networks that enable non-facilitated peer communication, content and knowledge sharing, user forums and online collaboration.

Customer Innovation and Crowdsourcing Ideas

Sixent Ideation forums are ideal for gathering innovative insights and ideas from a diverse audience and to understand which ideas have the broadest appeal within the community. They can be guided (i.e. directed to focus on specific topics for research), or open to the users to submit ideas on subjects they believe important. The most popular ideas are voted on by participants and naturally rise to prominence. Typically, the findings of these crowdsourcing/ideation initiatives will feed into a client’s concept development processes and ultimately into roll-out or beta trials.

 

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Training and Support

Software training is delivered as part of site setup for both Recollective and Sixent Enterprise. Training is typically delivered online by web conference and can be recorded for future use. Courses include Site and Study Administration, setup of Activities, analysis and excerpting, plus the on-demand production of reports and transcripts.

All software is supported by a named Implementation Manager to guide setup and is followed up with standard technical support that includes web-based or email support once the site has been launched. Optional upgrades to telephone and Premier support levels or out-of-hours support are available on request.

 

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Other Services

Study Setup

The Study Setup service is ideal for customers that require hands-on support to turn their discussion guides or research plans into Activities, Tasks and Discussions in Recollective or Sixent. We extend the role of your Implementation Manager to work with your team to build the site, upload participants and test everything prior to launch. Additional services can be negotiated for study management, analysis and production of reports.

Advanced Customizations

Advanced Customizations provide for changes to the standard interface, or if new custom research tools are needed to satisfy and end-client’s brief.

Online Community Strategies

Ramius provides services to develop community engagement strategies including planning, recruitment, communication, targets, implementation approach and new job role definition.

 

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Useful Links

• Ramius.net website introducing our software products and company.
• Webinars – links to a series of webinars Ramius have given or sponsored on the subjects of marketing research and online communities.
• Recollective Feature Sheet – more detailed description and screenshots of Recollective.
• Sixent Feature Sheet – more detailed description and screenshots of Sixent.

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Affiliations: ESOMAR, MRIA

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