Focus groups are an extremely valuable tool helping marketers understand their customers, and helping companies plan for future products and services.

But, traditional focus groups are very expensive to set up and run, and because of the relatively small number of participants, they can suffer from a skewing of results due to the biases that the participants bring with them into the group.

GoLightly's online social networking tools, applied to a company's marketing needs, can accomplish much of what traditional focus groups can do, and at a much lower cost.  Another advantage of the new online technologies is that they permit the company to react to participants' comments and quickly test other ideas in the ongoing community network, without having to reconvene a face-to-face focus group.  The rapidity of the interaction between the company and the online community can lead to substantially shortened product-development cycles. 

Even when face-to-face interaction is deemed indispensable, the online social networking tools can help the company expand and refine the pool of participants to create more effective traditional focus groups.