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HOM E AB O U T U S T E AM CO NTACT AD V E R T I S E
Why people participate in onlinecommunities
2 4 TH M AY 2 0 0 8 by A YE L E T NO F F
My dear friend Yaniv Golan, CTO of Yedda, had given a brilliant presentation
regarding Incentives In Online Social Communities a few weeks ago at The Marker
COM.vention and since it’s unfortunately in Hebrew, I wanted to translate it, include
some of my own additions, and share it with you.
Online community participation
Yaniv Golan
Let’s start with the obvious question….Why?
Why do users comment? Why do they write blogs? Why do they upload pics to
Flickr? Why do they send links to friends?
What are the motives behind user participation in social communities?
Understanding why users participate can lead us to understand further how to
engage users and increase their participation in online communities. Let’s first learn a
bit more about our users.
Membership life cycle for online communities
Amy Jo Kim was the first to propose the
idea of a member’s life cycle in an online
community (2000). The cycle suggests five
phases of a user’s lifecycle within a
community:
1. Peripheral (i.e. Lurker) – An outsider, unstructured participation
2. Inbound (i.e. Novice) – New user, invested in the community, on his way to full
participation
3. Insider (i.e. Regular) – Committed participator, member of the community
4. Boundary (i.e. Leader) – A member brokering interactions and
encouraging/sustaining participation
5. Outbound (i.e. Elder) - On his way to leaving the community, perhaps to another
community due to a particular change in the community or personal choice
Power Law of Participation
According to Ross Mayfield:
“The vast majority of users will not
have a high level of engagement
with a given group, and most tend
to be free riders upon community
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value. But patterns have emerged
where low threshold participation
amounts to collective intelligence
and high engagement provides a
different form of collaborative intelligence……
Digg is the archetype for low threshold participation. Simply Favorite
something you find of interest, a one click action. You don’t even have to
log in to contribute value, you have Permission to Participate. Del.icio.us
taps both personal and social incentives for participation through the low
threshold activity of tagging. Remembering the URL is the hardest part,
and you have to establish an identity in the system. Commenting
requires such identity for sake of spam these days and is an under-
developed area. Subscribing requires a commitment of sustained
attention which greatly surpasses reading alone. Sharing is the
principal activity in these communities, but much of it occurs out of band
(email still lives). We Network not only to connect, but leverage the
social network as a filter to fend off information overload. Some of us
Write, as in blog, and some of us even have conversations. But these are
all activities that can remain peripheral to community. To Refactor,
Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of
engagement — which makes up the core of a community…..Participation
in communities plots along a power law with a solid core/periphery
model — provided social software supports both low threshold
participation and high engagement.”
All users activities in online communities whether low threshold or high engagement
activities co-exist within a community to create a form of collective intelligence.
Therefore it is key for virtual communities to allow both low threshold and high
engagement participation so that users in all 5 phases of their lifecycles will be
made to feel comfortable within the community.
Participation Inequality
Social Platforms – the 1% rule
1. 90% of users are lurkers
2. 9% of users contribute sometimes
3. 1% of users actively participate and are responsible
for almost all the action
On Wikipedia for example, participation inequality
is even higher. More than 99% of Wikipedia’s users
are lurkers. Only 0.2% are active participants.
Wikipedia’s most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of
its users — contribute about two-thirds of the
site’s edits.
We see here that small groups of people often turn out to be the main value
creators of social communities. Over time, their actions fuel widespread interaction
that engages the lurkers and attracts new users. If continually nurtured, the
community can become a self-sustaining generator of content and value.
So let’s go back now to our initial question:
Why do users participate in virtual communities?
According to Peter Kollock in The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public
Goods in Cyberspace, there are three major reasons for why users contribute in
online communities:
1. Anticipated Reciprocity – A user is motivated to contribute to the community in the
expectation that he will receive useful help and information in return. Indeed we have
seen such active users receiving more help than lurkers.
2. Increased recognition – individuals want recognition for their contributions. the desire
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2. Increased recognition – individuals want recognition for their contributions. the desire
for prestige is one of the key motivations for individuals’ contributions in an online
community. Contributions will likely increase if they are visible to the whole community
and are credited to the contributor. … the powerful effects of seemingly trivial
markers of recognition (e.g. stars, ranking) are overwhelming.
3. Sense of efficacy – Individuals may contribute because the act results in a sense that
they have had some effect on the community. Wikipedia is a good example of this.
Yet there are also other elements which can
motivate users to become active in online
communities:
1. Connections within the community – the more
friends a user has within a given community,
the more important it becomes for him to
participate in. Therefore it’s important for
online communities to allow users to form
friendships easily and encourage a high level
of interaction between users.
2. Emotional Safety – a sense of belonging and
identifying with the community. Once users become regulars in a community, just like
in any offline community, they stop feeling fearful and begin to feel a sense of safety
in and identification with the community. The key here is to get these individuals to
become regular users in your community and create a cozy and ”feel
good” environment for them.
3. Common emotional connection – niche communities that are built around a particular
emotional connection/cause between members tend to become more cohesive
and experience lower percentages of participation inequality.
4. Altruism - Yossi Vardi coined the term “Dopamine Over IP” – each user transfers
dopamine to another user….by contributing content, a user knows that he will cause
pleasure to those who view it and those users that forward this content onwards,
know the same.
For more reasons why people become active participants in social online
communities and the key to Web 2.0’s success, please see my posts:
What’s Behind the Success of Web 2.0? A Psychological Interpretation
Web 2.0 and the new tribalism
So now you ask…
What are the ways that online communities can overcome
participation inequality and increase users’ participation?
1. Make it easy for users to contribute, make them feel confident with their
contributions, and share their contributions with other members in the community -
> Feeling of influence
2. Make participation a side effect. Let users participate with zero effort by making their
contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s
“people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side
effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your
book preferences entered into the system.
3. Reward users’ contributions and allow for markers of their contributions. Promote
and feature top contributors -> Sense of recognition, sense of community, fulfill
anticipated reciprocation
Allow users to rank each other within the community and comment on
contributions -> sense of community, feeling of influence
4. Platform should be flexible enough to transform with the changing needs of its
members -> feeling of influence
5. According to virtual community pioneer Jonathan Bishop, online
community managers need to also change the beliefs of lurkers on their site in order
to increase participation. Lurkers, believe that they do not need to post messages or
that they are being helpful by not posting. Such beliefs prevent them from carrying
out their desires to be social and participate in the community. Therefore it is up to
the community managers to change this attitude by use of persuasive text or by other
means.
A few more useful tips for community managers
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A few more useful tips for community managers
1. Simplicity is key – participating in the community should be simple for the user. The
simpler it is, the higher the participation rate will be.
2. Allow some actions to be performed by non-registered users.
3. Give people something good to talk about – as always, content is king. If your
content is interesting and appealing enough, people will be eager to contribute.
4. Display the activity on your site. No one likes to go into an empty restaurant. Already
on the homepage show users all the great stuff that’s happening within the
community.
5. Offline events are a great way to make a community even more cohesive and virtually
active.
JO IN TNW ON: OR
D I S C U S S I O N
9 C O MME NTS & P I NG B AC KS
Comments are closed.
TR AC KB A C KS
1. Experience is Everything » Why People Participate in Online Communities says:
May 25, 2008 at 12:34 am
[...] events are a great way to make a community even more cohesive and virtually
active. Ayelet Noff May 24, 2008 Link var gaJsHost = ((“https:” ==
document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : [...]
2. FreshNetworks Blog » Blog Archive » Why people participate in online communities
says:
May 29, 2008 at 4:58 pm
68kLike
A BOUT THE A UTHOR
Ayelet Noff is the founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0 , a New Media PR agency helping
brands create brand awareness and increase social engagement. Check out Ayelet's
Blonde 2.0 blog and Twitter.
1. Steven said on May 24, 2008:
Thorougher Analysis!
But what is the most important reason? and by how far ahead? content is
the main reason I suspect, if there is compelling content people will
engage! This is probably 90% of the cause.
Reply
2. Jurjan said on May 26, 2008:
Thanks for the translation and your additions. Your story is very much in
line with a blog post I have written on community management in
innovation projects:
http://www.innovationfactory.nl/blog/2008/03/18/community-management-
in-innovation-projects
Although a few differences exist between ‘public communities’ (like
Facebook and Myspace) and ‘enterprise communities’ (for example
communities used to nurture innovation within organisations).
Reply
3. Konnects said on July 26, 2008:
Great Post. Community participation is vital for community growth. At
http://konnects.com we built the community feature for business owners
and organizations to only only network but also to conduct business
online.
Reply
4. Richard Cole said on November 12, 2008:
The motivation of users is a key area of focus for all community managers
and this post is a terrific insight.
Reply
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June 9, 2008 at 8:16 pm
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