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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 its unfortunately in Hebrew, I wanted to translate it, include some of my own additions, and share it with you.
Yaniv Golan
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Lets 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. Lets first learn a bit more about our users.
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Amy Jo Kim was the first to propose the idea of a members life cycle in an online community (2000). The cycle suggests five phases of a users 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
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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 Wikipedias users are lurkers. Only 0.2% are active participants. Wikipedias most active 1,000 people 0.003% of its users contribute about two-thirds of the sites 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 lets go back now to our initial question:
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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 its 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 2.0s success, please see my posts:
Whats Behind the Success of Web 2.0? A Psychological Interpretation Web 2.0 and the new tribalism
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 theyre doing. For example, Amazons people who bought this book, bought these other books recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You dont 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.
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Why people participate in online com 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 thats happening within the community. 5. Offline events are a great way to make a community even more cohesive and virtually active.
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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.
DISCUSSION 9 C O M M E N TS & P I N G B A C KS
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-managementin-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). 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. 4. Richard Cole said on November 12, 2008: Reply Reply
The motivation of users is a key area of focus for all community managers and this post is a terrific insight.
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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
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