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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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