Two weeks ago, Tom Critchlow suggested that we work to close the gap between inbound marketing and content marketing communities. It's time to build bridges again, this time between inbound marketing and research. In this post, you'll find research on participation patterns, how to spot high-value users, seeding content in a new community, how to bring new life to old content, and a little bit of gamification.
Some research is already being shared with the inbound community. Bill Slawski from SEO By The Sea does a great job reading and condensing patents from the search industry. But there is so much more research waiting to be tapped.
I am currently in a PhD program and therefore attend academic conferences. They are different to MozCon, SearchLove, SMX, Blueglass and the other conferences we all usually go to. And different means different perspectives. Last week at CSCW, 160 researchers from private companies and universities presented a paper. Topics include social media analysis, collaboration, gamification, incentives, recommender algorithms and online communities. For better or worse, I did not attend 160 presentations. So this will be a very limited summary, focusing on online communities.
Why Should You Care?
Universities and private companies like IBM, Microsoft and Google do some legit research. Being familiar with this research is a competitive advantage and will help generate new ideas.
In this post I focus primarily on community building. At SearchLove last year, Rand had a slide stating a 34% growth in 4 months, primarily from Q+A, YouMoz, the blog and user profiles. Add to this that community members are some of the best link builders you'll ever find. Getting community right is a huge win.
Who Participates In Online Communities?
Previous research offers two perspectives on participation patterns in online communities:
- Some people contribute, and others do not. It is an inherent, personal trait like hair color.
- Lurking is a development stage toward being an active member. All people potentially contribute, after the learning/socialization phase: users lurk for a while before participating.
Michael Muller from IBM presented fascinating research on a study on 8,711 online communities covering diverse topics with 224,232 unique users. The insight of the research shows a completely different pattern than the conventional wisdom above: 84 % of those users who participate in one or more community, lurk in others. However, the majority of members' lifetime contributions are in the beginning on their membership. Thus, many users start off contributing like mad, then stop. This means retention is key.
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(Graph is printed in Muller, 2012. See references in the bottom of this post).
Design implications: Do whatever you can to grasp new members. There are many ways to do this: Make sure they get encouraging feedback to their initial comments/contributions. Assign them a mentor. Send them nice emails. Reach out to them on social media.
Spotting Talent
Despite the overall participation trend identified by Michael Muller, some people are more likely to contribute more to new communities than others. In fact, only few people end up participating in the first place. Google+ VP Bradley Horowitz once wrote about 90-9-1 principle, describing how 1% of community members are creators, 9% are synthesizers, and the remaining 90% are users/lurkers who do not directly add anything to the community.
Rosta Farzan and colleague from Carnegie Mellon University and University of Minnesota developed an algorithm to identify potential high-contributing members. The algorithm uses the following metrics to spot a potential high value member.
- Quality
- Motivation (quantity, frequency, and commitment)
- Ability (knowledge, trustworthiness, and politeness and clarits)
Those identified as potential high-contributing members participated 10 times more actively than those not classified.
Design implications: sometimes the gold is right in front of us, but without our knowing. Identifying high potential members early on can help us reach out and retain these creators.
Starting A New Community
In inbound marketing, one often hears the advice: go build a community. Yes, we'd all love to have flourishing communities, right? But how to get critical mass? One solution often used is seeding a site with (third party) content. This is supposed to show that the community is lively and thereby encourage users to contribute. Jacob Solomon and Rick Wash from Michigan State University tried this form of bootstrapping when starting a new wiki.
The results show that users contribute more when they are given a blank page, than they do when they see a seeded page. This makes sense, as there is more work to do on a blank page. However, contributions made on a blank page tend to be unstructured. If the users see a page with some content (e.g. headers, text chunks, objective content, opinionated content etc.), they tend to contribute content similar to the seeded content.
Design implication: If you want users to create a special kind of focused content (e.g. replies of a certain length or with a special focus), seeding can be good. The bad news: seeding content is not a shortcut to start a community as it might actually reduce contributions. Two weeks ago, Rand and Dharmesh launched Inbound. When the site was launched, it was already seeded with many good articles. According to this paper, this seeding reduced contributions, but made them more focused on the kind of articles Rand and Dharmesh want. Sounds plausible.
New Life To Old Content
This one might require a bit engineering power. But it is really neat. Aditya Pal and colleagues from University of Minnesota created an algorithm to detect expired content on a Q&A site. The algorithm uses metrics such as
- TF/IDF
- Reference to a specific time (e.g. date, month)
- Fixed vs relative time reference (ago, after, before, today, tomorrow)
- Reference a date in past
- Tense of the question
Design implications: Such algorithms are not only useful on Q&A sites. On enterprise websites, it can be used to flag content that ought to be updated, removed, rel=canonicalized or 301 redirected to new content. This creates better and fresher content on websites, as well as help avoiding old and irrelevant pages rank in Google. It can also help scale some of Cyrus Shepard's advices on fresh content, and help you rank for QDF keywords.
(This illustration is made by Dawn Shepard for Cyrus' post mentioned above)
Gamification Over?
Gamification has been a hot topic in the last couple of years. For many websites, the question is no longer if gamification systems should be implemented, but if it should be kept. Jennifer Thom and collaborators from IBM studied the removal of gamification points from IBM's internal social network. The researchers found that removing the points system made users contribute significantly less than before.
Design implications: You might (also) be tired of hearing about gamification. But it kinda works... So you might want to take a look at these gamification slides from Richard Baxter:
Curious for more?
The ACM Library is very good. In fact, so good that Matt Cutts blogs about it. To access the articles, you might have to go to a library or a university. But many researchers are happy to share their research, and link to it directly to their own work from their personal websites (The authors have the rights to share their own articles for free). So a little Googling can usually provide the article.
References
Michael Muller (2012): Lurking as Personal Trait or Situational Disposition? Lurking and Contributing in Enterprise Social Media. Proceeding to CSCW 2012
Aditya Pal, James Margatan, Joseph Konstan (2012): Question Temporality: Identification and Uses. Proceeding to CSCW 2012
Jacob Solomon, Rick Wash (2012); Bootstrapping wikis: Developing critical mass in a fledgling community by seeding content. Proceeding to CSCW 2012
Rosta Farzan, Robert Kraut, Aditya Pal, Joseph Konstan (2012): Socializing volunteers in an online community: A field experiment. Proceeding to CSCW 2012
Jennifer Thom, David Millen, Joan DiMicco (2012): Removing Gamification from an Enterprise SNS. Proceeding to CSCW 2012
Amazing post. Especially enlighting is the graphic explaining the three natures of the members of a community. And even though it is surely clear that any site based over a community should always look for that 1% of creators, who we may define also as high profile brand ambassadors, I believe that actually more attention should be paid analyzing the great mass of silent members, seeding the community with "tracking events" who can help in making edge their reactions. Did people talk in the conference you attended about this specific need a community based site may have?
Going for the 90% instead of the 1% is definitely an idea with a huge potential. The biggest problem is that most lurkers don't create an account, making it hard to reach out to them.
But there seem to be many different ways to get more people to participate
- Lowering the entrance barrier should help on this. But completely removing entrance barriers (e.g. no account creation) is en route to spam
- Giving feedback to users on their initial contribution seems to be a huge win. Noone likes to be ignored.
- Social comparison information reduce the contribution differences (e.g. top contributors contribute less, non-contributors more).
- Assigning mentors to new members should help them get started.
Hi Thomas,
Excellent Post, however I do not agree on one aspect of the post i.e. 90% are users/lurkers who do not directly add anything to the community. It’s a very subtle way of saying that they are of no use or "useless".
I understand that it’s not your point of view and correct me if i am wrong but what if the 90% of the so called "lurkers" stop visiting the site? What would happen if only "synthesizers" and "creators" visit the site?
I think instead of calling them lurkers the right word for them would be "audience" and it makes sense doesn’t it? These are the people for whom the community is built, people who are looking for information, people who are trying to learn and obviously in the initial stages they will not contribute.
Give them time and if they are groomed properly they will fit into the category of "synthesizers" and "creators".
- Sajeet
Hi Sajeet, I like your point of view - agree!
Hi Sajeet,
You are absolutely right. Lurkers is a negative word, but there is nothing wrong in reading. Some researchers are making this criqtique as well - and I forgot to adapt to it. I did write not "directly" because I am well aware there are many indirect ways to add value.
And most communities would probably not live long without an audience as its usually are those that are monetized.
Thanks for clearing this up!
Thomas
Remembering back when I first heard the term "Lurkers", I felt exactly as you did, Sajeet. But it's important for me to reconsider that these "viewers" can also be future synthesizers, inbound linkers and contributors. If anything else, they might spur me towards coming up with more creative ways to engage them or solicit their input. I also recall hearing someone stating that "It's often those quiet ones in the meetings that have some really great ideas." So it's OUR challenge to increase their comfort zone, provide easier ways for them to contribute and add new topics that stir their passions as well...
I think it's also important to remember that many people just do not have time to write clever comments or even simple thank yous. As long as our traffic numbers go up and our bounce rates go down, hopefully we must be doing something right.
AND we can always look at their visits or revisits as contributions to our SME-status! [ OK, that might be a bit egotistical, but it's an aspect of accountability helps me to blog more consistently. ]
Thanks for your kind words, Thomas.
I've been seeing a few more people (such as Mike King, Justin Briggs, Dan Shure, AJ Kohn) publishing blog posts and articles lately about patents and whitepapers, and I think it's great that is happening. I'd love to see it happen even more.
It's a little costly, but it is possible to become an ACM member and access articles from their library from your own computer as part of that membership. I joined up a while back, and it's very convenient. I don't think my local library subscribes (any computer scientists near me who might want to access it probably commute daily into DC or Northern Virginia).
As Thomas mentions, it is sometimes possible to find some of the articles published by researchers at the ACM also available on their personal websites. I've written a few posts where I would have linked to some ACM articles if I could have located them on sites like those, but didn't because of that paywall.
I've also had a couple of people from the research community send me links to some of the stuff they've written when they publish something new, and I'd love to see that kind of communication open up even more.
I've posted a few academic/search industry links on inbound.org, and hadn't seen any comments or upvotes on them, which made me wonder if they were the kinds of things people wanted to see there. Are they?
I have noticed the same thing on inbound. Links to research doesn't go over particular well. And this post was an attempt to see the demand for condensed and contextualized research communication. But it seems like a niche in a niche.
I think I am in the lurking phase right now here at SEOmoz. I do really enjoy it and the incentive for me is the wealth of knowledge that is dispensed. I hope to contribute as time goes on. Thanks for the post.
Great post. Customer driven content is definitely a plus. Obviously it has to be monitored, but once the initial work is done, a lot of content can be generated with less effort than it would take for a company to generate the content otherwise. Thanks.
Love this post, Thomas. I've been preparing to launch a community site of my own, so there are many takeaways from this.
Sooo...thanks!
Hello Thomas,
Excellent Post.
Thank you
Carmen
Community builders can learn a lot from research. The sheer volume of research on any topic might seem overwhelming, but it’s necessary to stay on top of emerging and disappearing trends. Research is valuable because it allows marketers to reevaluate older data and gain insights from new data. Community builders can then target their campaigns to market to high-value users, create effective content, and add gamification to the mix. It’s important to note that there’s a big difference between building an audience and building a community. An audience is never social or interactive. It’s one-way. Audiences watch passively and rarely share with their network. People share, read, and respond in a real community. Content is still king. Place a unique spin on your content so that it will be educational, entertaining, and inspirational. Great content is the first step toward building a great community.
Great article! Because the social media/community management field is still so new (at least to me), I like to know the research supports that I am on the right path. Thank you.
great and nice sharing, keep it up