Kapt'n Kluge's Workshop Blog by Tom Paolucci

I've earned the title of Kapt'n Kluge around the office because some of my "solutions" might be just a little too far outside the box. I will try to stay reeled in with what I post here, but I'm not making any promises...

Posts: 14 | Created on March 25, 2009 | 3

Confessions of a Community Lurker

By Tom Paolucci in Kapt'n Kluge's Workshop on Thursday, May 07, 2009 11:08 AM 2
Tags: 90 9 1 principle lurker

Until I was emotionally and physically threatened to write this blog I lived as a community lurker. I should also confess to being a bit of a liar as threats were never actually made, but my preference had really been to live on the community sidelines. I'd simply go in and get what I needed then slip away without making any contributions unless absolutely necessary. Like ensuring the continuation of my paycheck, but I digress...

Last week I had the pleasure of visiting with a team who is managing a community using the Leverage platform. This team has done an outstanding job designing a great looking customized site and they are also hands-on members of their community. Thanks to their efforts the community has been quite successful with membership representing better than 20% of the potential member pool in less than 3-months. Still, the team shared some concerns. Most members were not adding content and they feared the community was not being used. We checked the latest stats and discovered that over a quarter of their members had accessed the site within the past week and these were primarily return visits. As we continued to explore the statistics we would find that theirs was an active community of lurkers and I could relate to every one of them.

A recent poll of their community showed that 30% of respondents were using the community for networking. Obviously these are not very good lurkers if they respond to polls, but using the community for networking does not require that these members add any content. We found that 17% of respondents (What kind of lurkers are these folks anyway?) returned to the community for the exclusive content available only to community members. This 17% didn't necessarily want to be the members adding that content, but they were coming back for what was being added. It was clear that the community was being used by the members, but not quite how the team had expected it to be used.

Too often community managers, and I will put myself on this list, use the creation of content to gauge the success of an online community. I am not saying that content isn't important, obviously members will not return to a community if there isn't something new to capture their interest when they come back. However, there are many community members who, like me, will come back, come back often, and just like very good campers leave no trace of these visits. We will tell our friends about our visits and share links or information that we discovered while we were there, but that isn't something that reports are going to capture. Unlike those discovered in the dark back alleys of Film Noir, online community lurkers are not bad community members. We are quietly active and promoting the community, we are just not so good, or perhaps comfortable, with promoting ourselves in the process.

Do you have concerns that your community has become a hang-out for lurkers? Check out the following sites and embrace your community members who seem to live in the shadows...
The 90-9-1 Principle
Online Reviews Second Only to Word of Mouth as Purchase Influencer in US
Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute



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