How can the quality of the participation in online communities be improved?

Mon, 11/02/2009 - 14:44

I love online communities because they offer us our best hope of learning from each other and accessing the wisdom that exists in silos.  I also believe that human beings are happiest when they're with other human beings - working, conversing, playing, reading, doing anything - but in the company of others. So I believe that it is very important to nurture online communities and integrate them with offline ones. I think they can feed off each other.

Having said that, I have found it hard to find quality online communities.  By the term "community", I mean any site where users interact with each other. Let's examine the motivations of the members of the community. Let's take two big social networks - Facebook and LinkedIn. By and large, Facebook users are there to keep track of their friends and their lives. They're not there to be educated. They're there to have fun. The majority of LinkedIn users are there to keep in touch with professional associates and perhaps get found by recruiters. A small minority consists of recruiters, small consulting firms and entrepreneurs. This small minority creates the majority of the discussion on groups, and are there largely to get more clients.

A conversation with the leader of a non-profit Association, led us to do a cursory analysis of a group on LinkedIn. Here's how we broke down the first page of the Linked group under the discussions tab:-

  • Self-promotion - 5
  • Discussions - 12
  • Comments - 8

That's not very good, but that only paints one side of the picture.  How many of them had sincere questions that were not answered?  There were 2 that I could tell were sincere.  How many had answers that gave the questioner good information?  We'd have to ask them, but judging from the mostly tepid responses, I would say not many. There was one good discussion - 18 comments with a provocative title.

The Group Host even pled for help from other members to help police the group, get rid of the spam and the off-topic discussions, except that the members didn't seem to have the easy-to-use tools to join in the moderation.  The Group Host doesn't have the time to do it all by herself. We concluded that not enough genuine questions were being asked and fewer answered.

Then we looked at another one - one that I thought I'd participate in myself. Here's what I found though :-

  • Self-promotion - 16
  • Discussions - 3
  • Comments - 5

The previous one seemed to be showing some signs of life, but this one was dead. This was even more puzzling because the founders of this group had a community site that had a much better quality of discussion.

Let's take another example - YouTube. The videos are great, but the comments are worse than bad. They mostly consist of people shouting over each other, cursing the other, their ancestors, their cousins and their religions. Is this what human beings have come to?  A conversation I once had with a fellow participant in a breath & meditation program comes to mind. "If we did have many lives before," she asked, "then why are there more people alive today than 1000 years ago. Where'd all the new people come from?" My answer half in jest was, "Perhaps some of us were animals in our past lives." Seems pretty apt in this context :)

 

There are successful communities out there.  The ones that I'm mostly interested in are those that encourage learning amongst members. Yahoo Answers has 24M uniques, but it is rare to find a good, educational discussion on it. 

The mark of a good community is the quality of the participation - how many questions get answered satisfactorily, how many discussions get concluded successfully. For that to happen, the following are essential ingredients:-

  • First, the questions need to be good.  We want people who've tried answering their own questions themselves, spent the time doing the research, and then asked.
  • Then there need to be people willing to contribute, watch the discussion and provide answers. People are busy working, and don't have time to answer many, many questions. How can we route them the discussions/questions that they'd be interested in?
  • Then the answers have to be good. Quality people need to continue to participate. They need to continue to find value.
  • There also needs to be a high degree of self-moderation with technology assist.

All of these feed into the level of usefulness of the community.

So what gives?  Why aren't groups/forums etc. driving engagement?    That is a journey we'll be on for some time, but here's the Top 3 list of what drives engagement:-

  1. A host with a reputation in the field. This can be an individual, or entity. Their job is to attract the initial high-quality participants, get them to invite their own high-quality associates, oversee the site and get out of the way.
  2. Tools to nominate/elect moderators, automate building of reputation, flagging and other such functions. Moderators can't do their jobs without tools.
  3. Funding - a site can't run on an empty stomach for too long. It must become self-sufficient, else its promoters will lost interest.

Successful communities can indeed be created without following these, but their operators will require more work. A hint - you will need to think carefully about the nature of  your community - who gets admitted, how they find you or you find them, how they might remain engaged, productive, educated and contributing. Finally, technology is not the whole answer but better technology helps you enlist help from others. It also helps your members spend their valuable time only on things that matter to them.