This is worth going over on how to keep online community healthy and engage new members. Gail started "the Well" and is pushing out notes from Forum One's Community Conference.
Link: Lessons from Online Community Summit « Connectable Dots.
xamples of high barrier to entry include http://www.sermo.com/ — Social networking for doctors: Trusted by physicians because they look up your license to admit you to hang around with other doctors. (That’s way tougher than The WELL!)
* Research on collaboration implies designers should assign challenging specific goals!
This was tested at the research project at the Movie Lens site. The site’s goal was to get lots of user-rated movies.
* Don’t just ask to “please rate as many as you can” but ask people for specific targets: please rate 10 this week was compared to please rate 30; 90; 120. PROVEN: a specific goal is preferable, and a higher goal works even better so long as it is doable. (A drop off in contributions was seen when they asked for 120 movie ratings in a week. Most likely this was seen as impossible. Researchers expected a softer goal to keep the group happier and performing better, but saw the higher but not impossible goal of 90 yielded the best outcome.)
An audience question was asked about aggregate goals for group (Moveon, etc) From research on NPR fundraising, etc. aggregate goals DO help. Tell what others are donating or accomplishing … but tell about the 90th percentile, not top 10% of donors.
* Speculation from the researchers anticipated that people will shirk work that is assigned collectively to a group but the opposite effect was seen. An arbitrary group membership was announced to users. The other group members were unseen, there was no feedback or ability to observe the group’s work independently. Still, in this arbitrary group members showed loyalty to making the group succeed, and did better compared to those not told they were in a group.
* If you’ve got some kind of karma rating, when you show people at the bottom how they compare to median they will move up. (unless it looks impossible)
* If you tell top producers that they are excellent they will do less. (But they may do something different and even more special if challenged to do that.)
(He shared the amusing tidbit that Psych research (where deception is required in almost any test) and Economics research (where there is no deception allowed) were the two study types merged for this study. The solution: Selective truth. No lies used, but no whole truth was told to various sample groups.)
On welcoming newcomers:
* What happens in response to a first post or any initial contribution matters
* Getting a human response makes a 12% difference in retention.
* The tone of the response does not matter! Fights, praise, whatever!
* Accuracy of information in the response does not matter either! Response creates stickiness.
The Hawthorn effect is a problem in studying this stuff, too. (That’s from an old AT&T study in the 20s. More lighting = better productivity; then less lighting also = more productivity! One might cite the Hawthorn effect as a reason for redesigns, actually.)
