Check out the current discussion with Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies, Dr Michael Wu, on the subject of the 90-9-1 rule, feedback loops, and the rest, in the LinkedIn Online Community Manager Group.
A second question on LinkedIn from Dr Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies:
Is there something more accurate and precise than the 90-9-1 rule out there? IMHO, Lorenz Curve and Gini Coefficient. Do you know anything else? The Economics of 90-9-1
My answer as part of yesterday’s Online Community Manager group discussion kind of sums up where I’ve got to after reading Dr Wu’s blog previous post and this latest one:
I like the approach you have using economics-based models. I’ve come at it from a more particpant-observer type sociological point of view, so what I’d like to see is for your analysis to return a new ‘rule of thumb’ based on your in-depth data analysis.
The 90-9-1 rule is useful to community managers because it helps provides a starting point for understanding, as Arantza says above. For example it would be useful to know from a practical point of view whether for more open communities (as opposed to niche market research or project based communities) the 90-9-1 is a useful tool for helping launch a new community.
It’s partly about creating a social dashboard that can explain to a member of senior management why a certain kind of community activity may help or hinder greater participation.
I did this kind of work previously in the National Health Service, creating simple reports on the success of a national public health initiative, which worked well for senior managers (government ministers in that case).
So I come back to the challenge, the age old relationship between lab & fieldwork if you like, what would be the new rule of thumb/thumbs?
I’ve chosen to highlight multiple feedback loops as a useful tool, to help drive top contributors for example (taken from the HP Labs research), but I take your point that for commercial ROI purposes more precision is required. To put it another way in such a dynamic social context how does precision allow you to create heuristics for day to day community management?
A question on LinkedIn from Dr Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies:
Do you believe in the 90-9-1 rule? Do you think it is a hard and fast rule, or do you believe that it is just a rule of thumb?
What do 10+ years of data across 200+ communities say about the 90-9-1 rule? http://is.gd/aNWvx
My answer as part of the Online Community Manager group discussion kind of sums up where I’ve got to, hence why I thought it worth reproducing here:
Hi Michael,
It’s getting a little late on Friday evening here in the UK but I wanted to share my experience in case it’s of use to you.
I tried to use the 90-9-1 rule as a heuristic to help guide community development here: http://www.siftgroups.com/blog/heuristic-tools-help-community-managers – and used that rule of thumb in designing a drupal-based community metric package to help monitor the balanced between readers and contributors in various facets of measurable development.
In addition I believe it’s worth considering the value of designing feedback loops, so that your top contributors for example are rewarded for their efforts. I did a slideshare sketching out that concept here: http://www.slideshare.net/stuartgh/feedback-loops-3363641 – in fact that got me thinking about the broader topic of ‘viral loops’ but that’s another story with I was sharing with some great people at the Social Media World Forum in London this week.
Otherwise thinking about the 90-9-1 rule also has underlined to me recently the value of measuring offline use of online communities, especially to the majority of ‘readers’. I’ve blogged on that aspect here: http://www.stuart-hall.com/2010/02/08/measuring-e2-0-evolution-of-hello-bah-com/
Hope that’s of use.
Cheers,
Stuart G. Hall
@stuartgh
PS: I’m off on a skiing today but hopefully I’ll get chance to read Dr Wu’s in-depth piece on the subject when I get back from Rauris in Austria!
Pic from Ava Maria Seven’s photostream.
The answer to how to radically reduce your R&D costs is to involve customers in the product development cycle, using social tools as well as face to face meetings. That’s the powerful experience of ‘community chick’ Dawn Lacallade of SolarWinds, the US-based web-based network management software people at yesterday’s Telligent webinar. For your consideration I screen-grabbed the slide in question below, and should have the full set online shortly.
How using social tools to involve customers can reduce R&D costs
In summary, thanks to this intro text on the Telligent blog, SolarWinds has been able to lower costs, increase profits, and speed product enhancements by focusing on these core areas: (1) Aligning multiple departments around one community (2) Evaluating metrics that tie to company objectives (3) Monitoring growth and participation (4) Identifying influencers, contributors, and connectors.
I also liked the fact that when quizzed as to why there was a 30% involvement rate of staff in the community Dawn said this fitted their community, but it was for each business to find the balance right for them – neither swamping a community nor under-supporting it.
Full set of slides and notes, and a recording of the webinar here.
Found on the blog beamtenherrschaft, a research blog about information systems, complex networks, technology enhanced learning, social software, communities of practice, web 2.0 and more:
“Classic argumentative discussions can be found in a variety of domains from traditional scientific publishing to today’s modern social software. An interactive argumentative discussion usually consists of an initial proposition stated by a single creator and followed by supporting propositions or counter-propositions from other contributors, usually part of the same virtual community. Thus, the actual argumentation semantics is hidden in the content created by the contributors. In this article, the authors describe an abstract model for argumentation, which captures the semantics independently of the domain. Following a modularized approach, the authors also take into account additional important aspects of the argumentation and present a possible use of the framework in the context of virtual communities.”
To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below (costs $30).
http://www.infosci-on-demand.com/content/details.asp?ID=34158
Interesting comparison on the difference between B2C and B2B communities from B2B expert Vanessa DiMauro who says on the community managers’ forum e-mint: “B2B online community building is less common than B2C communities and is just starting to garner attention in the media. I have been working exclusively in B2B for many years and i can say the entire strategy, process, rules and metrics are very different than b2c.” Sound interesting to you too?
Worth also checking out Vanessa’s Leader Networks White Paper (pdf) on the subject of creating professional peer-to-peer communities.
One final thought from discussion on e-mint is that for B2B community management it helps if you have some business experience to bring to bear. For example Vanessa’s presentation makes clear B2B communities benefit from simple presentation, not overloading with information. One further issue would be to discuss the pros and cons of anonymity in this B2B space, and possibly the value of profiles. One to come back to, for sure.
See below for her slideshare on this subject:
Just got hold of this recent study from HP Labs which demonstrates the feedback loop between attention and contributions to online communities. The abstract provides a nice introduction:
A significant percentage of online content is now published and consumed via the mechanism of crowdsourcing. While any user can contribute to these forums, a disproportionately large percentage of the content is submitted by very active and devoted users, whose con- tinuing participation is key to the sites’ success. As we show, people’s propensity to keep participating increases the more they contribute, suggesting motivating factors which increase over time.
This paper demonstrates that submitters who stop receiving attention tend to stop contributing, while prolific contributors attract an ever increasing number of followers and their attention in a feedback loop. We demonstrate that this mechanism leads to the observed power law in the number of contributions per user and support our assertions by an analysis of hundreds of millions of contributions to top content sharing websites Digg.com and Youtube.com.
What’s important about this is helping frame community management strategies to ensure the valuable ‘advocates’ in a community remain active, by ensuring the value of peer attention is factored into sustaining their involvement. This the author’s recognise if paramount as “a disproportionate number of contribution to online peer production efforts are made by a small number of very active users”. And here’s the maths that supports this:
So what sustains this feedback loop? The authors suggest that to answer this question “one needs to look into the constituents of a contributor’s potential audience”, or to put it simply the number of fans/subscribers they have — a feature of both Digg and YouTube — could well be the missing evolutionary link:
Because a considerable portion of attention a contributor receives can be attributed to her fans, the contributor’s publicity (measured by the number of fans) could act as the important missing link between popularity and productivity. A contributor with many past contributions (high productivity) naturally has many fans (high publicity). Her fans naturally pay a lot of attention to her next contribution (high popularity). This in turn incentivizes the contributor to make more contributions.
Conclusion? (1) Have a strategy to support your top contributors. (2) As part of this measurable strategy make sure the means for them to gain attention work well.
Getting these right could make the difference between success and failure in the long term. After all don’t 90% of posts get created by 1% of users, according to Jakob Nielsen?
This is why top contributors matter
Indeed Nielsen adds a useful caveat to this question:
If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value.
Feedback loops of attention in peer production, Fang Wu, Dennis M. Wilkinson and Bernardo A. Huberman , 2009/05/12, arXiv:0905.1740 (pdf). Thanks to the Complexity Digest for the initial research reference.
Update May 2010: A simple way to boost influencers’ (not precisely the same as ‘top contributors’ but still relevant) credibility with your users is by making their content more searchable, & by promoting it via tweets & bookmarking: http://ow.ly/1FUtM
Came across this nice Slideshare on Community 2.0: The Business of Online Communities, and spotted HBO’s Standards page on slide 29 with these examples of acceptable and unacceptable comment:
While we wouldn’t consider using examples like these, it got me thinking what would be good examples be for professional online communities?
Likewise we wouldn’t have a line which talks about “reserving the right to remove any material that does not (in our judgment) comply with these standards and to revoke posting privileges at our discretion and without warning or explanation” as per HBO’s. But what would be best practice on professional communities?
Why are profiles important?
The way profiles works reflects the fact that the quality of communities reflects individual members’ actions, which is the prime driver of the success of a community.
If a member decides not to complete their profile then they’ve chosen to be relatively anonymous, whether they know it or not. But if as community manager you have a large percentage of members that are anonymous this will obviously negative impact on the quality of conversations. Conversely if you have a community where most members have a rich profile which they keep up to date then it’s likely to result in positive conversations. And positive conversations sustained over time help sustain a successful online community.
The value of measuring profiles
Consider the value of profiles in light of the 2008 Tribalization of Business study which found that “the greatest obstacles to making a community work are not technology-related or getting funding, but getting people involved in the community (51%), finding enough time to manage the community (45%), and attracting people to the community (34%)”. Interestingly the same study also reports a disconnection between what organisations’ communities say they are going to measure to track success and those they actually do record. Perhaps to drive the message home we should stress the value of a metric which demonstrates the degree to which profiles have been completed as a proxy measure of community participation, especially considering the findings on the core importance of profiles?
“Based on research in the field of virtual communities, most business thinkers will agree that there are 4 fundamental pillars to successful communities – content, members, member profiles and transactions. If managed properly, these four dynamics can lead to economics of increasing returns that characterize most successful communities.” (‘Understanding the Power of Communities – Even When You Do Not Have Critical Mass of Users’)
The role of the community manager
If members of a community take part in discussions, and express a wish to be part of a group, then it’s the job of the community manager to ask them to complete their profile so other members of the group know who they are discussing with.
The benefits of this approach will show in the quality and number of community discussions. It’s a matter of trust; you are more likely to engage in conversation with when you trust who you are talking to.
To put it another way if you simply invite people to participate with a one-to-many email blast when they’ve shown little desire to take part in discussions, you may get a lot of readers, but you won’t get many people joining in discussions.
Influencing the community eco-system using profiles
From a more scientific viewpoint it’s the role of the community manager to set an evolutionary example in the online eco-system by completing his or her profile to encourage others to imitate. Similarly it’s down to community champions to fully complete their profile as they are leading by example in discussions. In turn community managers and champions should aim to refresh their profile every month; profiles are (to quote Chris Brogan) not a place to dump a snapshot of where you’ve been. It’s an opportunity to stay connected to people, and to demonstrate where you are now, and where you plan to go next.
There’s the additional benefit that when community managers or champions ask members to complete their profile when they first take part in discussions that other readers also see this in public and understand from the benefit in context, not just the principle, and are encouraged to make the same step themselves of adding their profile to take part in discussions.
Consider the scenario of two John Smiths
Two John Smiths are in the same discussion and no-one knows which is which as they haven’t ticked the boxes to show their profile, or have no detail in their displayed profile.
In this situation it’s the job of the community manager to invite them publicly to add their profile so other individuals, as with a normal conversation, take part in discussion on the basis of knowing who they are talking to. It’s obvious that you are much likely to take part in a discussion with people you know. In LinkedIn in the absence of a community manager due to the scale of the undertaking they’ve automated the process so that you are encouraged to complete your profile with a graphic which shows how complete it is.
You are going to invite people for a reason – so they will take part in discussions. To do this successfully they need to complete their profile so people are encouraged to talk to people. This is connected with the benefit of using real names as community members’ display names, rather than anonymous ‘usernames’ for online communities. Understanding how profiles work helps see that non-unique real names are the way forward, as it’s about getting individual members of the community to tell other members who they are, so that other members feel they want to take part in discussion with them. See the recent case of MySpace, which is facing tough competition from the behemoth Facebook, which changed its software to make the use of real names the option of choice for its members. (Meanwhile Faceboook recently took note of the power of its members by putting out its Terms of Service out to vote by the community).
The power of scale unleashed
Indeed the next step, to reiterate, the next step in the process of valuing profiles is for the community manager to advice members how to keep the profile up to date: it shouldn’t just be a place to ‘dump a snapshot of where you’ve been’, but also where you are going. The (‘fractal’) business bottom line is that the more individuals within a community take this approach the more this scales up and positively impacts on the value of the community as a whole.