Lurkers Anonymous: Motivate and Engage Online and Everywhere Else

In the book Freakonomics, author Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner discuss “the hidden side of everything.” They look at non-traditional correlations, asking questions like “what do school teachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?” and “why do drug dealers still live with their mothers.” More powerful than the quirky applied economic exercises of this book is what it tells us about incentives. In applying Levitt’s reasoning to the online lurking phenomenon, perhaps we will better understand to engage and be engaged (note: Dubner, a NY Times writer, is the literary force behind the book while Levitt, an economist, is the brains).

There a fundamental view from Freakonomics on incentives:

Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life. And understanding them – or, often, ferreting them out – is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crimes to sports cheating to online dating.

To understand how to engage and be engaged then we need a formula for mapping out user incentives.

In any query, Levitt seems to follow this approach:

1. Ask a question about a phenomenon
2. Find data that can tell us something about the object of study
3. Propose connections between the data and the phenomena we are trying to explain
4. Draw conclusions about our phenomena based on the data

This is a simple and perhaps obvious rendering of economic analysis. By applying this to the lurking phenomena we will develop a methodology for engaging different types of lurkers.  As I will illustrate in an upcoming post, I disagree with the traditional online engagement pyramid that lumps users into a 90-9-1 breakdown.  Therefore different methods work with different users in different contexts.

Do you know of any good data out there for our study?    In looking at user incentives, what is the right question to ask?

Here’s are some videos of Stephen Levitt discussing his approach:

Why incentives don’t work

Why do crack dealers still live with their mothers?