Lurkers Anonymous: Motivate and Engage Online and Everywhere Else

In the world of online lore the 90-9-1 pyramid of lurking has become the stuff of urban legend: unsubstantiated with evidence yet people believe it to be true.   We all know the diagram, like some warped, lurker-saturated diet, the pyramid represents hearsay at best and provides us with one of our most well known and oft cited “statistics” for online behavior.  In my view we have it completely wrong, from the very shape itself to the conclusion it draws.

Ari Herzog decided to do an experiment on his blog AriWriter to test the theory of lurking and see just how many people would respond to an automated email asking them to comment.

I experimented with a new prodding tactic last night and emailed everyone who hadn’t commented here in 180 days.

You can thank (or blame) WordPress plugin developer Ajith Edassery for his invention called Contact Commenters, which was the impetus for a customized albeit automated email message sent via my blog server to about 800 people.

The result? 82-comments from various levels of lurkers and active users all talking about the topic of not talking.  Ari cited the following diagram as perhaps a better way of describing the lurking phenomenon and his test seemed to verify the Forrester results to some degree with varying levels of the ladder weighing in on his experiement.

In looking purely at the numbers, his experiment actually lends more credence to the lurking pyramid than the ladder.  Out of 800 emails sent for targeted commenters he received about a 10% return (82 comments as of 1/18/2010).  That means Ari managed to get the 1% of super users and the 9% of casual commenters to respond, (this may actually be optimistic however considering that at least 20% of the 82 comments came from Ari).

Based purely on the numbers looked at as a whole, Ari’s experiment seems to confirm what we already know: in any given online community 10% of your eyeballs will contribute. That’s if you want to look at just numbers.  But I have a new theory for lurking, which explains the results in Ari’s experiment and will help us to understand online behavior.

Circles of Interest (COI)

Circles of Interest (“COI”) describe the behavior that person exhibits online when dealing with certain topics and communities.  Rather than viewing web users as falling into a hierarchy, COI show that users behave differently depending on context.  In any given context the following factors determine a user’s interest in participating:

1. Comfort level with the destination (private v. public)
2. Standing in the community (expert v. novice)
3. Subject matter (curiosity v. passion)
4. Incentive to participate (direct v. indirect)

We will go into each of these factors and provide a more detailed diagram in a future post.

In applying this idea generally to Ari’s experiment we must note that everyone on his email list had an interest in social media and online marketing (the subject of his blog).  At some point or other they had commented on his blog.  At the very least, they entered personal information to a form on his site; this itself is a form of participation and perhaps one of the key behaviors where businesses can first start to gauge a users interests, (alternatively: filling in forms to gain access to sites has become so commonplace online that it does not count towards engagement – another post perhaps?).

With Ari’s current campaign, he had already created comfort with the site.  His call to action invited all levels of expertise and actually put more value on those who participated less (the target to 800 of the 180-day non-commenters).  Everyone on his email list had varying levels of interest in the subject matter, so at a basic level we can conclude the incentive here was being able to delurk with the crowd: not having to come out alone.  Does this type of targeted group engagement for lurkers actually work?  If we assume that everyone who commented on Ari’s post was in fact one of his prime targets, then yes.  However, a greater analysis of the experiment would likely reveal that his commenters were a mix of superusers, casual commenters, and readers.  Without more concrete data on how many of the actual 800 commented we cannot draw a proper conclusion.  As food for thought in closing: an interesting experiment would be restricting comments to the 800 only – this begs the question: can exclusivity motivate?

Honing in on the circles of interest for users means finding out where users find it important to engage.  It isn’t always that a user won’t engage.  They can be a superuser on one site and a lurker on another.  Often a business or community manager can’t control whether a user has an interest in their site.  As the late, great Bob Marley said: “you can’t please all the people all the time … so get up, stand up …”  The best we can hope to do is when someone shows an interest in what we have to offer see if we can either expose them to additional offerings that meet those interests or provide them with direction towards additional destinations that will meet their needs.  There is no one-size-fits all.