Lurkers Anonymous: Motivate and Engage Online and Everywhere Else

Does it matter how many people read your work or watch your video or retweet your tweets?  If attention is capital on the web and you are in the business of doing anything online then the answer is absolutely. Making others passionate about your product or idea, getting attention deficit investment for your little corner of the web means everything. How can you get people to buy in? Let’s look at some examples.

• Apple
• Wikipedia
• Facebook

Apple’s forums are well trafficked and generate much engagement. As the first stop for technical questions about Apple products, the forums provide a place to get answers. The very nature of Q&A communities lend themselves to greater participation because novice users (“NooBs”) have incentive to post in order to solve their specific problems. This invites engagement by seasoned users and provides them with a stage to demonstrate leadership and know how. A symbiotic engagement, the Apple platform takes passion for Apple products and funnels it into applied engagement.

Wikipedia is a funny animal, which makes contributors to the online encyclopedia project feel they are part of something bigger, that what they are doing on the site is of great importance to the world.  This is perhaps one of the greatest sources of inspiration, both for yourself and others, seeing how what you do is critically necessary and important.  It is also an often overlooked incentives in place of things like money, rewards, and prizes.  More so than any of these a passionate user will be an engaged users who contributes to your site.  Now this does not mean that every user in a passionate community will be active.  Everybody has a different button that turns them on: there will be individuals attracted by the passion in your community, they may even be passionate about the subject themselves, but still won’t comment.  Wikipedia has emerged as the go to place for information because passionate people built it.

In my observation there is more engagement per user on Facebook than any other destination on the web (if someone has statistics please share).  With over 350 million users, what accounts for the upsurge in activity on that site?  I will break it down to three factors:

1. Concentric Circles of Interest (check out my post explaining this subject).  Facebook is a great example of what leveraging circles of interest can do for your site.  The sheer numbers of people you are likely to find on Facebook that you know makes it easy to build a critical mass network (typically around 20 connections).  This provides an intuitive basis for people to exchange happenings in their lives and other items of mutual interest (many of these items will likely form some basis for this person being your friend in the first place).  Then the curiosity factor kicks in.  We start “stalking” people on Facebook that we are curious about.  Before long we are getting friend requests outside our circles, sometimes sending them to the stalked, and so on.  It will be interesting to see how, as networks grow on Facebook and become a mix of business and professional, the engagement changes.  Will people post as much and as often if they are “friends” with their boss?
2. Easy Engagement Tools – in my opinion the feature that is making Facebook so successful at engagement is the commenting and liking feature.  With the simple click of a “thumbs up” you can tell your entire network that you like what was posted.  Adding more detail of why you like it is a secondary function which is also easy to use.  When trying to stimulate engagement in your community focus on providing easy to use tools which foster engagement.
3. Robust Privacy Settings – it is easy to be invisible on Facebook and still participate.  My mom has a Facebook profile, but has adjusted her settings so only my family can see her activity.  She is invisible to everyone on Facebook unless she decides to comment on their postings.  And she can still comment on postings and retreat back to invisibility if she so chooses (which she does).  Having easy to manage privacy settings set people free to engage how they want to engage.

Looking at engagement and passion does not mean that every user has to write lengthy comments or lead a discussion forum.  People can be passionate about something just by following it.  I love New York Jets Football.  Enjoy watching games on Sunday, wear Jets apparel, and inundate my children with Jets chants and a love of the game from the time they are little babies and can show any sign of understanding.  Yet my level of passion for the Jets is expressed in a more passive way than my brother in law who goes to a lot of games, or my friend Tracy who knows every player and can recite stats.  I’ve also never really played organized football.  But I’m passionate about it.  I’m inspired because there is a part of me that feels what that team does on Sundays is important.  Can you create that same feeling in your community?  How do you do it?

Here’s a video on Motivation: