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I love lurkers, I just haven’t found a meaningful way to measure them.
John Chen and I got into a little debate during our session at ASAE’s 2013 Annual Meeting about the value of lurkers in an online community. The Daily Now (see page 3) and Associations Now both latched on to the debate, and set off a minor flurry of comments.
Based on my reading of research about online communities and my experience applying this research with my clients and on the communities I’ve personally launched, here’s my position on lurkers:
It’s significantly more difficult to measure the value a lurker imparts to a community than an engaged member
Yes, lurkers may receive value from the community. Yes, lurking is member engagement, just as opening emails is member engagement, which is good for every organization.
But there are levels of engagement. Just as going to a conference is a higher level of engagement than attending a webinar, contributing to an online community is a higher engagement level than lurking. Do you prefer higher levels of engagement? And if you don’t have contributions, you have nothing to lurk on.
Most importantly, lurkers are virtually impossible to measure. How do you know if users are getting value from the community (notification open rates don’t count as having read them)?
Active engagement is a far more accurate measure of a community’s success.
Don’t be satisfied with passive definitions of engagement. At some point you will be asked by management or the board to justify your community’s existence. They will be far more accepting of a rationale based on high levels of active engagement than the difficult-to-prove argument that lurkers are receiving value.
Why would any organization invest tens of thousands of dollars in software that is designed to engage members in a conversation with each other, and yet be satisfied with the outdated 90-9-1 ratio of lurkers, responders, and conversation starters?
I think I know why (this is gonna sting): nearly every organization online community is failing to generate the expected levels of engagement, so we overvalue the benefits that lurkers provide to the community. These low engagement levels almost always come from failure to apply basic community management best practices, not by some fault of the community software platform.
Of course there’s a caveat: an online community exists within a much larger member engagement ecosystem. It’s just one piece of the engagement puzzle for most organizations. If members are engaging in a committee, but not on the online community, that’s probably okay. And in researching this post, I revisited some papers about active lurkers. Active lurkers do things like privately share content from the community with their peers, and privately contact and network with other community members. Active lurkers certainly add value to the community, but again: their effect is very difficult quantify relative to that of contributors.
The choice is yours. Will you continue overvaluing the benefits lurkers create and have a community with fuzzy ROI, or focus on growing your contributing members and creating a vibrant community?
More importantly: which community will look better to the boss or board when you’re asked to justify it?
When we charged for membership and use for the early online community called The WELL we had the typical minority of members actually posting to our conferences with what has become accepted as the typical 80/20 or 90/10 or more truthfully 95/5 split of lurkers/posters. We used the term “lurkers” in the negative sense. Yet at the same time we glorified these people because whether they posted or not, even whether they logged in or not, they were paying us the monthly membership fee of $8/month. That kept the WELL afloat. That was part of our ROI.
Today paid sites are very rare. Lurkers don’t help support the community unless – as you described – they help distribute links to your community. Of course you can try to run polls or surveys to engage some of them. But one can’t take community lightly. There must be a compelling purpose that provides incentive to participate. There must be a focus that draws people to have skin in the game. Better to have a smaller more talkative community than an open general focus one that underperforms the initial projections.
Great comment, Cliff. In the industry I work in, members pay dues to belong to an organization and are usually dumped into an online community without their express consent. This creates a very different community ecosystem than most communities and forums you see online today.
Ben, in the communities you are familiar with, is there an option to “like”, “one up”, or “one down” a post, comment, blog, etc?…similar to what Facebook and other platforms are doing.
For instance, I’m not a frequent contributor to my Facebook profile, rather I’m more of a lurker, gauging public opinion on current events and liking statuses. Sometimes, I’ll like ridiculous/unessential post/rants just for the sake of entertainment…can’t believe some of the stuff people put out there.
Perhaps, this could be a way to “engage” lurkers more in POPC’s…
Thanks for not lurking here, Brent! Yes, several of the community products I work with have this functionality. I’d prefer to see people posting to discussions, but Liking or Rating or Thumbs-Upping at least lets you know who’s engaging.
Funny enough, I had the same thought literally yesterday! I was writing an article on community management lessons we can take from Reddit (haven’t published it yet!), and I realized that the upvote/downvote has the byproduct of giving lurkers an outlet to participate – and potentially coaxing them out of the dark! Once you start to put an investment into the community, I feel like you’re more likely to deepen your engagement in the future.
It’s the equivalent of eyes on a page. Exposure v. engagement…which is a its own metric.
If you run CPM ad campaigns within your community then you can measure the value of lurkers with regards eyes on ads, but of course not all communities run such ads.
I don’t have any figures as to the conversion of lurkers to contributing community members, but I do know from experience that keeping content open for lurkers to read, and lowering the barriers to participation (eg trying to keep logging, and registration as slim-lined as possible) is the best way to pull people in. However having said that, I have known some lurkers to lurk for years (coming back frequently to read new posts etc) before they actually participate. So at least we know our community is sticky if nothing else
Thanks, Sue. The research shows that lurkers converting to contributors is the exception to the rule. The best approach is to convert newcomers into contributors.
Interesting conversation and good point about the difficulty of measuring ‘lurkers’ engagement’ (I personally prefer the term ’empowered listeners’ [see: ‘Me a lurker? How ignorant of you! I’m an empowered listener | http://km4meu.wordpress.com/2012/05/18/1309/%5D.
(One of) The point(s) is: it’s not just about your community but also about how your community relates to a wider ecosystem of communities and how these communities establish bridges with each other, formally from active core members of both communities, or informally via other members. You may want to expand your inquiry into that broader ecosystem.
As for your own community, you might actually raise a questionnaire or short survey specifically targeting the not-so-active members in it, letting them know that you believe in their contribution but that you need to qualify how that contribution helps the common good, and ask them to share examples of how they have benefitted from being a member. That, combined with regular membership trimming (e.g. every year, giving people one month to confirm they want to remain members if they haven’t posted anything and if they don’t respond, pruning them out) and focusing on the balance in the conversation space would help. The latter point is about ensuring that some people are not over-dominating the space. In my favourite CoP (www.km4dev.org) we have that problem: a few people are so vocal and articulate that other members don’t dare contribute although they’re actively following.
At last, face-to-face events certainly help bridge gaps among active and not as active members in any community, and with a bit of a buddying/mentoring process it helps turn some of them to active members…
Hope this helps!
Ewen
I belong to a group of people that are parents of multiples for which I read the digest of forum posts every day. I don’t contribute to the discussions but I pay my dues every year because I value the content that is delivered to me every morning. I think reading the content whether it be print or online is a form of engagement and periodically they will survey the members and I tell them I value the online forums.
I’m also an online community manager of a private platform that produces 20,000 posts each month. We poke, prod, and promote members to contribute content but there are always going to be those that value the content they are reading each morning without ever contributing. I know they value the content because we’ve asked.
I’d expect that different technologies (forums, email discussion lists, Google Groups, Facebook groups, online communities etc) have different baseline percentages of lurkers. It would be fascinating to see some research on this.
I would be that the percentage of lurkers is directly related to the average length of a member’s contribution; the easier it is to participate the fewer lurkers, probably. Anyone seen any research on this?