My friend Dan Shamir has created this adorable Twitter Birdy. Birdy is a cute air Twitter client that sits on your desktop and twitts whenever one of your friends updates his status. Try it yourself. Almost makes you feel like you’re in the country….(please note it’s still a little buggy).
Chris Heuer posts about the new FriendFeed Rooms and says that they replace the old mailing lists. I tend to agree with him. As Chris points out:
We can have them
I love the new Friend Feed Rooms feature. Now people with similar interests can more easily share content and discuss it. Currently there seems to be no search capability for public rooms which I think should definitely be added, however, you can find some interesting rooms here. Some rooms I joined:
Social Media Club - administrator - Chris Heuer
Scripting News - administrator - Dave Winer
Space Vidcast is covering The Phoenix Lander’s seven minute decent to Mars on Ustream.TV right now! You can view it below or go to Ustream’s site to chat online with others as you’re watching and post your comments. This is definitely Web 2.0 at it’s best.
Some background on the mission:
“The mission to Mars cost around 380 million dollars. The Phoenix Lander has been in transit for ten months. There hasn’t been a successful power landing on Mars since 1976. There is over a 10 minute delay in communications between us and the Phoenix Lander so the Phoenix will have landed before we even know if the decent has started!
The Phoenix Lander was sent to Mars with the intention of looking for signs of life. It is prepared to dig for ice - aka frozen water - aka signs that life was possible.”
Let’s wish them all the best.
Photo credit: NASA
My dear friend Yaniv Golan, CTO of Yedda, had given a brilliant presentation regarding Incentives In Online Social Communities a few weeks ago at The Marker COM.vention and since it’s unfortunately in Hebrew, I wanted to translate it, include some of my own additions, and share it with you.
Online community participation
Let’s start with the obvious question….Why?
Why do users comment? Why do they write blogs? Why do they upload pics to Flickr? Why do they send links to friends?
What are the motives behind user participation in social communities? Understanding why users participate can lead us to understand further how to engage users and increase their participation in online communities. Let’s first learn a bit more about our users.
Membership life cycle for online communities
Amy Jo Kim was the first to propose the idea of a member’s life cycle in an online community (2000). The cycle suggests five phases of a user’s lifecycle within a community:
1) Peripheral (i.e. Lurker) - An outsider, unstructured participation
2) Inbound (i.e. Novice) - New user, invested in the community, on his way to full participation
3) Insider (i.e. Regular) - Committed participator, member of the community
4) Boundary (i.e. Leader) - A member brokering interactions and encouraging/sustaining participation
5) Outbound (i.e. Elder) - On his way to leaving the community, perhaps to another community due to a particular change in the community or personal choice
Power Law of Participation
According to Ross Mayfield:
“The vast majority of users will not have a high level of engagement with a given group, and most tend to be free riders upon community value. But patterns have emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence and high engagement provides a different form of collaborative intelligence……
Digg is the archetype for low threshold participation. Simply Favorite something you find of interest, a one click action. You don’t even have to log in to contribute value, you have Permission to Participate. Del.icio.us taps both personal and social incentives for participation through the low threshold activity of tagging. Remembering the URL is the hardest part, and you have to establish an identity in the system. Commenting requires such identity for sake of spam these days and is an under-developed area. Subscribing requires a commitment of sustained attention which greatly surpasses reading alone. Sharing is the principal activity in these communities, but much of it occurs out of band (email still lives). We Network not only to connect, but leverage the social network as a filter to fend off information overload. Some of us Write, as in blog, and some of us even have conversations. But these are all activities that can remain peripheral to community. To Refactor, Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of engagement — which makes up the core of a community…..Participation in communities plots along a power law with a solid core/periphery model — provided social software supports both low threshold participation and high engagement.”
All users activities in online communities whether low threshold or high engagement activities co-exist within a community to create a form of collective intelligence. Therefore it is key for virtual communities to allow both low threshold and high engagement participation so that users in all 5 phases of their lifecycles will be made to feel comfortable within the community.
Social Platforms - the 1% rule
1) 90% of users are lurkers
2) 9% of users contribute sometimes
3) 1% of users actively participate and are responsible for almost all the action
On Wikipedia for example, participation inequality is even higher. More than 99% of Wikipedia’s users are lurkers. Only 0.2% are active participants. Wikipedia’s most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site’s edits.
We see here that small groups of people often turn out to be the main value creators of social communities. Over time, their actions fuel widespread interaction that engages the lurkers and attracts new users. If continually nurtured, the community can become a self-sustaining generator of content and value.
So let’s go back now to our initial question:
Why do users participate in virtual communities?
According to Peter Kollock in The Economies of Online Cooperation: Gifts and Public Goods in Cyberspace, there are three major reasons for why users contribute in online communities:
1) Anticipated Reciprocity - A user is motivated to contribute to the community in the expectation that he will receive useful help and information in return. Indeed we have seen such active users receiving more help than lurkers.
2) Increased recognition - individuals want recognition for their contributions. the desire for prestige is one of the key motivations for individuals’ contributions in an online community. Contributions will likely increase if they are visible to the whole community and are credited to the contributor. … the powerful effects of seemingly trivial markers of recognition (e.g. stars, ranking) are overwhelming.
3) Sense of efficacy - Individuals may contribute because the act results in a sense that they have had some effect on the community. Wikipedia is a good example of this.
Yet there are also other elements which can motivate users to become active in online communities:
1) Connections within the community - the more friends a user has within a given community, the more important it becomes for him to participate in. Therefore it’s important for online communities to allow users to form friendships easily and encourage a high level of interaction between users.
2) Emotional Safety - a sense of belonging and identifying with the community. Once users become regulars in a community, just like in any offline community, they stop feeling fearful and begin to feel a sense of safety in and identification with the community. The key here is to get these individuals to become regular users in your community and create a cozy and ”feel good” environment for them.
3) Common emotional connection - niche communities that are built around a particular emotional connection/cause between members tend to become more cohesive and experience lower percentages of participation inequality.
4) Altruism - Yossi Vardi coined the term “Dopamine Over IP” - each user transfers dopamine to another user….by contributing content, a user knows that he will cause pleasure to those who view it and those users that forward this content onwards, know the same.
For more reasons why people become active participants in social online communities and the key to Web 2.0’s success, please see my posts:
What’s Behind the Success of Web 2.0? A Psychological Interpretation
http://www.blonde2dot0.com/blog/2007/08/13/web-20-and-the-new-tribalism/
So now you ask…
What are the ways that online communities can overcome participation inequality and increase users’ participation?
1) Make it easy for users to contribute, make them feel confident with their contributions, and share their contributions with other members in the community -> Feeling of influence
2) Make participation a side effect. Let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system.
3) Reward users’ contributions and allow for markers of their contributions. Promote and feature top contributors -> Sense of recognition, sense of community, fulfill anticipated reciprocation
4) Allow users to rank each other within the community and comment on contributions -> sense of community, feeling of influence
3) Platform should be flexible enough to transform with the changing needs of its members -> feeling of influence
According to virtual community pioneer Jonathan Bishop, online community managers need to also change the beliefs of lurkers on their site in order to increase participation. Lurkers, believe that they do not need to post messages or that they are being helpful by not posting. Such beliefs prevent them from carrying out their desires to be social and participate in the community. Therefore it is up to the community managers to change this attitude by use of persuasive text or by other means.
A few more useful tips for community managers
1) Simplicity is key - participating in the community should be simple for the user. The simpler it is, the higher the participation rate will be.
2) Allow some actions to be performed by non-registered users.
3) Give people something good to talk about - as always, content is king. If your content is interesting and appealing enough, people will be eager to contribute.
4) Display the activity on your site. No one likes to go into an empty restaurant. Already on the homepage show users all the great stuff that’s happening within the community.
5) Offline events are a great way to make a community even more cohesive and virtually active.
Thursday night Garage Geeks hosted Sergey Brin, founder of Google, who was nice enough to answer many of our questions about Google’s past, future, and his view of the Israeli startup scene . So many questions were answered actually that my camera’s battery died at a certain point so I apologize for this video not showing the full Q & A session (though it shows most of it). Thank you to Yossi Vardi and Garage Geeks for making this event happen. Here is the video from the event:
The last set of tickets for MashBash Tel Aviv was just released so anyone who still doesn’t have a ticket and wants to go, should RSVP immediately. No more tickets will be released and there will not be any available at the event itself.
In addition to MashBash, Mashable will also be covering at least 10 Israeli startups throughout their Israel Media Tour Series. I will proudly be covering the Israel Media Tour Series as the exclusive guest writer for Mashable.
One week ago Nine Inch Nails surprised their fans with a special treat giving away their new album Slip absolutely free on their website. The album is available for download in a variety of formats: MP3, lossless at CD quality and 24/96 WAVE format, which means even higher-than-CD quality. Downloaders also receive a PDF with artwork and credits. This is not the first time that Trent Reznor is sharing his music for free. Here’s a little history for you.
In 2007 NIN produced an album called The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust and made it available to fans as a free download. Many thought that Trent was only mimicking Radiohead who asked fans to put their own price on the group’s release in the same year. Though I believe that by the time you’re finished reading this post, you will see that NIN are true innovators that have achieved quite a lot since being released from their major-label recording contract last year. The fact that NIN has given away music various times in extremely high quality formats and released it online using a variety of tools shows that it is serious about this model. This is not just an “experiment” for them like it was for Radiohead who have since said that they will not be releasing online again.
According to Mashable:
Reznor called Radiohead’s effort a “marketing gimmick,” and Yorke’s latest statement does nothing to disprove it. Reznor did it right. He set out his plan very clearly, and he’s doing well, earning 1.6 million dollars from album sales in the first couple of weeks, according to him.
In March 2008 NIN released a portion of their album Ghosts for free via BitTorrent. According to TorrentFreak, the band confirmed that they had uploaded the album themselves to sites like The Pirate Bay, Waffles.fm and What.cd. The NY Times quotes Trent describing file sharing as “a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.” Trent Reznor himself admitted to downloading music using BitTorrent and being a former user of OiNK. The band also offered a digital download of the entire 36-track collection for a flat $5 from its site and Amazon.
On May 4th of this year, NIN released their single ‘Echoplex’ for free via their iLike page and told fans to check the NIN website the next day for a surprise. The surprise came the next day when fans found out they were receiving a full-length NIN album as a gift from Trent for their continued love and support. What an amazing way to cause a buzz and increase the love of fans! Everybody was twitting and digging about the free album.
NIN is truly paving the way for future artists to find new means of distributing (and profiting from) their music. As fadingsignal comments on Digg:
I just wanted to say to those under the impression that more frequent releases could mean less quality, that an artist is typically limited to releasing one album every couple of years mostly due to the surrounding circumstances with a record label. The actual recording process may only take a matter of weeks or months, but everything that happens afterward - the mastering, the artwork, the PR and marketing bullshit, the tour plans, the single/radio release schedule, music video shoots/scheduling - those eat up a lot of time. Trent has really tightened up his audio engineering crew, and with Rob Sheridan now serving as his art director (who I can’t help but also feel is a big influence on Trent where all things Internet are concerned), NIN has become essentially autonomous - they can create and release on their own timeline - the recording industry marketing schedules don’t matter anymore.
Everything surrounding music is changing, and Trent and his crew are definitely at the forefront showing the mainstream how it should be done.
Yet other than revolutionizing the way that artists distribute music, I think it is also important to note that NIN is a truly Web 2.0 band that is communicating with its fans using social platforms and proving to everyone that you don’t need a major-label recording company to promote you.
NIN are on Facebook, MySpace, upload their videos to YouTube, upload their images to Flickr, Trent writes posts on the NIN site for his fans and even has a digg this! button on posts. NIN also allows fans to collaborate with them. Take for example the Nine Inch Nails Ghosts Film Festival where they invited anyone and everyone to create visuals to accompany the album’s music. NIN even created Remix.NIN.com, an interactive community for creating, sharing, and listening to NIN remixes.
I believe that NIN has a great advantage over other bands, promoting themselves using Web 2.0 tools and not fighting them. Utilizing them to communicate with their fans, increase their support and create brand awareness while at the same time building their fan base. I think that many artists, as well as brands, can learn a great deal from NIN on how to socially market right and become not only self sustainable, but prosperous.
Photo taken by Rob Sheridan.
After the first 500 tickets to the Mashbash event were sold out within only a few hours, Mashable has decided to offer a few more tickets. You can now buy a ticket here at $10 a piece. There are currently about 40 tickets left so if you want to attend, you should hurry up and register. In case you do miss this opportunity though, Mashable will be releasing a few more tickets in the upcoming weeks.
As I mentioned in my earlier post regarding the event, Mashable will also be covering at least 10 Israeli startups through its Israel Media Tour Series. I will be covering the Israel Media Tour Series as a guest writer for Mashable. For startups interested in getting involved:
*To apply to be considered for inclusion in the Israel Media Tour, please send an e-mail to events [at] mashable [dot] come with the following information: Company Name, 20 word description, Web site, 50 word description on why you should be covered in the Israel Media Tour.
My friend JD who was here a few weeks ago on the blogger posse road trip interviewed me regarding Israel’s Web 2.0 scene, my background, and services I offer to startups. You can check out my interview here.
JD is a brilliant social media strategist, blogger, podcaster, co-founder of Ourmedia, president of the Social Media Group, and author of Darknet, a book about the personal media revolution.
