by: Roger Dooley
A key aspect of Web 2.0 is letting users create or enhance a site’s content. This sounds great, but in practice can be hard to achieve. The Web is littered with dead forums, unreviewed products, spammed-out wikis, and other failed attempts to build user-created sites.
Consulting giant McKinsey has posted a research brief, How companies can make the most of user-generated content, that helps explain why users add content to websites, and how to best encourage the process. The firm surveyed nearly 600 users of four German video sharing sites, and reached some interesting conclusions:
We observed that users cite a variety of reasons for posting content online—chief among them, a hunger for fame, the urge to have fun, and a desire to share experiences with friends. While some users were open to the idea of being compensated for their contributions, that wasn’t a primary driver: the people we studied weren’t paid for their contributions.
We also found that a few users posted the most popular content. Depending on the site, just 3 to 6 percent of the membership added 75 percent of the videos available for download, and videos from just 2 percent of the member base accounted for more than half of all videos viewed. (As the “long-tail” effect would suggest, half of the videos posted accounted for only 10 percent of all downloads.)
These findings are consistent with studies of business communities, McKinsey reports:
At one cable company we studied, for example, more than half of the installers who contributed to an internal wiki said that social factors such as reputation building, team spirit, and community identification were the main factors motivating them to contribute. Only 20 percent cited the possibility of a financial bonus as their main driver.
These findings match my own experience in building and administering online communities. Some members are far more helpful than others and contribute much of the site’s quality content. These members are most often driven by either pure altruism or a mix of altruism and a desire for recognition as an expert. In business contexts, this recognition may help gain new clients, though such linkage is often indirect. Often, in my experience, the client exposure aspect is more of a rationization for the time spent posting than a productive marketing technique.
There are a huge number of factors that go into building a successful community, but the McKinsey study underscores a few important ones that we always try to employ. First, be sure that user contributions are recognized - at the very least, showing the number of posts or reviews, for example. Prolific contributors can be promoted to higher user levels, and perhaps granted additional privileges. Reputation systems can reward users for high quality contributions. Second, by keeping interaction civil one can reduce the chance of quality contributors being driven away by transient but annoying members. If one is flamed after every good post, there’s a disincentive to keep posting. In short, spend less time creating complex compensation schemes and more time on the human factors of community building.
(Thanks to Opensource.Association and Experience Curve for leading me to this study.)
Original Post: http://www.rogerd.net/articles/why-users-create-content
The resemblance of these results and the motivations of open source developers is interesting. There is however one clear different, open source developers always site learning as a large motivator, but here it is not listed among the top motivations.
Very thoughtful commentary, Alexander. I agree that all too many businesses miss the point. My firm helps build communities, and the most common reaction I see, particularly in larger companies, is fear. "What if someone says something bad about us? What if they criticize our product?" For some, letting their customers interact publicly and help build the website requires a big leap of faith.
Roger
Your last line says it all “less time creating complex compensation schemes and more time on the human factors of community building”. The Internet has always been about communication. What people seem to not really appreciate it that relationship building has been a vital part of the web. This makes a lot of sense because the key to any good relationship is communication. There are many types of relationships possible on the Web. Many of the Web 1.0 were one to many, with a website created as a means to reach a large number of people. Viral Marketing and Spam were also examples of one to many relationships based on a shotgun approach to pushing products with in many cases false relationships. Then along came interactive web marketing that tried to create a more one to one relationship allowing loyalty, trust, and etc. to enter the picture. When Web 2.0 emerged it took the early many to many relationships of bulletin boards and chat rooms to a totally new level of community building.
To me Web 2.0 is really about building communities based on healthy relationships achieved through communication. These many to many relationships allow people to do what they can’t do in one to many or one to one relationships. You are right in that a huge number of factors go into building a successful community. You stated, “be sure that user contributions are recognized” but if you think about it, is not recognition an important part of many relationships. Someone once told me that, “people stay in relationships not because of how they feel about the one they are in the relationship with but how being in the relationship makes them feel about themselves”. Recognition, respect, trust, etc. are all important aspects of this. Your second recommendation “keeping interaction civil” is also one of the keys to successful relationships. Who wants to stay in a relationship where they are abused when the Web makes it so easy to leave?
You would think the business community would be the first to appreciate the importance of relationships in Web 2.0. After all there are transactional buyers motivated by cost, and relationship buyers motivated by factors such as trust. You can surf the Web and find studies that show buyers will pay a premium to purchase a product from a trusted seller. Why do you think rating systems exist in so many forms on the Web now? If you started with knowing who you current and potential relationship buyers are, one could build Web communities around the current and future, wants, needs, and values of these buyers. Since like tends to attract like, any communities that you can build or support are likely to be populated with potential “Good customers”. However, I do not see this happening in the real world.