Category: Social

Building online social communities: Helping your members cross the observer / participant barrier

This article follows on from our previous one ‘Long time listener, first time caller’.  In this article, we discuss what you need to do to foster and promote the necessary user behaviours within online communities to create a sustainable active community. We build on our ‘Observer / participant barrier’ model from our earlier paper to show you how to successfully manage your members as they start the process of engaging with your online community. We use strong social psychology models as a basis for the recommendations on how to work with your community and include a checklist of dos and don’ts.

You can find it on the PTG website under ‘Our Thinking’ and then go to the ‘Psychology / Social’ section.

You can also download it directly from here.

Let me know what you think in the comments…

categories Business and Strategy, Psychology, Social | | datetime 24 June 2011 4:48 pm | comments Comments (0)

Long time listener, first time caller – Why people do and don’t engage in a community

In this paper, we discuss the psychology of why people simply (and passively) observe a community while others actually participate and contribute. We discuss the process and decisions people go through when locating a community, choosing to sign up and participate in activities (e.g., sharing of information), through to becoming a ‘long time member’, or in some cases a leader (or super user) in a community. We present our ‘Observer / Participant Barrier’ model illustrating the critical leap people make to become active members in a community. Anyone who’s interested in creating a successful online social network /community should take a look.

You can find it on the PTG website under ‘Our Thinking’ and then go to the ‘Psychology / Social’ section.

You can also download it directly from here.

Let me know what you think in the comments…

categories Business and Strategy, Psychology, Social | | datetime 4:44 pm | comments Comments (0)