Lurkers are learners: new approaches to understanding participation

Some concepts become embedded in common parlance as a standard truism but in fact serves to obscure real value in online behavior.  The 1-9-90 model of online community participation is one of those shorthands that doesn’t serve us well anymore.   The ratio of 1-9-90 articulates that 1% of online community participants are active creators, 9% make some contribution and the majority 90% are mere lurkers, individuals who seem to make no real contribution to the community dynamic, but consume for their own purposes.

 

This 1-9-90 model is too simplistic, and the lurker term originated in the early days of bulletin board chat forums.   Online communities are now an important element in businesses and organizations - both within the organization and as vital points of engagement with customers and partners.   

 

The Altimeter Group came up with a more nuanced model of online participation called “Social Technographics” in 2007 but was oriented around consumer behavior in online social experiences. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More recently, the Community Roundtable has released some interesting data on member types and new insight into the range of participation across four broad types.

Their research looks at both best in class communities as well as average performing communities and their 2015 numbers show these trends continuing.     We’re solidly beyond the 1-9-90 era.

 

What we’re seeing is that individuals are participating actively across the entire spectrum of possible behaviors.    Community members are contributing and actively participating in very robust percentages.    Active members are active consumers, not mere lurkers.     Keep in mind that community members may exhibit different behaviors on different days or months.   Just because they are a consumer on Tuesday, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be a contributor on Wednesday.

 

Let’s talk about lurkers and why they are really learners

 

Community members in the “consumer” category may not exhibit overt participatory or contributory behavior at times for any number of reasons.

• They are new to the community and want to observe the social norms or etiquette of the group
• The focus of the content, raison d’être of the community is new to them, and they wish to familiarize themselves with content, current dialogue before jumping in.
• They are unfamiliar with how to participate in online communities - it’s a new behavior

But community members in the ‘consumer’ category do benefit and can spread those benefits beyond the community

• They may download and share content elsewhere in their own network
• They observe and learn from the dialogue going on in the community - vicarious, contextual learning 
• They may encourage others within their own network to join and explore the community
• Consumers can learn about the community while observing and in turn make meaningful contributions over time

Lurker is an negative term of little utility.    The word itself has unsavory connotations, drives the impressions that an entire segment of one’s community are passive observers, and obscures any nuanced understanding of these community members needs or aspirations.   In addition, community members often move from one set of behaviors to another a different times due to varying interests or workload demands.   

 

Thinking about and categorizing community members with more meaningful terms helps you, as a community manager, convey more value and insight to your stakeholder and management - people who may be resourcing or supporting your community.

 

It also helps drive your strategies for engagement - how should you be helping community members move from inactive to consumers or consumer to participant?   Understanding behavior profiles will more accurately inform your programming, content curation approaches, outreach and communication and engagement strategies.   It’s useful to think of all your community members on an engagement journey.

 

 

 

 There are a range of behaviors and types that one can consider when devising your community management approaches and strategies.   Here is a sample of some types that might resonate, and ways that you can engage and enlist those community members.

 

 

Let’s let the 1-9-90 mantra go and move away from the lurker nomenclature.    These community members are learners.

Comments

[Dennis_Pearce]

Catherine, good point about consumers spreading information. Unless we want to map the entire world population, it's inevitable that all networks will have arbitrary boundaries. This means that someone who appears to be "lurking" with few connections on the edge of a network might actually be part of a very robust network in a different context.

If we had a community devoted to figuring out how to achieve world peace and we knew that many heads of state were lurking there, I think most people would view that as a good thing.