Audience Engagement and Community Strength: Intangible Assets Part III
This is Part III of the blog series "Stop Throwing Away your ICT4D Investments: Recognizing Intangible Assets"
Part I: Overview
Part II: Brand and Reputation
Audience Engagement and Community Strength
This asset relates to how habituated the core audience is with participating in community-building and how strong the community is. This asset is one of the most important intangibles for Knowledge Management and social media projects, since they rely directly on community contributions and management for content creation and synthesis.
However, technology products need users too, and the more active the community around a product (especially an open source product), the healthier the product will be.
Like reputation, audience engagement and community strength directly leads to increased usage.
Examples of positive engagement include:
- Amount of original content added to a site by non-moderators
- Level and quality of commenting by non-moderators
- Demographic representation of the contributors
- Number of visits per week by users (content contributors and other)
- Number of recommendations made by users
- Number of downloads increasing over time
Ways to undermine this asset
Communities are a very fragile thing, and building audience engagement is tough. Participation inequality in online communities is well known. "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action." Jakob Nielson
When a project has an active user community, it is a highly valuable asset that may be impossible to recreate. Ways to undermine this asset include:
- Remove all moderation - if something fills with spam, people will be turned off.
- Remove all facilitation - most online communities have some level of facilitation, be it from posting content on the site for people to comment on, bringing subject matter experts in for web chats, or other forms of community creation. Nothing is more boring than a site that has had no content posted in awhile.
- Make it hard for lurkers to view content - One big mistake I see is requiring a username and password to view content. Unless the content is secure, then make it available to everyone. Individuals should have the ability to create a username and password once they wish to comment (though ideally, they can link their online profile to Facebook or LinkedIn).
- Forgetting about marketing the site - Newsletters with recent posts, email subscriptions to topics, "sharing" on facebook; these are all ways to help your community remember that you exist and that they are a member of it.
- Avoid controversial topics - The number one way to get lots and lots of content quickly is to post something that you know people will fight over. But if you only post content that is obvious or safe, the site gets boring quickly, and people have no reason to engage.
- Make it hard for lurkers to turn into contributors - The best sites have one button contributions such as ranking articles, or sharing content. If you make it too challenging for lurkers to contribute they will go away.
Valuation/Loss
The valuation of this asset relates to the value of contributors, especially from developing countries and from professions/demographics being targeted by the ICT4D project.
The other source of input from these contributors is usually limited to focus groups (expensive and small scale), surveys (limited in scope), and personal experiences of project staff who have worked overseas.
With audience engagement and strong communities, the ability for a project to be more responsive—and even partially directed by the needs of the audience—increases greatly.
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