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Viewers
At the bottom of the pyramid are the viewers, accounting for roughly 90 percent of the activity that takes place in your community, according to Jakob Nielsen, guru of web-design usability. Viewers are silent observers rather than participants in your community. They may consider themselves fans of your brand -- searching content, reading message boards and opinions of members -- but they don't participate in the conversation. The challenge, then, is to try to find ways to engage this segment, moving them up the pyramid. Why? Research has shown that 56.6 percent of online community participants log into their community at least once a day; 70 percent of them interact with others while they're logged in. Just how important is this segment? A McKinsey study found that participants in an online community
- Visited a site nine times as often
- Stayed five times as long
- Represented 65 percent of sales even though they only represented 35 percent of users
There are a variety of ways you can engage these viewers. Simply by creating an online community and offering the basics (such as forums), you provide content for the viewers to find and consume. There will always be some viewers who eventually participate in these ways, but for the most part, they don't engage with the one-way-to-collaborate approach. To engage these users, you can add polls, for example, which is one way to grab viewers' attention and ease them into participating, and then checking back to see how their answers compare with the rest of the audience. Surveys (multi-page polls) are another method; encouraging submissions or recommendations or shared bookmarks are other ways. There's not one answer for all users, so try to offer viewers a variety of options.
Participants
Viewers who find value and become involved in your community will progress into participants. There are lots of interactive Web 2.0 tools you can implement to engage this audience (which accounts for roughly 9 percent of your community), such as forums, blogs with talkback comments, wikis, customer reviews and the like.
Management blogs that allow talkback comments engage users because they deliver new insight into a brand's messages by allowing management the freedom to stray from their corporate-speak messaging. They also invite outside perspectives through dialog with people who have an interest in the brand's success. However, despite the new dimension and insight they offer, blogs seem to be underutilized. Research firm Hostway/Taylor Nelson Sofres found that while 23 percent of consumers use blogs to learn about new products and services, only 4 percent of U.S. corporations use blogs as a marketing tool.
Posting expert product reviews is also a great way to drive engagement in the community. Offering customer reviews is even more powerful. In fact, a survey of more than 10,000 online visitors to the top 40 online retailers during the 2006 holiday shopping season found that almost half of online shoppers who recalled seeing customer product reviews cited them as the primary factor in their decision to purchase. Why? Because they're more credible. For example, CompUSA has experienced tremendous results since adding customer ratings reviews to its website. According to Comp USA, visitors to its "customer review" section:
- Exhibited 94 percent more site visits
- Had a 60 percent higher buyer/visitor conversion rate
- Purchased 43 percent higher priced items on average
- Spent 50 percent more per order on average
Creators
At the top of the pyramid, creators represent the 1 percent of your community who are considered the most vocal, and very often, the most loyal users. These are the users who drive much of the interaction within the community, creating new forum threads, answering other users' questions, writing blogs, publishing content.
There are many tools to engage this audience on your turf, rather than having them deliver their message on their own sites, or on sites like MySpace and YouTube! You can implement MySpace- and YouTube-like functionality on your website, and allow creators to upload content and post their opinions. You can implement Digg-like functionality so that they can pull new content into the conversation, and allow other users to rate it so that the good stuff rises to the top. You can identify the most influential bloggers in your industry, and give them some real estate on your blog.
There are lots of new technologies that you can implement to try to engage all of your users on their terms. One new technology to consider is the brandable desktop community. A well-implemented desktop community engages viewers by allowing them to opt-in to receive your desktop alerts for late breaking news, information, promotions, and the like, giving you valuable insight into these users' preferences.
You can also engage viewers with desktop-based forums, blogs, et cetera with desktop-alert triggers for when new items are added. A desktop community is also an effective way to further engage your participants and creators. Not only can they access the communities, post their views and get alerted when there are new comments in their threads, but they can also start new threads, host a blog, and identify and flag new content for the rest of the community to read and rate (just like on Digg).
Unfortunately, simply building an online community with hosted forums is not enough to attract and engage all of your users. Fortunately, there are now a wide variety of Web 2.0 tools and technologies you can implement so that more of your users will want to stay and play. By offering more ways for your users to engage with you and with other users, you can make it easy for them to become further engaged in your community, moving them from viewer to participant to creator.
Joe Lichtenberg is vice president, marketing & business development for Eluma. Read full bio.
