Recent upheavals in Tunisia (see image below)and Egypt have thrown up the terms “Twitter Revolution” and the like and this indicates the maturation of social networking into a force comparable to traditional print journalism. I think this is a bit exaggerated but there is something in it.
Now we acknowledge that big sites like Twitter, Google applications, Facebook, Flickr and the usual suspects are excellent sites, in that they are successful with millions of users, what happens when we drill down to ordinary prosaic sites that range from wonderful to horrible? How do we judge them and how do we run the ruler of excellence over them?
More pointedly, what are the features of successful online communities? At first it seems easy enough to answer this because, we have some examples above of very successful online communities in terms of simple parameters like profitability and the number of people who use them. But if we dive into some of the research we see that there are many dimensions to success in this area and non-numeric qualities like engagement are hard to measure.
Graph site link.
In the graph above we see that in one survey, people rated the ability to connect with like minded people as the most important attribute in an online community. But there are 10 other attributes that scored well too. They included:
- Facilitation
- Ability to help others
- Exclusive product and service offers
- Ability for members to develop reputation
- Quality of community and site managers
- Community focused around a hot topic
The most comprehensive inquiry into the factors that contribute to a successful on-line community that I found was written by Wise, Thorson and Hamman. And called Features of Online Communities and Their Effects on Participation and Evaluation
Amongst some interesting things I found was that with just text and pictures in a community's meeting place a set of quite sophisticated norms are built up with a variety of methods to cope with departures from the norms. As individuation decreases, flaming and ad hominem practices increase and the whole society associated with that community can collapse. That's one end of the spectrum. The other is wonderful flourishing communities. To investigate what are the precursors to a flourishing on-line community the authors set up experiments at a US university and tested some of the following factors that they assumed to be important in an on-line community:
- attracting members
- retaining members
- encouraging participation
- the role of moderation
- structure of the site
- nature of the content
- time between posts
- role of synchronicity
There were no obviously strong conclusions concerning the above factors that came out of their experiments as there were always confounding factors and quite small samples used. However the discussion and the pilot experiments were extremely relevant to this current paper.
