I believe the session 3 readings had similar conclusions into the primary reasons of OC participation, such as the seeking of information, friendship and/or social support, although at what capacity differ greatly depending on individual needs, participation, and goals.
According to Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory , the most common users are called "lurkers" and their participation is minimal if not nonexistant. While the most valuable participants tend to be those that are intrinsically motivated.
In my observations, as a "lurker", I joined an online community of dog lovers at www.mydogspace.com and found that there were regular contributors although many more viewers in every posting. The number of comments compared to the number of views was astronomical, as I will show in some screen shots below. This substantiates the propostion that most OC members simply find the information they need without getting invloved while the "regular" participants had a sense of intrinsic motivation to provide information or feedback to questions and/or topics.
One area in our readings that I had a difficult time agreeing with was the concept that OC participants with a higher self-efficacy would contibute more than those with low self-efficacy.. (Tedjamulia) Efficacy being efficient- wouldint it be also efficient for the lesser participant to get the information that they needed and then carry out the suggestions instead of relaying inofrmation back and forth through the online community? But, of course our readings were more focused on just the study of OC participants and ways to improve participation and as somebody that does not actively belong to any such OC group I found it offensive to be considered less efficient.. for example, in the OC I joined of doglovers- if a user had a question regarding the dog's health and many people suggested seeing a vet- would it be efficient to keep up the "back and forth" postings or get the dog to the vet and then possibly return later and share the outcome?
MY OBSERVATIONS
I found the site www.mydogspace.com
The modes of participation of this site included such standards as Twitter and FaceBook, posts, rate posts, flagging posts, users rating, and fun things such as those listed below to encourage user participation:
Dog Fun and games:like guessing the breed, battle for cuteness, pet tails and pictures. Users could send in pictures/videos of pets and also vote on cutest dogs, etc. Dogs received "bark" votes and users frequency of votes was also noted. Pet Tails:Dogs dressed as super heros, polls, pet and animal news, pet health and tips, adoptions and rescue. Dog Info:dog breeds, dog and puppy health, puppy advice, special pet interests
Site also had blog and forum links:
The blogs has various links to user blogs that may or may not have anything to do with dogs, such as sending bark greeting or wedding presents.
The forum area is where I did my observations:
The five topics that received the most posts had something to do with the dog's health, behavior issues or the owner considering giving her dog away because of behavior problems. From the screen shot below, you can see the amount of comments compared to views is quite staggering!
For example, an URGENT post with the headline "My dog bit someone" had 13 response posts but an amazing amount of over 1500 views.
Although I did not go into the archives, from current pages I could see the other four types of content were on topics such as:
~gentle leader (a type of training leash) with 49 posts and 3402 views
~Potty training related posts appeared at least 25 times, garnering 61
views and some 6400 views
~Dog walking issues was also a repeat posting topic, showing up around 20
times with about 42 responses and some 4000 views
~Training issues also a repeat posting topic. I noticed numerous postings
of about 18 with 61 reponses and 5100 views
CONCLUSIONS
The site offered OC participants the opportunity to exchange information and/or gain social support while also offering entertainment value (Ridings, Catherine)such as games, voting opportunities, and user ratings. Unfortunately, this site also had an overwhelming amount of users who could be classified as "lurkers" for their lack of participation and/or motivation (Tedjamulia, Steven) which may have an impact on whether the site will continue to exist or garner financial sponsors (Ling, KG).
I myself enjoyed the opportunity to see cute dog pictures and videos and I suppose if I was to become a dog owner, I may one day utilize such a site to gain information or perhaps may look for a local dog lovers group in hopes of building friendships and networking. It did surpise me how the participation level in this site was rather low (based upon posts compared to views) but I suppose for the corporate sponsors the amount of users may still hold some value.
From our readings and my observations I can see the need for information, the need for social support, the various types of and interest levels of users and also the financial opportunities that such a site may have for business (clear by the dog food ads that consistently run on the sides). But the lack of active participants did surprise me, especially because these are all dog owners/lovers and Im still not sure what could be done to improve upon that as the site utilized games, flagging, user ratings and such.
Overall, I believe the growth and use of online communities will continue to steadily increase although what sites will enjoy success or longevity rely on its ability to gain and maintain continuued interest and participation.
___________________________________________________________________________
Reference:
Ling, KG. Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities.
Ridings, Catherine. Virtual Community Attraction: Why People Hang Out Online
Tedjamulia, Steven. Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory.
Interesting post! It is fascinating how you described a person’s actions from the on-line and real-life perspectives (getting the dog to the vet, as opposed to on-line discourse). Based on Tedjamulia et al.’s (2005) article, it sounds like this person would fall into the second type of lurker, one who searches for information and poses a specific question when he/she cannot find an answer. When considering your example further, it appeared that the person that would take their dog in to the vet would not have two of the three efficacies discussed by Tedjamulia et al., information efficacy (the belief that the information will be helpful, as he/she is asking the question not supplying the information), or connective efficacy (the belief that content contributed will be received well by the OC, as he/she is typically a lurker and contributing a question, not an answer to the question to meet the information need). This person may have technology efficacy, however, he/she may not have the internal motivation to participate due to the person being within the 80-90 of lurker participants.
ReplyDeleteThe site you visited, mydogspace, was very interesting! It does have a lot of hits with minimal posts. However, with the high amount of hits, I do agree with you, that it can be attractive due to the high perception of usefulness. It is also possible that the current highly participatory members are motivated by seeing how many views their posts have. Therefore, the lurkers could be contributing to the motivation for the participatory members.
That a good point, I can imagine how the huge number of views can be encouraging to the people that do post.. I also see how valuable the number of views can be for the site to continue gaining sponsors.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the high number of view is a critical factor that would definitely attract advertisers. You mentioned that the site has games, but I wonder if contests would be a better way to increase participation. I noticed that the website I visited for last week's activity (LibraryThing) a contest really got a lot of people interested. I can imagine a contest for the cutest, fattest, funniest, affectionate, energetic dog getting a lot of views and postings!
ReplyDelete"I had a difficult time agreeing with was the concept that OC participants with a higher self-efficacy would contibute more than those with low self-efficacy" I totally agree with you. I found that statement to be untrue, and conclusory. I don't think efficacy has anything to do with contributing. I would posit that people who are more efficient post less because they are so efficient, they get in and get out with the info they need.
ReplyDelete"I found it offensive to be considered less efficient" --- Me too!
"But the lack of active participants did surprise me, especially because these are all dog owners/lovers and Im still not sure what could be done to improve upon that as the site utilized games, flagging, user ratings and such." I wonder about this too, you'd think that dog owners who join a dog loving OC would be pretty passionate and vocal.
It is interesting that this site displays the number of views for each topic. Sometimes I think those are a bit inflated because they usually are total views rather than unique users. One of the posters might check back multiple times per day to see if anybody has commented on or answered their post. However, I doubt anybody did that 1500 times!
ReplyDeleteI agree with the others that displaying those numbers provides some motivation. It also might influence how posters present their topic. For example, the "My dog bit someone" topic could have easily been titled "I need help!" or "What do I do now?" but similarly titled posts have received only 200-300 views. Users can pick up on this and start making their subjects more descriptive (and dramatic!) to try to get more viewers and replies.
One of the things we haven't really covered in this session is how people enter these communities. Mydogspace seems like a popular enough site that its pages might appear high in search engine results list. That was my first thought when you mentioned the very high number of views on the "my dog bit someone" thread--maybe this is a common enough occurrence that people search it and visit the page without being a member of the community at all.
ReplyDeleteI really like your observation in Mydogspace. I had the same thought: There are more lurkers than participants in a K-pop online community that I observed. These two online communities share the feature that people can get information without joining the sites, so visitors increased the total clicks or views of the threads. One more possible reason may explain the lack of active participants of Mydogspace — maybe there are similar online communities or spaces for dog lovers to share interests and information. Therefore, I think in order to enlarge the community, the designer of the website should not only improve its features but also create unique content that attracts more users and makes the site different from other similar dog-lover online communities.
ReplyDeleteFor the high view to low post count, that was my interpretation as well. The headline 'My dog bit someone' seems like a generalized enough to receive many hits, yet specialized enough that people who search for it are likely to click it. When I searched for it on Google, the link to this forum was on the second page. To me, that makes it plausible that it could have received many, but not too many, hits (and I just added 1 to the count).
ReplyDeleteAs for lurkers, I believe that they directly help the site though the increased number of page views (symbolizing greater activity) and indirectly though possible (or current) future contributions, increasing the membership of the site.