Topics in Digital Media – Fall 09

We’ve all experienced it before, you get to a party early or you’re at a club, the music is blasting but everyone seems to be glued to the walls. The middle of the room where everyone should be converging is barren. Then, one or two brave souls venture out onto the floor and start dancing and rest of the crowd finally jumps in. This phenomenon is perhaps the best way to describe the issue that I explored in this travelogue. Going off of comments and my own research, the issue of how to generate activity within high and low member sites on the NfN network came up as a primary concern.

In my research I came across three ideas that I thought might be useful. The first (and not fully addressing the party starter issue…ill get to that in a minute) had to do with the way in which the Yelp community manages to maintain such a high degree of participation. In a blog I came across called Social Graph Paper, the blogs author commented on the role that Yelps “real world” activities played in strengthening community participation and promoting new membership.

1.    Members that engage face-to-face are your most dedicated customers
2.    Your most dedicated customers are most engaged
3.    Your most engaged members contribute content (this is, by far, a minority, of your users)

“Converting the weak ties of users that know each other only as avatars and nicknames to     strong ties (friendships) means your highly-engaged users return to your site to be with their friends, and these friendships make more effective/ relevant the other engagement mechanisms in place (point systems, for example).”

This information was backed up by my findings in Randal Pinkett’s dissertation on the Camfield Estates network where his team drove participation to the network by offering classes on how to use the network.

“One of the early challenges was the “chicken-and-egg” phenomenon of building an online community: community members won’t join if there isn’t a critical mass online, and there won’t be a critical mass online until community members join. To overcome this hurdle, at least initially, we had residents register for the site as part of the introductory course. This ensured that once they received their computers and Internet connections that there would be other community members and classmates who were already on the site. In doing so, we hoped to create an immediate audience by registering as many people as possible in a relatively short period of time, as opposed to creating an audience gradually as a result of intermittent or sporadic registrations over a long period of time.” p.167-168

The third and final finding was on the idea of social objects. The idea of social objects in the world of social networking has to do with establishing a common point of interest within the community, a point of convergence that, going along with the party starter theme, gets everyone onto the dance floor.

“The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That’s why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about ’socio-material networks’, or just ‘activities’ or ‘practices’ (as I do) instead of social networks…Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs.” -http://www.zengestrom.com/blog/2005/04/why_some_social.html

So what can we take from this when thinking about ways to encourage participation on the NfN network? I think that NfN should incorporate all three components.

1) While I think they have done this in the past, they need to hold regular meetup events in each neighborhood to encourage the creation of a community both online and offline.
2) Offer classes. Already they have discussions around ways in which to organize for action. I think that they should have classes on this in each neighborhood that focus on the general concept and show up to use NfN as a tool
3) And I think this is the most important point, generate focus on the site by generating topics in the forums and blogs so as to promote a point of convergence to promote activity. While I am aware that this runs more or less counter to Pinkett’s point in my last post regarding social constructionism where he advocates for letting the users set the tone, I do think that we are confronted with the chicken and the egg issue with regards to user activity here. So to deal with that I think it best for NfN to take survey of issues facing the community and, in so many words, get the party started by generating the conversation.

Possibly Relevant Posts:

• Refining the Social and Techincal Design of NfN (3) | Gabriel Mugar
• Access is only the beginning (7) | Gabriel Mugar
• Do community based social networks improve visibility of resources and civic engagement? (1) | Gabriel Mugar