Note: This post is part of the OC Tribe series. Each 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of the month, online community practitioners will be encouraged to explore a particular topic via blog, video blog, twitter, or whatever suites your fancy. The recap will be hosted on the site of another one of the bloggers in the loosely defined OCTribe group. This ad-hoc group (movement?) is just starting up, so please join in!
Today’s topic is the role of influential members in online communities. In the kickoff post, Gail Williams asks
“Who in your communities is an influencer of others? As a facilitator, moderator or community manager, how do you work with the most influential people in your network? As a designer, how would you accommodate the opinion leaders? Got three top tips for rewarding these valued members of a group?”
The Online Community Research Network studied this topic as part of the “Online Community Marketing, Growth and Engagement” report, published in July of 2008. At the time, Elite / Influencer programs were not a priority, and were generally being handled in an informal way. There were several reasons for this, including lack of executive support, overhead with finding and qualifying members, and the legal implications with having an “elite” or privileged tier:
“The real answer is that we don’t have much of an Elite program yet. We have started in the last 18 months to do some things, but haven’t yet gotten much participation. There are some legal reasons why we haven’t really done much so far. Go back and look at AOL. We’d like to find ways around the legal”
The case that the survey respondent was referring to was Greenberg vs. AOL (2001) which involved volunteer moderators suing AOL for back wages. To our knowledge, legal issues regarding influencer programs, and the related compensation, rewards or special privileges are still being approached on a case by case basis for organizations with programs.
Organizations that were attempting to identify influencers and elites stated:
- It is easy to identify influencers and elites because they tend to be easy to spot and they stand out from the crowd due to the amount of time they spend on the community and the amount of content they create or post.
- Others said it is all about relationship and knowing the people who are participating in the community and engaging them directly.
- A minority of people use algorithms and metrics to identify the influencers.
- One person stated they manually tabulate the postings that each participant makes each week.
Various tactics for engaging influential members included:
- Having Moderator contact the influencers directly via email.
- Providing extensive training and support.
- Highlight / celebrate influential community members in different ways on the web site.
- An escalation procedure and incentives (sometimes monetary) for converting members into subject matter experts, featured editorialists and/or ambassadors (geographic).
- I would recognize them in newsletters and on the website; send them a gift branded with our logo; quarterly send them something more expensive like an iPod.
- We increase the features available to these members for no charge.
- After the existing team has voted 100%, we approach a candidate with an offer to join in the decision-making group.
The write in answers from the study offer more insight:
Easy to Spot / They Stand Out (10):
- I have no methodology other than a feel for who is there most often, and who is listened to and respected by others.
- Influencers on our site are easy to spot – they have the most activity in submissions, Diggs and comments.
- Those who are comfortable with technology will be most likely to post and respond; therefore they will stand out in the community.
- Listen, track the people who are most interested and demonstrate that interest by spending a lot of time, posting a lot, etc. Then, most importantly, once we identify them and make contact, we provide pretty extensive training and support. Show them we really appreciate their support and want them to succeed within our community.
- We will probably start with those who actively engaged with our content — live events. Online courses, newsletters and seek out ways for getting them to engage with our content online.
- We are an online children’s game and we can easily identify the influencers by their levels in the game – so, no words of wisdom there, sorry.
- Monitor discussion.
- Directly. Just ask. It’s really that simple. Find the decision maker…keep it short and show what is in it for them and let the rest take its course.
- Tracking activity and having Moderator contact the influencers directly via email.
- Scan participation for quantity and quality of posts.
- The full team develops personal relationships with influencers and elites. They are also highlighted / celebrated in different ways on the web site, but I believe the personal relationship is the key engagement.
- I know them all by heart.
- Facilitators know who the most active contributors on their communities are.
- The community staff is part of the community so they recognize these people and through contact with them on the chat channels build up trust.
- Editors have connections to various “experts” that they’ve asked to be guest bloggers. We’ve had some success with this.
- We have algorithms for automatically identifying who is contributing lots of content, and the rating tools go into helping us identify who is doing interesting contributions. We also do “calls” for specific content and then comb through the submissions. We then have an escalation procedure and incentives (sometimes monetary) for converting members into subject matter experts, featured editorialists and/or ambassadors (geographic).
- Our platform has a member rank algorithm built into it, so we can easily see who’s among the top members according to total posts, quality (overall rating) of posts, and return visits to the community.
- Use metrics to see number and source of contributions and comments.
- We rank individuals for non-elite program means, using proprietary calculations, using a complex formula, including simple things like traffic, to very complex things like social network analysis (proprietary versions of centrality, between-ness, etc.)
- Unfortunately the platform we used did not have a recognition system, so I would have to manually tabulate postings for the week and key contributors/rated content. I would recognize them in newsletters and website under “Member Spotlight” where there was a printed Q&A with them, I would then send them a wireless kit that was branded with our logo and quarterly would send them something more expensive like an iPod. I then went from posting their interview to podcasting their interview and this would be posted on the website, in the forum, on newsletters, and anywhere else that was appropriate.
Relationships (5):
Use Algorithms & Metrics (4):
Manually-tabulated Metrics (1):
Community Volunteers (3):
Additional Resources:
Two programs that come up regularly in our research as target models are the Yelp Elite and Microsoft MVP programs.
Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2007/index.cgi?engaging_influencers_through_recognition_programs=
Influencer Session Notes from Unconferences past:
http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2008/index.cgi?managing_entitlement_wrangling_with_the_elite_noisy
http://www.socialtext.net/ocu2009/index.cgi?identifying_and_engaging_with_online_influencers
