Ghaywood

Ideas Page

Synopsis

This work is a brief to begin consolidating the current state of thinking regarding user motivation for using online social networks. It will review the relevant literature and present some of the author’s own opinions. This will be updated with a usable taxonomy of the ever-growing domain and a historical context shortly.

Motivation for participation in virtual communities

The nature of the demographics online is changing. Early internet adopters were typically from specialized technical backgrounds and were bonded by a sense of commonality of interests and a certain degree of implicit and earned trust. This was carried through into online community participation and interaction through early newsgroups, email and bulletin boards. Today’s user profiles are moving closer to reflecting underlying demographics (Pew 2007), especially for those users from developed countries where online activity is increasingly pervasive across the populations. Perhaps partly as a result of this, there has been a significant increase in specialist or niche online communities forming, especially appealing to an older (>30 years) audience. Another significant trend has been the move away from ‘traditional’ place-centric online communities to person-centric bottom-up social tools such as blogs, IM or mobile networks and other social tools particularly within the emergent user base. With regards to the latter, the motivations for initial participation in a social network may in varying amounts be a need for self-expression, a need for belonging, a need to join a group frequented by off-line friends to remain in the ‘clique’ and as a form of escapism. Motivations can be classified as those related to initial joining of a community, ongoing participation in a community’s activities and adoption of the cultural and social norms therein to a greater or lesser extent, and finally a decision to defect or leave the space either temporarily or permanently. Leaving the community might lead to joining another similar community, or to engaging in a totally different activity to meet the same or changing needs. The need to build and manage community effects are an imperative. Community activities drive the business models of many organizations today, and indeed the concept of a ‘Community Manager’ has become a commonplace job description in the last few years. Some of the commercial benefits of accumulating positive community effects include: Positive word of mouth and viral marketing effects Innovation opportunities and ‘crowd’ economics Opportunities for analytics and data mining Empathic listening, and customer experience management By implication, the need to understand what motivates individuals to join, participate in and defect from online communities is critical to the ongoing success of many companies. The danger of assuming consumers in the online market space as being anonymous and un-empowered is very dangerous. In fact today’s consumers are increasingly aware and well informed due to economies of search and the availability of information and comparators. Competition is greater and more wide-reaching largely due to lower entry barriers. On balance, internet strategies favor the consumer (Porter; Strategy and the Internet) and the need for careful e-loyalty strategies becomes ever more important. There is also debate over the relative importance between brand and social capital (community). Some proponents of community strength (Ahonen and Moore) would argue that community effects are more important even than brand value in certain markets. User groups are also increasingly sophisticated, their opinions are heard by other users and in some cases their innovations are directly responsible for the success of the economic model of the underlying firm. For example, Facebook’s business model appears to rely heavily on innovation around the core social networking utility. Developers can harness the power of the Facebook community of users to power their own social-network enabled applications with a pre-established user-base. This is done through opening the Facebook programmer API to the Facebook development community at large (“innovation community.”) This creates a sense of user empowerment and participation and acts as a test-bed or incubator for innovation in the community, harnessing good ideas from a pool of talent which Facebook itself could never secure in-house. In return, successful application development teams would pay a transactional fee to Facebook. However, it also shifts risk outside the control of Facebook in a number of ways: Failure or issues with 3rd party applications may tarnish the Facebook name Reluctance of external and un-policed developers to continue building applications for any reason would go to the heart of the Facebook revenue model By embracing the ongoing trend in innovation openness, Facebook has presented a powerful challenge to the competitors’ business model, created first-mover advantage and re-enforced its ‘open’ brand values. Needs-driven explanations Maslow’s theory of hierarchical needs suggests that participation is a function of the extent to which lower order needs are satisfied (by the online community itself or elsewhere) allowing higher-order needs to be met through active online community contribution; upward movement through the needs hierarchy would then be seen as reflective of the lifecycle stages suggested by Kim or Wenger and Lave. In this sense the decision to join and participate is seen as a way to fulfill unmet needs. Non-participation by ‘lurking’ or peripheral members is then interpreted as a reflection of un-satisfied lower order needs. The limitation of this approach is that online community members are rarely involved in only one need-fulfillment at a time. Needs-driven models are seen to be too linear in their explanation to be entirely complete. A number of other motives have been described by various authors: Altruism Anticipated reciprocity (Kollock 1999), in the sense that contributions are made in order to receive something back in return at a later date. The assumption being that in order to receive ‘help’ you need to give first. Increased recognition (Kollock 1999), implying online reputation and ego Sense of efficacy (Kollock 1999), and a belief that you are making a difference in the world Communion (Smith 1992), drawing on the fact that human’s are basically social creatures, probably encompassing elements of all the other points above Goal-driven explanations Imply that participants have personal and underlying goals which lead them to seek ‘answers’ in the target community they chose to join. So long as goals remain unfulfilled they will contribute as a means to an end. Cognition-based Innovation networks The convergence of four major factors is argued to have helped propagate a democratization of innovation (Von Hippel 2005, Tapscott 2006) online, through “innovation communities.” The ‘new’ web (“Web 2.0”) and shifting demographics have led to a social revolution. In turn these three trends have led to an economic revolution with greatly decreased collaboration costs, and increased reach amongst users. Whilst such collaborative innovation has always existed online – indeed it was the very reason for the first Arpanet – the interest in domain neutral collaboration has reached a tipping point in the last 2 or 3 years. Examples of online-facilitated innovation include Boeing’s use of Linux on a military version of its 737, the design of mountain bike and kite-boards, an open-source car and community-led projects such as Wikipedia. Motivations for participating in collaborative innovation communities can be viewed as a consequence of an individual’s innovate or buy decision. Understanding why users might feel self- or group-innovation is preferable to relying on commercially sourced solutions may lead to an understanding of why some users might feel the need to participate in communities and some may not. According to Von Hippel, some users (termed lead users) are ahead of the majority in their desire and ability to self-innovate. Such users might be equivalent to what is commonly referred to as early-adopters in the technology adoption lifecycle model. These users were found to be more likely to have heterogeneity of needs with regards to function or performance of a product/service. The ability of geographically dispersed groups/individuals to connect and work on new innovation is now possible, making it an attractive way to engage in collaborative efforts in almost any domain. So in this context the motivation to participate is largely goal oriented – to meet a preference/function specific need, presumably in light of some cost-benefit tradeoff. The benefits can be realized through altered transaction-costs or favorable information asymmetry where users understand their own needs better than manufacturers. Von Hippel’s research also indicates a high correlation between individual satisfaction and help received from the group, and a determination to stick with the group and turn to it for similar help in future. Why people voluntarily offer such assistance is speculated to follow the same reasoning that collaborative innovators freely reveal i.e. the private-collective model. Beyond a purely utilitarian reasoning for the ‘giving’ process, the “joy and learning associated with creativity and membership in creative communities are also important … [and] more widely available as innovation is democratized.” [Side note: it might be worth considering the personal-drivers models used in coaching such as ‘perfectionism’ or ‘a need to please people’ as possible motivators] Psycho-social identity Avatars Escapism Creation of social capital Putnam and Rheingold both note the personal and societal benefits of belonging to communities. Such benefits include psychological wellbeing of individuals and economic value gained from increasing social capital. Bridging (heterogeneous) sources of social capital are seen as being especially valuable. There may therefore be a specific motivation for individuals to increase their own access to social capital, and their own perceived contribution to social capital by others in order to gain in some way as an individual. Social capital is "the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition" (Bourdieu, 1983:249); "refers to the collective value of all 'social networks' and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other" (Putnam); "Investment in social relations with expected returns in the marketplace" (Lin); “the existence of a certain specific set of informal values or norms shared among members of a group that permit cooperation among them” (Fukuyama); “a set of attitudes and mental dispositions that favor cooperation within society, and that as such, it equals the spirit of community” (Hunout) The value of sharing, relationships, connections and community. The social element does not seem to be in doubt however the capital element (i.e. the value) is possibly harder to quantify/define and is thus the element which is frequently disputed The mechanisms that generated social capital were: networks of relationships; reciprocity; trust; and social norms Do email and communities help build lasting social capital or are they simply bridging agents rather than bonding agents? Is the social capital at the expense of capital generated locally, due to diminishing local interactions? Social-network analysis Structural network effects Individual attribute effects Sources

Rheingold Kollock Bishop Wenger/Lave Maslow Amy Jo Kim Von Hippel Jones Rappa 2001 Lessig Scott Ahonen and Moore