The Lurker Myth: Measuring the Value of Passive Participation in Community

In conversations about measurement of community sites, I frequently find myself championing the value of passive participation. Intuitively, it's easy to feel like "lurkers" are somehow taking advantage of a community without doing their fair share. In fact, not only do I believe so-called passive participation is the very lifeblood of community, but that there are better ways to think about whom your users are.

My basic philosophy on this point boils down to this axiom:

Active participation creates potential value, and passive participation realizes that value. Most people do both.

In other words, active and passive participation in and of themselves are equally valuable. While it's tempting to "reward" content contributions, which often reflect a higher degree of engagement, with a higher valuation, active and passive participation actually have a symbiotic relationship. In some situations, such as on a technical support forum, "passive" participation by people who need help accessing helpful content is the whole point.

 

 

It's a nice way of making the point that you need to measure, value, and optimize for passive participation. But of course it's not quite so simple. A single piece of content can be accessed many times, returning value over and over. In terms of individual actions, adding content is more important than accessing it. And some contributions create more potential value than others.

 

 

In this view, you can rank actions like posting a video highest, commenting on the video next highest, rating a video one notch lower, and viewing a video one notch lower still. That kind of engagement-based ranking can help you compile an overall index of community engagement, as I discussed in an earlier post.

This kind of relative view of the value of actions also provides a different lens to look at your users. While it's tempting to think of users as either content contributors or content consumers, participants or lurkers, the truth is nowhere near that tidy. 

This is the old-school way of looking at user segments in online community:

 

 

The basic idea here is that a core group of highly engaged users adds the content that fuels the community. The problem is that this model isn't accurate.

In fact, the majority of your online community users probably both produce and consume content:

 

 

So it's not necessarily useful to think about your participants as either "contributors" or "lurkers." It makes much more sense to think of them in terms of their degree of engagement. Using the community engagement index, you can identify and reward highly-engaged participants. You can reach out to less engaged participants with invitations to get more involved. Using behavioral targeting, you can even serve up content reflecting users' degrees of engagement to orient new participants, deepen engagement, and encourage exemplary behavior.