With more than 100 million Americans contributing content online this year, websites are doing anything they can to attract users to contribute to their site. With the notable exception of search engines, all major websites are depending on the community to drive their growth. Imagine YouTube without user uploads; Facebook without photos and updates or Wikipedia without users writing/editing articles. In addition to all that, this community-driven strategy also scales extremely well. It is a clear win-win situation that has us all looking for new ways to grow our online communities. Consequently, companies invest many resources in community building. But it’s hard to get right – just ask Google about this (Google is now making social efforts a top priority and staff bonuses dependent on it). The hard thing about online communities is that attaining critical mass is not enough – you have to maintain it over time. Luckily we don’t have to guess what motivate users. Decades of research in social psychology give great insights into how we can motivate users to contribute content over a long period of time. A key distinction is between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is about the joy of performing something. People are likely to be motivated if an involvement in an online community helps them reach a personal goal, if they improve their skills or if they simply are having fun. This is why people have hobbies and spend their evenings and weekends learning Ruby on Rails. For intrinsic motivation to kick in, the person must feel it’s his decision to perform a certain task. Autonomy is key. But there are many methods to reward users with tangible rewards, and several are already being applied online: Mechanical Turk rewards turkers with money for solving tasks; SEOmoz offers community members one month free software when compiling 200 mozpoints in one month; BettingExpert offers prizes and merchandise for points, and Threadless offers money for winning designs and slogans. The web is full of examples of rewarding desired behavior with tangible rewards. Giving tangible rewards seems like a great way to increase desired behavior, right? Increasing the rewards will increase the desired behavior. But it is not as easy as it sounds. The challenge is that extrinsic rewards potentially erode intrinsic motivation. Now that we know balance is crucial, I thought I would throw out some ways you can help nurture this balance. It is worth noting that there does not exist a strict borderline between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, as tactics often affect both. The aim of the following tactics is to help communities rely less on “hard” extrinsic rewards such as money, and more on “softer” forms of motivation. Have your users make a commitment to perform the desired actions. If you run a patient network, ask the user how many questions the user thinks he’ll answer a month. If you run an ecommerce site, ask the user if he’d “ever consider helping other users by rating a product he has purchased“. If you do, this will make the user motivated to honor the commitment. It’s human nature to better understand where we stand compared to our competition. Allowing users to compare their abilities and opinions to others is a powerful drive for many people. Especially when comparing to similar others. One often seen implementation of this is leaderboards. But this is not the only possibly implementation: You can send out emails in which users’ effort is compared to the median score of the community and/or similar others (e.g. other users who signed up at the same time). When users are new in a community, they often don’t know what to do. Highlighting desired behavior of successful users will make it easy for users to see what they should do. This is what Facebook does when showing that your friends are connecting to new people. You can do the same by prominently highlighting desired action whenever existing users perform these actions. Despite the (flawed) assumption that people are always driven by self-interest, most people actually like to help each other. An obvious way to facilitate praise is to let users express gratitude easily and give each other rewards can help motivation. On the SEOmoz Q&A Forum a questioner can mark an answer as “Good Answer”. But humans are not the only ones who can give praise: so can your website. Although the effect of getting praise from a human is One of the key components of intrinsic motivation is mastery. It is often hard to know if you are on the right way to mastery, so help is needed. There are obviously many different ways to motivate people to participate online. There can be derived many different tactics from social psychology literature than those mentioned here (See for example Rand'sIllustrated Guide to Cialdini's Science of Influence and Persuasion). But these can hopefully be a beginning in striking a better balance between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Thinking of attending a conference anytime soon? You should definitely check out the Distilled Pro Seminar in Boston 16th/17th May and the SEOmoz Mozcon in Seattle July 27th - 29th. 5 Tactics to Improve Your Community Balance
Extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation
The effects of tangible rewards (and why it's not sufficient)
5 Tactics for Increasing Intrinsic Motivation in Your Community
1. Commitment
2. Social comparisons
3. Social learning
For example, Flickr wants users to upload, tag and geotag pictures. On the home page, the number of uploads, tags and geotags are highlighted. As a new (or existing user), you know which action will contribute to the community4. Praise
5. Mastery
