How to Foster and Sustain Engagement in Virtual Communities
This article gives ideas and suggestions on what tactics may be useful for encouraging online engagement with the public. Getting the public engaged is the first and most significant obstacle to any online task. First, it is important to understand the needs that may be fulfilled by engaging with online communites: information; relationship-building; social identity/self-expression; helping others; enjoyment; belongingness; status/influence. So, the first thing that an organisation needs to do to foster engagement with their online environment is to determine which of these needs are more or less applicable to their public. Next, the organisation needs to promote participation within their public, encourage content creation and create enjoyable experiences (allow for ranking of content; host webinars and content-specific blogs on popular content, and ask the public to lead some of these; allow and encourage the public to help each other to develop a sense of social identification; allow for, and encourage, niche groups as virtual "sewing circles"; link to other related interest types; have fun and enjoyable content). Last, the organisation needs to motivate their public to engage with each other and the firm by mobilising member-leaders, inspire ideas and poll panels (the public are more likely to continue to engage with an organisation when they feel they are a part of it; offer roles of responsibility to members of the public; provide updates on ideas initiated by the public; avoid cash incentives for participation, but give speciality thank you's; make the members who contribute feel as if they are important and special). In general, such communities help to produce three kinds of value for the organisation: participatory, relational, and financial.
The higher the participation from members, the more the organisation can track their interests, and help increase engagement. This, in turn, leads to further financial gain.
Implications
This article gives some framework on how to create and sustain engagement in online communities. This is essential for my dissertation as simply creating a crowdsourcing project will not do any good without people who wish to contribute. It helps to have a breakdown of the reasons why members of the public may wish to engage in online communities, and to have the idea of "embedding and empowering" members to help encourage further engagement.
This article gives ideas and suggestions on what tactics may be useful for encouraging online engagement with the public. Getting the public engaged is the first and most significant obstacle to any online task. First, it is important to understand the needs that may be fulfilled by engaging with online communites: information; relationship-building; social identity/self-expression; helping others; enjoyment; belongingness; status/influence. So, the first thing that an organisation needs to do to foster engagement with their online environment is to determine which of these needs are more or less applicable to their public. Next, the organisation needs to promote participation within their public, encourage content creation and create enjoyable experiences (allow for ranking of content; host webinars and content-specific blogs on popular content, and ask the public to lead some of these; allow and encourage the public to help each other to develop a sense of social identification; allow for, and encourage, niche groups as virtual "sewing circles"; link to other related interest types; have fun and enjoyable content). Last, the organisation needs to motivate their public to engage with each other and the firm by mobilising member-leaders, inspire ideas and poll panels (the public are more likely to continue to engage with an organisation when they feel they are a part of it; offer roles of responsibility to members of the public; provide updates on ideas initiated by the public; avoid cash incentives for participation, but give speciality thank you's; make the members who contribute feel as if they are important and special). In general, such communities help to produce three kinds of value for the organisation: participatory, relational, and financial.
The higher the participation from members, the more the organisation can track their interests, and help increase engagement. This, in turn, leads to further financial gain.
Implications
This article gives some framework on how to create and sustain engagement in online communities. This is essential for my dissertation as simply creating a crowdsourcing project will not do any good without people who wish to contribute. It helps to have a breakdown of the reasons why members of the public may wish to engage in online communities, and to have the idea of "embedding and empowering" members to help encourage further engagement.
