The Challenges of dealing with newcomers,
R. E. Kraut, M. Burke, J. Riedl, 2012
Dealing with Newcomers
KSE 652 Social Computing Systems:
Design and Analysis
Uichin Lee
Oct. 11, 2012
Encouraging Commitment: Summary
• Affective Commitment
– Identity-based affective commitment: e.g., social identity, group
norms, homogeneous groups, naming, common fate/goal/task,
in vs. outgroups
– Bond-based affective commitment: e.g., leveraging social ties,
social interaction mechanisms, profiles, pseudonyms
– Reducing repelling forces: e.g., large group, diversity, off-topic
• Normative Commitment
– purpose, other's commitment, reciprocity
• Needs-based Commitment
– matching benefits with motivation, competitors, lock-in (sunk
cost)
Regulating Behavior: Summary
• Limiting effects of bad behavior
– Moderation, effective moderation, revision tools,
filters/influence limiters (reputation systems)
• Coerced compliance: limits on bad behavior
– Activity quota, gags/bans, CAPTCHAs
• Encouraging voluntary compliance
– Making norms clear and salient
• Descriptive (explicit display) vs. injunctive norms (feedback)
– Enhancing compliance
• Cohesive groups, collective choice, face-saving
– Rewards and sanctions
• Link spam protection, identifiability, reputation, handling cheap
pseudonym
Dealing with Newcomers
• Attracting newcomers and incorporating them
into an existing community
– Encouraging contribution, commitment, norm
establishment
• Dealing with newcomers
1. Recruitments (interpersonal vs. impersonal)
2. Selection (self-selection vs. screening)
3. Retention (keeping newcomers around; reader-toleader funneling by Preece 2009)
4. Socialization
5. Protection (from potentially damaging actions)
1. Recruitment
• Many online communities do little “active” recruiting
• Active recruitment strategies
– Interpersonal recruitment (like word of mouth)
– Impersonal recruitment (typical ads)
• Blizzard’s full recruitment gamut:
– Impersonal: TV, print, online ads, etc.
– Interpersonal: “recruit-a-friend” promotion, guild-recruiting
forums, etc.
• Design claim 1: Compared to laissez-faire approaches, in
which prospective members seek out or stumble upon a
community, active recruiting will lead to the community
having access to a larger pool of prospective members.
1. Recruitment
Interpersonal Recruitment
• Interpersonal appeals are more effective at influencing attitudes and
adoption than are impersonal appeals through the mass media
– More effective they come from whom the target knows (Katz 1957)
• Social influence is proportional to immediacy, strength, and number of
influence sources that a target is exposed to (Latane 1981)
– Ex) political get-out-the-vote campaigns; face-to-face contacts with potential
voters are costly, but very effective
• Bass’s product diffusion model parameters (Bass 1990)
– # people who might adopt (say from surveys), # people who already adopted,
alpha: # converts due to ads, beta: # converts due to word-of-mouth
– In general, beta >> alpha values (in the case of Hotmail, beta is 6.7 times as
powerful as alpha
• Design Claim 2: Word of mouth recruiting is substantially more powerful
than impersonal advertising.
1. Recruitment
Interpersonal Recruitment
• Design Claim 3: Recruiting new members from the social networks of
current members (e.g., Facebook, KakaoTalk) increases the numbers who
will join.
• Design Claim 4: Making it easy for users to share content from a
community site with their friends (e.g., via easy email, twitter, facebook,
and similar links), will increase the visibility of the community among the
users’ friends and thereby their likelihood of joining.
Caveat: be sure not to
go overboard with this
(e.g., Anipang example)
1. Recruitment
Interpersonal Recruitment
• Marketers work to get key influencers to use their products because
many followers their lead (The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell 2002)
• Existing research about automatically discovering these influencers,
by analyzing graph structure of the social network
– Richardson 2001: by analyzing how opinions flow along a social
network, one can choose the best people to market to
– Kempe et al. 2003: information dissemination over a social network; a
simple greedy approach works very well
• Design Claim 5: Identifying the most influential members of a
community and encouraging them to recruit others in their social
networks is more effective than soliciting referrals from members at
random.
1. Recruitment
Conventional, Impersonal Recruitment
• Impersonal persuasion influences people’s beliefs, affect, and
behavior toward a stimulus object (Roberts and Maccoby 1985)
– e.g., consumer product, health intervention, political candidate, or
online community
• Advertisement field trials on influences: weight is not critical in
influencing sales (Tellis 2004)
• But why? (Nickerson 1998)
– Confirmatory bias such as selective exposure, interpretation, and
retention
– Miscomprehension of advertising messages and competing advertising
for other products
• Design Claim 6: Impersonal advertising can effectively increase the
number of people joining an online community, especially among
potential members with little prior knowledge of the community.
1. Recruitment
Conventional, Impersonal Recruitment
•
•
Evaluating messages via systematic vs. heuristic processing
(Heuristic) One cognitive heuristic is “halo effect” (Cooper 1981): if people perceive that a
stimulus is good on one dimension, they assume that it will be good on other, unrelated
dimensions
–
•
•
•
E.g., Superficial features such as attractive/processional site design enhances people’s credibility
evaluations of the sites (Fogg et al., 2003)
(Systematic) People are likely to be influenced by credible sources with relevant expertise
(Heuristic) Celebrity endorsement can aid recruitment even if the person’s celebrity is
unrelated to the community’s topic or purpose
Persuasive messages appealing to heuristic processing: hard to convey deep info in general
(smiley face is good enough to convey emotional support), and when there are many
alternatives, only a small number will be chosen for systematic processing
Design Claim 7: (active searchers)
recruiting materials (that present reasons
to join) and endorsements (by credible
sources and sites)
Design claim 8: (casual visitors) recruiting
materials that present attractive surface
features and endorsements by celebrities
1. Recruitment
Conventional, Impersonal Recruitment
• Design claim 9: Emphasizing the number of people already
participating in a community will motivate more people to
join than will emphasizing the community need.
– Social proof heuristic (Cialdini and Goldstein 2004)
– Ex) “join the crowd” >> “We need you”
• Design claim 10: Activating familiarity heuristic (e.g.,
placing an icon with well known icons) will improve their
liking of the community and thus their willingness to try it.
– People tend to like people, things, and ideas they are familiar
with (Zajonc 1968)
Widgets for sharing an object on the web
2. Selecting the right newcomers
self-selection vs. screening
• Design claim 11: Providing accurate and complete information of
what the members’ experience will be once they join will increase
the fit of those who join.
– Realistic preview (low attrition during interview, turnover after joining)
– Online communities: FAQs, archived data (for lurkers)
• Design claim 12: Forcing potential new members to pay or wait will
cause only people who value the community more likely to join.
– E.g., MetaFilter (community weblog) asks new users to pay $5; there
is a waiting period to ask a question to “Ask MetaFilter” (though reply
is allowed)
• Design claim 13: Forcing potential new members to undertake
“separating” tasks will encourage those who are a good fit to the
community to join while weeding out undesirables
– Examples of separating tasks: reading, rating, editing, etc.
2. Selecting the right newcomers
self-selection vs. screening
• Signaling problem in economics (Spence 1973): i.e., what kinds of
signals to use for accurate screening?
• Design claim 14: Requiring potential members to complete a
diagnostic task will screen out some undesirable members.
– E.g., CPATCHAs, practice games, writing one’s symptoms (online
depression forum)
• Design claim 15: Requiring potential members to provide external
diagnostic credentials will screen out some undesirable members
– E.g., Sermo checks members with national physician DB
• Design claim 16: Requiring potential members to provide referrals
from existing members will screen out some undesirable members.
– E.g., Gmail Beta, Quora Beta, etc.
3. Retention (or Maintenance)
Keeping newcomers around
• Newcomers should stick around long enough to
–
–
–
–
learn the ropes;
form relationship with other members
begin identify with the group as a whole
eventually become committed members who will take on
core responsibilities
• Reality: substantial amount of newcomer turnover
– Usenet group: 68% are never seen after their first post
– Perl open source: 54% left after their first post
– WoW: 46% left group within one month (and migrating)
3. Retention (or Maintenance)
Keeping newcomers around
• Design claim 17: Entry barriers for newcomers may cause those
who join to be more committed to the group and contribute more
to it.
– Entry barriers: WoW/OSS has a long period of initiation
– Severe initiation has two effects: driving away some potential
members, while increasing the commitment of those who expended
this effort
• Design claim 18: When newcomers have friendly (positive)
interactions with existing community members soon after joining a
community, they will be more likely to stay and contribute more.
– Usenet example: higher returning rate if others reply first post
(Arguello et al., 2006)
– Inclusive usage of language: e.g., “we” instead of “you” + Facebook
comments
3. Retention (or Maintenance)
Keeping newcomers around
• Design claim 19: Encouraging self-disclosure (e.g., profile, intro
threads) gives existing group members a basis for conversation
with newcomers than therefore should increase interaction
between old timers and newcomers.
• Design claim 20. Assigning the responsibilities of having friendly
interactions with newcomers to particular community members
(e.g., welcome committee) increases the frequency of these
interactions.
• Design claim 21: Explicitly discouraging hostility towards
newcomers who make mistakes can promote friendly initial
interactions between newcomers and old-timers.
– Hostility examples: RTFM, STFU
4. Socialization
Teaching the newcomers the ropes
• Organizational socialization tactics (Van Maanen and Schein 1979)
– Institutionalized: collective, formal, sequential, fixed, serial, investiture
– Individualized: individual, informal, random, disjunctive, divestiture
• Design claim 22: Use formal, sequential and collective socialization
tactics
– Ex) standardized FAQs, Hattrick University (game), etc.
• Design claim 23:Provide formal mentorship to the newcomers
– Ex) eBay trading assistants (fee-based), Everything2 Mentor System
Antecedents and outcomes of newcomer adjustment during
organizational socialization. From Bauer et al (2007).
5. Protection
• Distrust of newcomers due to “no” history in the community
– eBay: buyers can pay less with (less experienced) sellers
• Ingroup-outgroup bias may happen (Moreland 1985)
– Old-timers vs. newcomers (depending on the kind of community and its goals)
• Design claim 24: Sandboxes both speed up the learning process for
newcomers and reduce the harm to the community they might otherwise
cause.
• Design Claim 25: Progressive access controls reduce the harm a newcomer
can do to a community while learning the ropes.
– Peripheral participation is useful for learning skills and norms
– Theory of legitimate peripheral participation: new comers become
experienced members through small but productive actions (Lave and Wenger
1991)
Summary
• Recruitments (interpersonal vs. impersonal)
– Active recruitment, exploit social influence (and existing social nets), celebrity
endorsing, impersonal ads only for new communities, appealing to
heuristic/systematic processing, social proof, familiarity
• Selection (self-selection vs. screening)
– Accurate/complete info, pay/wait for entry, weed-out tasks, diagnostic tasks,
referrals
• Retention (keeping newcomers around)
– Higher entry barriers, positive social interactions, self-disclosure,
mentors/welcome committee, discourage hostility (e.g., banning RTFM)
• Socialization
– Socialization tools (e.g., FAQ, courses, etc.); social support with mentors
• Protection (from potentially damaging actions)
– Sandboxes, progressive access controls