Designing for Active Lurkers
Fred Wilson makes a good point about how to think about relationships online. Instead of treating people as either taking some important action (the one we want them to) or not taking it, Fred reminds us there is a spectrum in between.
“looking at your user base as either non-active or transactors is the wrong way to think online (and maybe offline too). Just like bookstores use cafes to bring potential purchasers in the store, online retailers should intentionally cultivate an active non-transactor user base.”
Indeed, the vast majority of users (even valuable ones) are passive most of the time. The spectrum of activity is wide and is filled with people who are contemplating action, observing the scene, browsing, searching, reading, lurking, or otherwise passively hanging out. The majority of use is silent.
There is ample evidence for this. Remember Bradley Horowitz’ data on Yahoo Groups from way back when? He found that across all Yahoo Groups you could basically cut up the population into 3 types: Creators (1%), Synthesizers (10%), and Lurkers (100%).
Horowitz made several interesting points about this. One, you might not even want everyone to be a creator since this spectrum naturally keeps the signal to noise ratio in check. If everyone were creators, then things might get very noisy very quickly. Second, each of these groups is inclusive…the lurkers includes the creators, as creators aren’t always creating. They lurk, too.
In general, the vast majority of activity online is passive. Just because people are passive doesn’t mean they’re not valuable. For activities people are passionate about, they’ll move up the ladder of engagement and begin participating more. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t design to try to get people participating more. It just means after the population reaches equilibrium you’ll probably see a broad spectrum of use.
Back to Fred. I think he’s right about adding value specifically for people to get comfortable with your product/service. This is what relationship building is all about. From my own experience, almost every one of my clients has been a reader/lurker for months (sometimes years!) before they contact me. When I first started realizing this it startled me because I would wonder…why are they waiting so long to even say “hello”? But now that I’ve seen it over and over again, I realize that this isn’t science fiction…this is real life, real people, and real relationships. I’m actually glad now when someone says “long time reader, first time caller”. I know that we’ll have a good conversation because they already know where I stand on things.
This is all permission marketing at its core. You have to design for an active, lurking population, to build relationships over time, whether you’re meeting people face to face or designing an online application for people you never see. It may be adding archival content that people can browse or learn from. It may be creating a newsletter that people can subscribe to. It might be writing a blog. It may be like Fred’s example of Etsy forums. Etc.
Or, it may be as I’ve done this morning: designing a landing page for a book I’m writing and allowing people to sign up to be notified when I launch. People can lurk all they want to…if they give me permission to shoot them a reminder email that’s a great first step in what may or may not be a long-term relationship.
Make them Care! - Struggling to communicate the value of your product or service? I'm writing a new book that shows you how to make people care about your product or service by clearly communicating the most important bits. For designers and marketers creating product web sites. Find out more.
Links to this Post
Comments
1. Brent Billock 10:50am, Thu 16th, 2009
You’ve just described our entire business model at Zacks.com.
We provide a daily abundance of free content, both on the web and through a free email newsletter. By giving away little pieces of insight and advice, we demonstrate the value of our analysis and stock ratings.
It may take months or years before the consumers of those small morsels are ready to step up and buy a premium product. But the larger we can grow that list of people receiving free content, the greater the value of a 1% response rate when we do ask for the sale.
2. Ben Nevile 12:01pm, Thu 16th, 2009
It’s hard to design for lurkers because, other than visit numbers, you don’t get any active feedback about what they do and don’t like. Giving them the opportunity to declare their interest is great of course, but any other ideas for how to measure if you’re on the right track?
3. Christina Sponias 12:15pm, Thu 16th, 2009
I agree with you, Joshua, because a relationship with our website visitors is important, and I believe that each website owner has to care about providing fresh content for them, or give them the possibility to participate in various activities that won’t be necessarily subscribing to an email list of buying anything.
Everyone usually buys something when they feel that they can trust the seller; this confidence has to be built with time. Nobody arrives to a store and immediately buys whatever in a rush. Most people think a lot, analyzing many things before deciding to purchase something, and this happens online and offline, since it is a characteristic of the human behavior.
4. oggy 3:55pm, Thu 16th, 2009
The beauty of the web, is that it’s the first time that we can measure these passive users and their “lurker” behavior.
Landing pages, searcher intent through keywords, or even referral sites can give us valuable information about people who leave a site after just viewing one page (Bounce). Imagine then, the valuable information we can gather from lurkers which implies some sort of navigation. What are they interested in? is there a trend? or several? How could they add to the value of the site without necessarily participating in a transaction?
Potential for Brand awareness, word of mouth recommendations and even product evangelism come to mind.
5. Nate Klaiber 12:59pm, Fri 17th, 2009
@Ben Nevile
You have hit one of the toughest things when designing for lurkers. How do we know anything about them, when they aren’t doing anything? And…Can we truly change that?
One way I would suggest (something I have done in the past), is to do some A/B (split) testing with some different design ideas. Do your best to split things up and see if Analytics shows anything different. You can’t necessarily gauge the qualitative parts of the site, but you will be able to see the quantitative and see if there is more activity. This can include simple clicks, too.
Setup goals (funnels), and see if people are actually getting to the areas you think they are. This could give hint at a bottleneck earlier up the chain in the design process.
Again, these are just a few small ideas to a very tough problem to solve. There is no science to it, and each situation will vary in many ways.
6. Chris 12:24am, Tue 28th, 2009
Sounds a lot like using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (one of many persuasion theories, so I guess there is a science to it after all).
ELM has 2 broad routes to engagement.
- Central Route for those already engaged/involved or interested
- Peripheral for those that aren’t engaged or immediately interested.
You want people to be in the central group. Lurkers fall into the peripheral group, we need to be designing cues to engage them and steer them into the central group.
Advertising has been doing this forever in getting people’s attention, but it starts to get really interesting (and fun) when you’re playing with this stuff in an interactive environment.
Its a interesting that this is considered ‘new’ in the web industry when its been around for decades and researched to hell in the ‘real world’. Maybe its that the research hasn’t been applied in the web yet?
7. Nate Klaiber 9:22am, Tue 28th, 2009
@Chris
I think it’s simply because it hasn’t been applied to the web yet. I don’t think we can take a principle from one context, drop it in another, and still have the same effects or metrics. Measuring is different in both contexts.
I like the thought process and model, but I think it’s still young on how, where, and why you measure this on the web.
Thoughts?
8. Christina Sponias 12:11pm, Tue 28th, 2009
Yes, the point is always how to transform the lurkers into active visitors that will do something, instead of simply staying around, reading, watching and thinking…? Many of them simply remain lurkers forever, especially if they find new content and interesting opportunities everyday or so, what means that they don’t have any commercial intention. Perhaps some day they will…
What could help them take this step earlier? Information in articles and ads are banal tactics used by everyone…