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

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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

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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-to- leader 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.

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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.

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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)

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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)

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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