Increasing Responses in Online Communities

From Information Systems at Pitt Business

There are an increasing amount of people that join and participate in online communities all over the world. However, many of these communities fail since communication between individuals is not always successful. Little research has focused on why some people receive responses to posts in communities and others do not. This paper seeks to identify conversational, individual and group level factors that affect two key elements of success: community's willingness to respond to a member's message and members' commitment to the community.

This paper reports a large empirical investigation on factors to determine whether a poster will receive a response in an online community (Usenet group). To increase the likelihood of a response, a poster should: have prior experience in the community (not be considered a newcomer in the community), posting on-topic, introducing oneself via autobiographical testimonials, asking questions, using less complex language.

[edit] Abstract

People come to online communities seeking information, encouragement, and conversation. When a community responds, participants benefit and become more committed. Yet interactions often fail. In a longitudinal sample of 6,172 messages from 8 Usenet newsgroups, 27% of posts received no response. The information context, posters' prior engagement in the community, and the content of their posts all influenced the likelihood that they received a reply, and, as a result, their willingness to continue active participation. Posters were less likely to get a reply if they were newcomers. Posting ontopic, introducing oneself via autobiographical testimonials, asking questions, using less complex language and other features of the messages, increased replies. Results suggest ways that developers might increase the ability of online communities to support successful individual-group interactions.

[edit] Paper Information

Authors: Jaime Arguello, Brian Butler, Elisabeth Joyce, Robert Kraut, Kimberly Ling, Carolyn Rosé, Xiaoqing Wang

To check out this paper Talk to Me: Foundations for Successful Individual-Group Interactions in Online Communities

This paper was originally presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, Montréal, Québec, Canada, 2006.

[edit] Keywords

Commitment, community success, contribution, language, online communities, responsiveness, text analysis