UPDATED 12:24 EDT / JANUARY 07 2011

Don’t underestimate the power of lurkers

Diving into a community head first can be intimidating for some people, even though it may be second nature to you and me.

Sometimes it’s much easier to stay in the background and lurk, enjoying the community with no real commitment.

It’s the lurkers sometimes, who contribute to that valuable “time spent” stat community managers often covet and it makes sense to consider lurkers when you’re developing features for a new online community.

I don’t believe that every action should require registration, and learned from experience that it can take a lurker up to six months to finally bite the bullet and jump on in. I specifically remember an e-mail from a member and a blog from another indicating that they’d both been hanging around for months.

By the time they did sign up, they knew which groups they wanted to join, which members they’d like to connect with and understood the community culture as well.  Lurkers are also less likely to create a new profile  and abandon it, never to return. They already view your community as a destination and that’s a beautiful thing.

By locking everything down, you don’t give people a chance to dabble, and sometimes you have to have a little taste before completely committing.

So as you think about ways to engage the community, do consider the lurkers. Include polls and other interactive features. Host live chats that allow guests to sign in, and publish snippets of your member newsletter in a blog post or forum so they can see what they’re missing.

This is an important audience, so be sure to show the lurkers a little love.

[Cross-posted at Online Community Strategist]


A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU