Active members are a community's most engaged members. Typically 1 percent or so of registered members, they create a great deal of content, answer a disproportionate number of questions, guide your customers though the real-world use of your products and services, relay customer issues to your organization, and lead by example.
Essential to any community, active members have definite motivations and needs. Supporting a vibrant community means understanding what drives these members and helping them achieve their own goals. Through interviews with four active members of leading technology-based communities, this report looks to answer such questions as "Why do active members devote so much time (sometimes upwards of 20 hours a week) and effort to help others?" "What drives them to share their expertise and perspective?" "What's in it for them?" And "How can the community's business sponsor best identify and support them?"
The people interviewed are active members of The MathWorks' MATLAB Central User Community, the Symantec Technology Network, Intuit's QuickBooks Small Business Community, and Microsoft's Exchange Server Community and MVP program. While four interviews do not make up a statistical sample, the conversations contain enough commonalities to draw reasonable and practical conclusions.
INTRODUCTION
What Is an "Active Member"?
The definition of an "active" member varies from community to community. Some communities have hard and fast rules, while others "know it when they see it." But in all cases it refers to someone who goes above and beyond in terms of answering questions and providing guidance to others.
However active members are defined, they're the life blood of the community, essential to its functioning. They're the community's most engaged members, creating proportionally—if not absolutely—most of the content, answering most of the questions, encouraging new members to contribute and to learn the community's rules of the road, and leading by example.
In a typical community, 1 percent to 5 percent of registered members tend to be "active," with the percentage more often than not skewing toward the lower end. This illustrates how rare they are, and implicitly emphasizes the importance of supporting their efforts.
What Do Active Members Do?
In her book, Outside Innovation, Patty Seybold discusses the five key roles that customers play. They can be lead customers, contributors, consultants, guides, and promoters:
- Lead Customers are a special breed of innovators. Not finding what they need, they invent new solutions themselves. They extend, modify, and/or redesign your products and services.
- Contributors are happy to donate their work for the benefit of others. For example, contributors may create software or music or designs, and offer their creations freely to others. They enjoy seeing their contributions and ideas used.
- Consultants provide deep subject matter expertise and offer valuable guidance and insights. They analyze trade-offs, help you prioritize, and recommend winning approaches.
- Guides act as advisors to other customers, solving problems, and offering insights. Guides classify, filter, organize, and review alternatives. They help others make sense out of confusion. They add value by creating new knowledge.
- Promoters are enthusiasts about your brand and your products. They are happy to spread the word. They come up with innovative ideas about how to attract and delight other customers.
Although active community members take on characteristics of all five roles, in communities that focus on technical service and support, active members are primarily guides.
Active Members' Customer Scenarios
We define Customer Scenarios to be sets of tasks that customers would ideally like to do in order to achieve desired outcomes. They are often in the form of "I want..." to achieve something. For example, a software purchaser may have the scenario "I want to buy the program I need at a good price."
Identifying Customer Scenarios lets organizations know what's most important to their customers and other stakeholders, so they can enable them to succeed.
We've identified the following six scenarios as the primary ones for active members of service and support communities:
- I want to help others (because it's in my DNA, and because others have helped me get where I am today). Corollary: I want to know that I've helped somebody.
- I want to learn, both for its own sake and to be better at my job.
- I want to stay (very) current in my field.
- I want visibility and recognition in the community (especially with my peers), at my company, and in my field.
- I want to help improve the products and services I care about.
- I want a creative outlet.
- I want to enjoy myself.
As you read the interviews, think about which of these scenarios they address.
Interviewees
The four active community members interviewed are:
This report continues...
To read the full report: http://www.psgroup.com/detail.aspx?ID=847.