We all are social animals, and would love to share our opinion and thoughts. We also love to discover new things that would interest us. But a social gratification is only achieved if we have an audience who can hear us. Nobody wants their voice to be echoed in an empty chamber. Any kind of feedback is a motivation.
One of the key challenges for any social media website is to help the contributors get right attention for their efforts. In the era, where attention is touted as the new currency, more and more noise is gathered which is making it difficult to identify the right content for the right person. Within online communities attention and recognition are considered to be the most important motivators for participation and contribution. Generally it has been observed that those who get more attention are likely to contribute more, while those who don`t might decrease their productivity. Especially for a first time contributors, it has always been a challenge for any site to identify the true value of their efforts.
So the key to success for any online community is to provide right attention to its contributors. For high traffic sites like digg, youtube and stumbleupon it’s easier, since they already have huge traffic inflow. But for newer or smaller sites this has been the biggest rolling friction. If you can get attention to the contributors’ content – they will produce more content – this will get more traffic – hence more attention – and more content. So in this chicken-egg situation, one wonders where to begin with.
The answer lies in the fragmented nature of the internet.
Most of big social sites are realizing they have to open their gates, and let developers build applications on top of their platforms. Some of the big sites which haven`t done so or are resisting from it will be a thing of past very soon. You have to provide right plugs and tools for your contributors to share their contributions freely on different platforms seamlessly. Your community in future is not going to exist only on your platform, but will co-exits simultaneously on different places.
One of the prime example is of “Circle of Moms“, who was able to emerge out of nowhere as huge community of 850,000 moms in just two months by utilizing Facebook platform efficiently. They were able to do so by understanding that building walls around their portal will restrict their ability to grow. And today it is one of the fastest growing mother’s communities on the web.
