A Model for Better Understanding Communities Online

By: Sam Ford, PepperDigital

People often use terms such as "users" to talk about Internet audiences. 

Now, if there's one thing my MIT colleague Joshua Green always reminds me of, it's that these labels matter (as I wrote about earlier this month here on PepperDigital). 

In particular, these terms frame the way we look at those who are reading, watching, listening—and often producing commentary and materials in response.  And since all "media producers" are likewise audience members, it can sometimes be baffling how commodified these audience members can be when they are transformed into more passive roles, such as users, are lumped into one category, as if there were some singular audience or community for a brand or media product.

That's not to vilify segmentation.  It's no more a help to say every audience member is unique than it is to say the audience is all the same—neither produce a model that's feasible for effective mass communication.  It just means there's a need for a more nuanced way to understand the different types of online audience members.

Almost a decade ago—back in 1999—Robert V. Kozinets (who now acts as a consulting researcher for the Consortium I work with at MIT) wrote a piece that has been quite influential in scholarly online community research.  That piece, entitled "E-Tribalized Marketing?" proposed breaking fan communities at particular sites down into four categories.

As I summarize here, those four types of fans are:

1.) Tourists. These fans have a passive relationship with both the community and the show or the brand. They may often just be lurkers.

2.) Minglers. These fans have strong ties with the community but not particularly with the show or the brand, or at least not with the current product. These fans are tied to the product only through social ties and not at all through consumption.

3.) Devotees. These fans are strongly attached to a show or a brand but are not full members of the community. In other words, they are deeply engaged fans but not particularly involved in the social aspect of fandom, even if they lurk and read a lot of fan comments.

4.) Insiders. These are the prominent members of the community who both participate actively and are also devoted to the show or brand.

Rob's work predicted that about 20 percent of the fans fall into the "devotee" and "insider" categories, but they are a particularly influential 20 percent, at least for the community on the discussion boards he was looking at.

I've found this breakdown quite useful and have drawn on it for my own writing and research, particularly because it distinguishes and differentiates among various types of community behavior.  And I think the categorizations Rob described there are not just useful for scholars writing about these phenomena but for media professionals interested in better relating to their audiences online.

Two important caveats though:

First, these categories are not meant to be permanent descriptions of individuals.  Someone may be an insider on one site and a tourist on others, or an individual may move over time from being an insider to a devotee or mingler. In reality, our online behaviors are always fluid, changing in relation to a particular site over time and changing as we surf from site to site.

Second, the proportion of a community that falls into any one of these categories will differ, depending on the site and the community type.  Recently, Rob wrote a follow-up piece over at his blog, Brandthroposophy, based on a study from Swedish Master's students Hjalti Hjaltason and Marie Vernersson.  Their study—of Facebook online poker communities rather than fan communities in online discussion boards—found 61 percent of the audience in the more active category.

As Rob indicates, the differences can be explained in part because a community surrounding a poker game is engaged in activities that may differ substantially than fan community boards surrounding a media property.  Further, the nature of a Facebook group versus a message board in and of itself is substantial.

In short, Rob's model isn't a "smoking gun" sorting machine that can make complex online communities be neatly packaged and understood.  For marketers looking for that smoking gun, I'm sorry to say it will never be found.  Communities are too dynamic for that to ever happen.

But it's a very useful way to look at "the audience" or "the community" in a more nuanced way and to understand that there are a variety of ways "the user" engages with a brand, and with the rest of the community.

Thoughts?  Questions?  Drop me a line at samford@mit.edu.

Comments

[Rob Kozinets]

Sam: I could seriously kiss you for this. A subtle, nuanced, yet accessible representation of what I was trying to say. If you want to see a bit more about the article (really series of pieces) from which the typology sprang, see today's blog posting (June 25)...Thanks!

[Sam Ford]

Well, Rob, I'm glad you only got the kissing idea AFTER we both left the Consumer Culture Theory Conference...Seriously, thanks for the kind words. And, for other readers, I highly recommend you check out Rob's blog. There's a reason it's in our blog roll.