Lurking is Not a Static State

Lurking and its role in communities has been on the forefront of my mind for the past few days. It has received a lot of attention in the past from the thought leaders in the realm of learning and the role of communities in personal as well as organizational learning. I have recently taken on enterprise community facilitation and was curious to see how people are interacting on our enterprise collaboration platform. The analytics told me that over 40% of the users are Active Users (a term Jive uses to describe all users who log in to consume content without necessarily interacting with the content in any manner). This is also proved by the fact that many of the groups on this platform have membership of ~300 but obviously not everyone is a Contributing User. They are lurking on the edge, consuming content.


Somehow, the word lurker has become associated with pejorative connotations of people taking from communities without giving back, of not contributing, of being selfish and feeding off the hard work of others. They are the free riders. However, is that truly the case? Would we consider silent participants in a meeting or at presentations lurkers? Not really. They showed up. I think what makes lurking seem dubious in an online environment is that we can't technically "reveal" our engagement. No one can see the engrossed look on my face when I read discussion threads in the Learning and Skills group. A lurker might very well be giving back by performing better at their jobs, by sharing insights with others in the context of their daily work by using the learning gleaned from lurking. This is especially true of communities in enterprises. Since the give back is asymmetric and happens in a different context, this goes unnoticed. Does that mean they should always continue to lurk? I don't quite think that happens. Some of the research material points to a cycle of participation that I have mentioned later.


I recalled some of the posts and articles I had read in the past about lurking as a behavior in online communities and what it indicated, and decided to dig through those again. At this point, I also "serendipitous-ly" stumbled upon a couple of conversations recently that touched upon lurking (this is why I love social media). 
The questions going through my mind were:

1. Do people learn when lurking?
2. Is it an indicator of the value of the content being generated on the platform?
3. When does lurking change to participation?
4. What can community facilitators do to turn lurkers into participants? 
5. How is lurking different from non-participation? 
6. Finally, are lurkers considered as community members?

After digging through the references and some old articles I had saved, these are some of the key points that emerged. 
Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith in Digital Habitats calls lurking "legitimate peripheral participation."

From a community of practice perspective, lurking is interpreted as “legitimate peripheral participation,” a crucial process by which communities offer learning opportunities to those on the periphery. Rather than a simple distinction between active and passive members, this perspective draws attention to the richness of the periphery and the learning enabled (or not) by it. (p. 9)

Quoted in Lurking or Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Christy Tucker

Etienne Wenger in the Communities of Practice: Learning, meaing and identity explains the five trajectories of participation behavior:

• Legitimate peripheral participation, not fully participating (lurkers)
• Inbound, headed toward full participation
• Insider, fully accepted into the community
• Boundary, sustaining membership in related communities of practice and “brokering” interactions between them
• Outbound, in the process of leaving a community

from Lurking and Other Behaviors

There are subsets of lurkers who are Active Lurkers. In Active lurkers – the hidden asset in online communities, writes: 

Active lurkers are those that may take something from the community and pass it along to others using different channels – so they participate in your word of mouth. Active lurkers also include those people who may visit a customer support community and find a solution to their problem without contributing to the community. Those people derive a lot of value from that community interaction and so does your company since they do not clog up your customer call center. Active lurkers also include those who will contact the original poster through a different channel, like telephone, email, or perhaps a face to face meeting – in effect continuing the conversation outside of the visible public side of the community, but not outside of the community itself.

From Lurking builds commonality

...Sometimes. Lurkers are part of a group's latent energy; good things happen when that energy is activated. Lurkers are part of the all-important weak-tie network, and it's important to keep them engaged, even if engagement does not translate to participation. ... the lurkers are a critical part of the weak-tie network -- they need to understand the concepts being discussed so they can discuss them cogently with people who may be outside the network in question.

Just a couple of days back I read Luis Suarez's post on Social Learning at TELUS by Dan Pontefract, where Dan Pontefract says (and I am quoting Luis Suarez's post here):

You don’t have to have everyone on board to get value: Indeed, something that we have seen ourselves, over at IBM as well with some of our social software tools, like IBM Connections Bookmarks where about 35k fellow IBMers make use of it, yet the entire IBM population of 400k benefit from it, because the search results from our corporate Intranet search engine are injected with those social bookmarks that folks keep adding along. And it looks like the folks at TELUS share a similar experience; while they may not have achieved just yet 100% penetration with their social tools, the ones who are making active use of them are helping everyone else get enough value, perhaps not just producing valuable content, but digesting it as well.
This is, in my opinion, a critical point regarding the adoption of social tools within the enterprise, mainly from the perspective of setting up the right expectations and encouraging those who would want to make use of the tools to use them, while allowing the remaining ones adjust accordingly and figure out by themselves whether they would need to jump in as well or not. Let them figure out the value they would want to get from it is probably as good as it gets in order to allow for knowledge workers to understand how, when, why and what to contribute, whenever they may be ready.

There are communities where we continue to remain as lurkers. This happens due to various reasons. Participation, I think, is a factor/output of multiple variables. Some of these are:

1. Comfort level with the topic under discussion and having something substantive to say.
2. The perceived expertise level of the others in the community (if I am out of my depth, I may just lurk).
3. The place of the community in my daily life (if it is on a topic of peripheral interest, I may just lurk).
4. The attention/time ratio I can devote.
5. The feel of the community--does it feel welcoming and generate a sense of belonging, accepting of different opinions, composed of people at different levels of expertise, and so on.

When one or more of the above mentioned participation criteria are not met, users tend to lurk. But, as described above, lurking is not necessarily a bad thing. Lurkers often have weak ties to a community but form bridges between communities. They often try to use their listening engagement to distill many opinions and seek the larger pattern. By virtue of being distant from the core of the activities, they may spread themselves thinly across multiple communities and are in the key position to know what is happening where. And talk about these communities cogently to those external to the communities thus driving users towards the communities. 

User Profiles: Spanning Structural Holes

Mark Granovetter wrote the paper The Strength of Weak Ties in 1973. This is probably one of the most oft cited paper in the industry of sociology, education, psychology, sociometry, network analysis and other related fields and sub-fields that study human behavior. As far back as 1973, he spoke about how interaction in small groups aggregate to form large-scale patterns, in short, the theory of emergence that every complex system—organism or organization—display. His other notable research was on ties—the premise of this post. He claimed that strong ties—ties between close friends and colleagues—do not lead to problem-solving or import unfamiliar ideas. Each knows what the others also know or practice. Let’s see how this plays out in an organizational setting.    

What has Granovetter got to do with User Profiles and Structural Holes?

Scenario #1

Here’s a scenario. While hypothetical, I believe it is entirely plausible. Alex and Sam work in the same organization. They are based out of different countries but know each other having met once at the Away Day event.  Months have passed after that meeting. One day, Alex is suddenly required to work on a project that necessitates the use of a technology he is only vaguely familiar with. As he and the team rack their brains for solution, Alex suddenly recalls Sam, whom he had met all those months back. Sam had mentioned this as one of his key areas of interest. Presto! Maybe, Sam can help…And indeed, Sam can! You can probably predict the rest now. 

Study the above image for a second. You can see that because Alex has a weak tie (they are acquaintances who met only once) with Sam, both Alex’s and Sam’s group of close ties become potential ties for each other. They can become aware of the existence of the other and reach out for help when needed due to the connection between Sam and Alex. The possibilities of converting these potential ties into actual ones reap tremendous benefits for an organization.

Granovetter also had an interesting claim that I have paraphrased here: Weak ties are not merely trivial acquaintance ties but rather a crucial bridge between two clumps of close friends (strong ties). Bridges help to solve problems, gather information and import unfamiliar ideas. 

 

Scenario #2

The scenario remains the same as above. The only difference in this case is that Alex and Sam did not meet at the Away Day. They don’t know about the existence of the other. Alex and the team rack their brains to come up with a solution. The proposal must be sent out within a week. They send out a mail requesting for help. But with no specific person to direct the mail to, they are unsure about the response. This is a classic case of a structural hole. Ronald Burt, in his book Structural Holes (1992), defines it “as a separation between non-redundant contacts”. 

Of course, real-world situations are always much more complex, with multiple cause-and-effect relationships playing out in tandem. But my point is not complexity in this post but the importance of spanning structural holes to help an organization become more responsive, adaptive, and innovative. 

Let’s carry on with the above scenario for a bit. How can we ensure that Alex and Sam (and others like them) do not remain unaware of each other’s existence? This unawareness does not bode well for an organization. A huge amount of organizational knowledge and innovation are lost because we fail to span structural holes or leave it to chance. Leaving something as crucial as this to chance meetings at social events can no longer be an option if organizations want to remain sustainable. 

Enterprise Collaboration Platforms and User Profiles

Fast forward to the 21^st Century! An increasing number of organizations are distributed across regions and countries. The probability of disconnect is high. Hand in hand with this phenomenon is the massive growth of information, rapid-fire pace of change, and complexities in work situations that defy all known practices— best or good—irrespective. All of these necessitate an increasing amount of collaboration and tapping into the collective knowledge of an organization. This means spanning structural holes—consciously and deliberately—as an organizational strategy to face the challenges of the 21^st Century.

Many forward looking organizations have already embraced the idea of social business (I will leave that for another post) and invested in high-potential enterprise collaboration and learning platforms. What makes these platforms so powerful is the ability to find each other, locate expertise at the point of need and the opportunities for serendipitous learning. One of the key features such platforms offer is User Profiles. While this may seem totally innocuous and negligible, it is not. 

User profiles help to bridge structural holes. Let’s go back to Alex. Imagine that Alex never met Sam, and he (Alex) is stuck in this dilemma of writing a proposal with a looming deadline on something he is clueless about. He can search for the specific expertise on an enterprise platform—and if the expertise exists in the organization***—the profile of the person who is tagged with the expertise or has mentioned it as one of her/his areas of knowledge will show up. In this case, let’s assume Sam. Without having ever met Sam, Alex has one concrete person he can immediately reach out to. In the process of the search, Alex may also find documents or reports on the topic. It is an easy matter to check who created those, and reach out to those folks as well. 

It is fairly easy to see how the User Profiles feature of an enterprise platform is a powerful tool for locating potential ties that need to be converted into actual ones to keep the organizational knowledge flowing and maintain that sustainable edge. Filling out one’s user profile in as much detail as possible thus serves the organization and the individual well. Who doesn’t want to be recognized as an expert? Who doesn’t want to reach out and extend help to those who need it? 

***In case, the expertise does not exist, it’s time to leverage one’s personal learning network. Bring knowledge in from the outside.  That calls for another post.