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- Member Spotlight
- Justin
- Verizon Community Forum
- Member Since: Aug. 05, 2008
- 517 posts (15 posts/week)
I started coming to the community to learn, and I find that I still learn something new almost every day. But I stay because I like helping people, there’s tremendous satisfaction in that.
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The process through which a new member in a community becomes a regular, established contributor is particularly important to understand in order to fully grasp the capabilities of communities. It is subtle, fascinating and unusually powerful as a driver of the human psyche.
The Initiate
A new member in a community comes for information or for a shared interest. In the first case, it is because the community generates specific information that is useful to the new member through its member-generated content. In the second case, it is because the community brings together people around a specific focus. In most cases, these two reasons are mixed and hard to distinguish.
The Observer
At first, the new member will primarily read other members’ contributions, observe activity, and perhaps occasionally post questions. The new member may remain in that phase for several months (or maybe forever), and be a large consumer of community content.
The Convert
The observer quickly absorbs the common values and rules of behavior of his customer community. Each customer community represents a small-scale society, and has its own implicit values and rules of behavior. The new member who is rapidly able to duplicate them in his own posts quickly assimilates these expectations.
Once the new member has assimilated the rules of behavior of the community, he is truly a member rather than an initiate. To him, the virtual community is as real and important as the physical communities around him, and he may spend more time in his virtual community than in his physical communities. At this stage, he has now become a faithful in a community whose beliefs are centered on its corporate sponsor and products. In later stages, he will become an evangelist.
The Evangelist
Once the member surmounts the timidity that comes with being “the new neighbor on the block”, he will start posting and contributing to the common body of knowledge generated by the community. In online customer communities, maybe more than anywhere else, one’s recognition and prestige are directly related to the quality and quantity of contributions to the community. There is also the desire to be helpful to others. At this stage, the member becomes a true evangelist of the community values and, implicitly, of its corporate sponsor.
The Opinion Leader
Finally, as the member’s posts accumulate and his contributions become noticed, he gains respect from the community and becomes an opinion leader to whom other members often pay deference through quotes and direct positive references. Once such respect has been established, the member, now a community leader, starts to enforce community values by reprimanding breaks of the community’s behavior roles and criticizing the offenders. The opinion leaders emerging from the community are a de facto management structure for the community that the corporate sponsor can co-opt for many of the global management needs of the community. The process that has led them to their position is self-selecting and creates believers who are the best evangelists that a corporate sponsor can hope to attain.
