Improving Virtual Communitiy Member Motivation and Activities …

and has the ultimate goal of finding ways to stimulate user contribution in online communities … make people feel “more at home”…

Want to know more about your users ?

why not participate in my research ?

I need your support for that, the owner of a running online community, be it a webmaster forum, an online gamers club or a Britney Spears fan club…

As I’m researching a lot of social factors like motivation, friendship building in the community my plans are to conduct online surveys among your users.

my online surveys will conduct about their habits, like’s and dis-like’s will help you in running your business as well…

This survery will be developed in the next months and of course you will be able to review and do the survery yourself before we launch it to your users.

The surveys will be run from October 2006 to Jan 2007, so you might even choose an appropriate time with me to launch it.

What’s in it for you, the community owner?

1. You will receive a free research about your users behaviours and habbits, their like’s and dis-likes
2. You will receive a free professional research interpretation of these results… making helpful words out of a lot of numbers
3. You can show your community members that you care about them – even give them the research results if you want to…
4. You can advertise your community with scientific research results… you can add the results of your survey about your user base to you media kit to attract future advertisers

What’s in it for your users?

1. I am ready to fund some prizes for your users to increase participation – the type and value of those prizes are to be discussed with me before we start – not every prize is right everywhere, or?
2. The survey is completely anonymous – no user data will be collected except some minor demographics like sex,age, time the user belongs to your community

What requirements your community must fulfil?

1. a platform for information exchange between members – no e-bay like auction sites, as those don’t allow enough user interaction enough
2. at least 50% user generated content
3. a substantial member count – I’d say around 500 minimum – only 10% or so of those are really participating in average anyway, so I expect a similar figure of filled out surveys

update 7/24 begin

What can you do to help me?

1. I will conduct an online survey among your users – the draft version will be ready latest October . Once that’s approved by my mentor we will have to
* post about the survey in a central thread
* place a link on say every page of your community to bring people there
* maybe if you usually do that, create a popup or send out mass-PMs / mails to your users… * short – anything to make your users signup and fill out the survey
2. I also plan on analysing certain statistic information over time for communities… average posts per user, average post size per user, average number of users on buddy lists and things like that ( all anonymous of course, interested in statistics insights, not the single user behaviour here)
   
   I’m not yet sure on which of these stats I’ll fully need, but any kind of related data that you can provide on a regular basis (i.e. via a Hall of fame – page on your site or via a databases-static query export (I COULD program the SQLs for you if required) would be a great help for that analysis.
   (I COULD program the SQLs for you if required)
3. Also your idea of an incentive would help… for webmasters I’m sure a perm link or presell page might be a good incentive to participate… but it all depends on your community…

   update 7/24 end

   So if you run or own a web community and want to help me by supporting an online survey in YOUR community, please contact me at your earliest convenience to join this research and discuss possible options for YOUR community.

   If you have any questions on my studies, this research, the survery itself, just post your comments below this post.

   I also added an FAQ on my community research recently to the site – check it out.

   Thanks,
   Christoph C. Cemper

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