Online Communities: The Good, The Bad, and the Silent

I’ve been mulling over an observation that someone made in a discussion forum about community building, whose take was that there is an inverse relationship between a person’s desire to express their opinion and the value of the opinion they express.    I’d like to dismiss that as a pessimistic joke, but my sense is that it’s actually quite accurate.   Considering what I’ve seen in many forums over the course of the years, it does seem that uninformed people tend to talk quite a lot while those who have an informed perspective are reluctant to participate.

That’s just casual observation, and my sense is that it would be difficult to perform a reliable analysis of the phenomenon because it would require a great deal of data and some rather painstaking analysis to qualify whether each contribution was based on sound knowledge.   And it would also be impossible to truly account for the number of people who might have lent expertise to a conversation but chose not to participate.

So instead, I’ve decided to matrix a person’s willingness to participate in a conversation against their ability to contribute something worthwhile, and I do think that it corresponds to some of the behaviors I’ve witnessed, not only in online interactions, but in human interactions in general.

Lurkers (low desire, low expertise)

This group represents a discussion observers who rarely if ever participate.   They do not know enough to have an informed opinion, recognize their opinion is uninformed, and have the wisdom to remain silent and listen to the more informed.  The lurkers cannot be counted, but considering the number of people who view a discussion thread as opposed to the number of people who contribute, they are likely the majority of users who come to the feast but bring nothing to the table.

I wouldn’t go so far as to declare this group to be undesirable, even though their relationship is largely parasitic.   They will occasionally ask a question or probe someone to elaborate, and can be useful in keeping the conversation going.   Particularly in knowledge-sharing forums, a substantial number of participants who are hungry for knowledge is central to the mission of the group.  It could even be said that the main value of a discussion forum are the lurkers, as a group of experts posting things that everyone else in the group already knows is not doing anyone any good at all.

Neither does it seem like a particularly good idea to stimulate the lurkers into being more active in the group: their need for knowledge is something that they bring, and getting them to speak when they lack knowledge turns them into Disinformers.

Disinformers (high desire, low expertise)

The disinformers are the group that prompted the notion that people who know little enjoy talking much, but their contributions are of low value (and may even be detrimental) due to their lack of subject-matter expertise.  If you measure the success of a forum by the level of activity alone, they would seem to be a valuable audience – but given that they annoy others and that anyone who follows their guidance will likely come to regret it, they should likely be regarded as the least valuable audience a community might attract.

I can think of one potential benefit of having disinformers – and admittedly, this is quite a stretch: by offering bad information, a disinformer provokes a response from a participant who has genuine subject matter expertise but is reluctant to participate, who will feel the need to speak up in order to set the record straight.

Consultants (low desire, high expertise)

There are among the lurkers a number of people who do have a significant level of expertise and could be valuable contributors to the group, but who are for whatever reason reluctant to speak.   I liken them to consultants because they are only likely to contribute if they are compensated in some way – not necessarily with a monetary payment, but for esteem or recognition of their expertise.

Consultants represent an untapped potential in online communities, and it’s desirable to get them to join the conversation.  Aside of offering tokens of esteem such as badges of status or participation (which seems quite silly, but can be effective) or cajoling them into taking an active role of moderator, it seems difficult to get them to step out of the shadows.

Ambassadors (high desire, high expertise)

The most desirable participants for an online community – highly knowledgeable people who are generous with their knowledge and who are motivated by a desire to spread enthusiasm for the subject at hand.  This is the audience to pursue, develop, defend, and treasure as they are the value that lurkers seek in a community, and they tend to draw like-minded people to participate, fueling the growth of the community.

However, it does not follow that a community should seek to be solely composed of ambassadors – that leads to the problem described earlier, in which there is no-one in the group that genuinely needs to converse, such that a group of experts has no audience that could benefit from the information they wish to share because everyone to whom they are speaking is already aware of the facts they are sharing.

Caveat: Social Communities

It’s likely that the desirability of knowledgeable participants is particular to knowledge communities – in which the point of participation is to share and gain information germane to a practical skill, be it an occupational or leisure interest – and expertise is significantly less important in social communities, in which the topic of conversation is entirely frivolous.

It’s also likely that the demand for social communities is largely satisfied by the large general-interest communities of Facebook and Twitter, in which people interact with a purely social interest – as a convenient way to maintain contact with people they already know in their offline lives.  An engaging conversationalist in social communities doesn’t necessarily need to have anything of value to say, just the ability to make pleasant conversation, as no-one seems to want or expect anything practical.

At the same time there is a significant and underexploited market for specific professional and leisure interest.   Arguably, LinkedIn has attempted to provide forums for occupational conversation, but non-occupational interest groups seem to be disperse and difficult to locate.   Whether this is fertile ground for expansion or merely an idea that hasn't worked out at all is subject to some debate.

Customer Experience in the Culinary Industry

I read an excerpt from a book on culinary anthropology, specifically the evolution of the restaurant industry, that seemed to encapsulate the basic approaches to customer experience in general – or perhaps that’s what I paid attention to, given my own cognitive filters.  Whether it was intent or inference, it seemed worth a bit more meditation.

Choices in Cuisine

The author’s approach to categorizing cuisine (which is only one of several facets of the restaurant experience) considers the choices that restaurant operators made out of operational or competitive necessity, and seems to portray the contemporary restaurant scene as branches in evolution:

• Home Cooking – Food prepared in the home is the basis for all cuisine, and the customers’ alternative to dining in restaurants.   In this genre, the home cook does as best as he can given the constraints of his skills and budget.   It is a moral imperative to provide food that is substantial, nutritious, and pleasant to consume when feeding one’s own family.
• Utility Cooking – This involves food prepared for the masses.  Food is delivered to a large number of people and the focus is on adequacy, being merely “good enough” to pass for a meal with emphasis on time and cost efficiency that often take priority.  This includes not only cafeterias and mess halls, but also hospital and airline food service as well as “fast food” restaurants … and likely any other venue that is infamous for abysmal quality.   
• Traditional Cuisine – Restaurants that attempt to mimic home cooking, which serve a substantive and flavorful meal but often compromise on nutrition, in which time and money still have some influence and a corresponding effect on degrading quality to varying degrees.   This includes most typical restaurants, and also includes many ethnic restaurants, which mimic “home cooking” of a different nation or culture.
• Haute Cuisine – Restaurants that attempt to elevate the dining experience, by using high-quality ingredients and hiring talented chefs to prepare a meal that a home cook cannot general execute.   This form of cooking focuses more on the presentation and flavor than on the substantive or nutritional qualities, focusing on the pleasure of consumption rather than its functional effect in satisfying hunger or nutritional needs.
• Non-Cuisine – A catchall category was suggested for restaurants that prioritize to non-culinary concerns.  Meals are prepared to suit religious practices (a Kosher or Halal restaurant), dietary restrictions (meals suitable for diabetics), or political sensitivities (a vegetarian or “organic” restaurant) – with the admission that they may fall into one of the other categories as a secondary priority (a Kosher restaurant may be utility, traditional, or haute)

I have the sense this could likely be picked apart a bit further – to consider each of the factors involved (substantial, nutritious, tasty, cheap, quick, and entertaining) – but my sense is that this original schematization is most germane to the analogy I’m not going to get back to: the choice of the level of customer service.

Choices in Customer Service

As the author described each of his categories, it occurred to me that it reflected a choice made by a business owner to provide a given level of customer service, and to serve different priorities.

A brief aside: I’d like to stress “different” because there is a tendency to consider the categorization in the nature of a hierarchy in which one is better than another – suggesting that all restaurants should aspire to the standards of haute cuisine as anything else is inferior.   I could not disagree more: there are many customers who prefer a utility meal to a fancy dinner, ad even those who enjoy fine dining on occasion have a more frequent need of a standard meal, so it’s just as valid a choice to serve their needs and interests such as they are.   There is no profit, and little point, in snobbery.

That said, I’ll ruminate a bit on how these culinary categories are reflected in terms of businesses and customer experience in general:

• Do It Yourself (Home Cooking) – Businesses that support customers with equipment, supplies, and education that enable them to serve themselves.   This is likely the origin of all businesses, whose founders recognized that people will pay someone to do things they already do for themselves.  It is also the death of industries such as financial advice and travel agencies, as people have recognized that doing it themselves results in a better outcome, such that self-service investment and travel reservations have replaced full-service providers.
• Discount Merchandisers (Utility Cooking) – Retailers that provide customers with something that is just barely adequate with a focus on cost and time efficiency.   This is generally seen in the lowest end of the retail industry, but can also be seen in services (cheap haircut chains, discount motels, and the like) 
• Standard Merchandisers (Traditional Cuisine) – Retailers that aim to provide customers with something of moderate quality at a reasonable price, which is more or less as good as they could do for themselves, if they had the time.  Again, this also applies to service, considering that car washes, lawn care, or maid services do a pretty good job at something people would rather not do for themselves.
• Premium Merchandisers (Haute Cuisine) - Retailers that provide the customer elevated quality at an elevated price, often providing a quality that the consumer cannot achieve by his own efforts.   Most “upscale” lines of merchandise fall into this category, as do most “upscale” service providers.
• Fashion Merchandisers (Non-Cuisine) – Retailers whose value pertains to something other than their functional purpose of the goods and services they sell.   This remains vaguely defined: if a person purchase a garment to make a political statement or participates in an activity to socialize with fellow aficionados, these secondary characteristics of the experience surpass the typical benefits most consumers seek to obtain.

My sense in considering this is that it’s more difficult to consider because while “cooking” is something that anyone can do for themselves (to some degree), most people have lost the skills to weave their own cloth and make it into clothing (never mind making your own cell phone from scratch) so purchasing is their only means of serving their needs – so likely the base comparison of retailers and service providers to “what you could do for yourself” is not something that most people can even imagine.

In spite of that, the comparison does seem to fit – and it should be fairly simple to consider the way in which any given business has chosen to serve its customers: whether it supports customers who need supplies and knowledge to do it on their own, those who want something cheap and adequate, those who want something of standard quality at a reasonable price, those who want something superlative (or at least very good) at a premium price, and those whose purchasing decision is influenced by factors not related to the product at all.

In the end

Perhaps I’m making too much of too little, or stretching the analogy too far?   But at the same time I do think that it provides a slightly different way to consider the approach to customer experience that might provide more food for thought than the traditional “price versus quality” schematization based on the customers’ definition of “quality” in a given situation or market segment.

I’ve added the book to my reading list, and am eager to delve further, so it will likely appear as “reading notes” in future.

Long-Term Brand Loyalty

A casual conversation about the longevity of marriage got me to thinking about the longevity of brand loyalty.  I spent some time speaking with, or rather listening to, a man who was very pessimistic about the longevity of marriage.    He had just been through his third divorce.  He was twenty-seven years old.  Naturally, it made me wonder if he had any idea what “marriage” meant – he had some expectation of what it ought to mean, but was obviously not very devoted to the concept.

Statistics on Marriage and Divorce

I’ve long been skeptical of the pessimistic statistics about marriage – that over half end in divorce.  Census statistics support that figure, but it seems a bit dodgy because a person who remains married is counted only once, whereas a person such as the serial divorcee who was speaking to me counts three times, as do each of his wives, who may also have generated additional divorces to add to the statistic.

Digging a bit deeper, statistics also indicate that only 15% of people have ever been divorced.   Even if you trim away about 25% of the remainder as those who never have married, primarily children who are too young for marriage and the odd lifelong bachelor and spinster, there are still likely 60% of the population who married once and never divorced.  So in the end, is that 25% of the population has never been married, 15% have been divorced one or more times, and 60% have been married only once (whether still married to their spouse or widowed).

That paints a much brighter picture about the institution of marriage than the media would care to promulgate: people who remain loyal to a partner all their lives outnumber people who are disloyal by a ratio of about 4 to 1.

Analogy for Brand Loyalty

Loyal to to a brand is not perfectly analogous to loyalty to a spouse, in that it is generally accepted that a company sells products to many people – such that the customer cannot expect to be the “one and only” customer of a brand.    Though it does seem a bit ironic, in the nature of a philanderer who expects loyalty of their spouse, for a brand to expect to become the “one and only” to each of their millions of customers.

It’s generally accepted that brands and customers have an open relationship, the terms of which are that a brand is free to pursue other relationships at will and loyalty is expected of a customer so long as their individual needs are being fulfilled.  That is to say, so long as a brand serves the needs for which it was purchased, the customer doesn’t mind if the brand wants to be appealing to other customers as well.

But therein lies the problem.  If a brand, in pursuit of new customers, changes something about itself that sufficiently detracts from its appeal to exiting customers, their loyalty will be lost.   This is most evident when a brand changes something to do with the functional benefit of a product.  It is also evident when a brand changes its service experience.  And in some instances, it occurs when a brand changes its culture or image (when a person feels the use of the brand is a reflection of their culture or status).  That is to say that people in general are willing to give loyalty, but it is not unconditional.

I have not seen statistics for brand loyalty that parallel the marriage statistics I presented earlier, but it does seem entirely reasonable that they might be about the same for many products: 25% of the population has never tried the product at all, 60% are generally loyal to a single brand, and 15% of the population has no brand loyalty and jumps from one brand to another at a whim.

I don’t expect these numbers to be that far off.  Browsing through my pantry and my wardrobe, and generally looking about at the things that I presently own, I do have the sense that a majority are brands that I have been purchasing all my life, and “about a quarter” seems about right for the brands that I have intentionally changed in the past several years.   I don’t expect that this is unusual.

Pessimism about Customer Loyalty

I also have the sense that companies are overly pessimistic about customer loyalty, in the same way that serial divorcees are pessimistic about loyalty of their future spouses.  A man who cannot keep a wife wishes to believe that his behavior is normal and that there’s something wrong with the women he's encountered – and in the same way a brand that cannot keep its customers wants to believe that its behavior is acceptable and that there’s something wrong with the customers, who will not give loyalty to the brand.   But this is mere posturing and, worse, it leads to an abdication of responsibility for making the relationship last.

That is to say that a 27-year-old who has divorced multiple times is likely a terrible husband.  While he feels that his ex-wives have failed him, he is the common element in each of those failed marriages.   And I strongly suspect that a similar conclusion can be drawn from any brand, or any professional in charge of a brand, that if they feel that their customers are disloyal, they are neglecting (or perhaps refusing) to consider the part they have played in the failure of that relationship.

In all, I am left with the sense the pessimism about long-term customer loyalty is not an accurate reflection of reality, and aggrandizes the customers who churn in an out because their behavior is more dramatic than that of the contented (or patient) customers who remain.   It’s far easier to get hired as a consultant, or to get budget allocated to a department, if there is an implicit promise to win new customers than it is to get hired or funded to maintain the loyalty of existing ones, and an inordinate proportion of time and money is spent chasing customers who have a history of serial disloyalty in hopes they will finally settle down with a good brand.

All of this ignores a less distressing reality: that most customers are loyal to most brands, provided that the brand remains loyal to keeping the promises it has made, implicitly or explicitly.   So it should be somberly considered whether it is really worthwhile, in the end, to neglect a loyal customer based in pursuit of new business that may not be faithful, or even have the desire to be faithful, to the brand.

The Nature of Trade in General

I've recently read Cantillon's Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, a piece written in the early eighteenth century about the fundamentals of economics, and while it pains me to admit it, I think that the French may be onto something in their approach to the topic that makes their approach particularly relevant to the present day.

The more popular English school (Adam Smith and those who followed) tends to have forgotten or pointedly ignored a foundational premise, which seemed to be dispensable for a time when demand struggled to keep pace with supply, but is become of increasing importance in the present day: why should man choose to engage in productive activity at all?

That is to say: the English school takes production to be an end in itself.  Eveyrone must be productive because the only alternative is to not be productive, and to not be productive is sinful, wasteful, and bad in all regards.   And so, the English school fails to consider the very reason for economics, and in doing so has missed a few subtle but significant points that have been damaging to the western approach to economics.

Production is for Consumption

Cantillon recognizes, from the start, that production is not an end in itself, but is a purpose-driven activity that serves an objective: providing goods and services for consumption.   This would seem to be self-evident and require no further consideration, but a great deal of dysfunctional behavior has arisen from failure to consider this.

Primarily, the present-day emphasis on customer experience reflects the fact that many companies have focused so much on profit that they have forgotten the very reason that people give them money - the desire to consume their products.  Many products are marginally satisfactory and a customer service is barely tolerable because firms focus on maximizing profit by minimizing the value they provide in exchange for the price consumers consent to pay.    Meanwhile, firms that recognize that production is done for the sake of consumption focus on maximizing the benefit delivered by consuming their products, and find that by doing so they earn considerable profit from highly satisfied and rabidly loyal customers.

The consumer has also been forgotten in the design of many products - engineers make things that meet certain qualities that they feel are important (durability, speed, efficiency, etc.) without considering whether these qualities deliver value to the consumer.   Why should we endeavor to make a vehicle that has a top speed of 150 mph or faster when most customers will never drive faster than 80 (on the highways, maybe 50 on surface roads)?   Why should we make computer processors faster when the typical user's needs are more than served by present capabilities?   Why should we invest a dime in any capability that does not serve the need of the customer?    Such questions are seldom ever asked, which indicates that firms are more interested in pursuing the qualities they admire (or are best capable of pursuing) rather than considering the needs of the consumers.

A product that ignores the needs of the customer, being suitable for the needs of consumption while being wildly overdeveloped in ways that are essentially meaningless, had been viable for many years, but only for the lack of options.   Given a plentitude of choices, customers will take the option that best serves their needs and is indifferent to excellence in regards that do not matter to them.

With this in mind, the French perspective becomes poignant, and production for production's sake becomes a meaningless and very expensive ritual for producers to continue to pursue.

Production beyond Consumption is Waste

If the needs of the consumer are ignored and production for production's sake pursued, then the objective of a firm is "more."   To make more widgets, to sell to more customers, to increase market share, ad infinitum.    And while demand exceeds supply, there is always the ability to locate a consumer for an additional unit of production.

But the limit is not infinite - as the world economies develop and more people are included in the marketplace, there are fewer people who are not included, and less potential to continue with growth.    There is a theoretical limit at which point people are producing and consuming all the goods they possibly can, and though it has not been reached, each day we draw closer.

Consider the example of food: in the most developed economies (United States and Germay), lack of food is not a problem, but its abundance certainly is.  Simply stated, when there is too much food, people grow fat consuming the excess, and yet the rule of "production for the sake of production" encourages the cultivation of even more.     While I'll concede that the dream of a world where no-one is starving is worth pursuing, the dream of a world where everyone is morbidly obese is dysfunctional.

With this in mind, and with the terminus approaching, firms must consider a sustainable level of production rather than infinite growth - and the path to sanity is the same: to consider that production is for the sake of consumption, and when the needs of consumption are satisfied, further production is wasteful and even harmful.   So stop pursuing it.

Focus on the Consumption = Focus on the Consumer

In all, the premise provided by the French economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is one that yields a valuable insight to the world of the twenty-first.   If we are mindful that production is done for the sake of consumption, we are reminded that the quantity and quality of our products must be aligned with the needs of the consumer, and that the mindless pursuit of more quantity than is needed and more features than are wanted must be mitigated by considering the extent of consumer needs in addition to their nature.

For most industries, this has not yet reached the point of crisis - but it is already impacting their success to some degree, and it seems reasonable to predict that this will only become more pronounced in future.

Getting Urgency Right

As a customer, I've found myself if a few situations lately in which a seller has turned me to the competition - not because they were not interested in selling, and not because I was not interested in the product, but because they made a critical mistake regarding the urgency of the purchase.   In their desire to march me to the cash register, they made some critical mistakes that soured me on the prospect of buying from them.  This is not a new experience, and I have a sense it's a much broader problem that sellers mistake their customers' level of urgency and behave in a highly inappropriate manner in attempting to close the deal.

It's likely worthwhile to consider the nature of urgency itself, because like many terms it has been garbled by misuse - something is said to be "urgent" simply because someone feels a sharp desire to have it, which is to say that it's important to them - but that does not make it urgent.   Urgency is more than the importance of taking an action.   It pertains specifically to the speed at which it must be done - which is to say something is only urgent if there is a cost to doing it tomorrow rather than today, or next month rather than this week.   If there is no consequence for failing to act immediately, then it is not urgent, however important it may be for reasons other than time.

From the perspective of the seller, revenue is urgent all the time.   Having money today means being able to invest or spend it before it loses its value - though that's less important in the current economy.  These days, a dollar in January is worth 99 cents in December because inflation and interest rates are nearly flat.  There once was a time it would be worth only 90 cents, or even less, because of the rates of inflation and interest were much higher.   But even though the financial rationale for urgency is less poignant, it still remains a psychological need that relates to security - the more time it takes a customer to decide, the more likely it is they will decide to buy from someone else.   There is an almost palpable sense of fear that failing to close the deal today means losing the deal forever.

That shouldn't be a fear for brands that are confident in their quality of their product and the fairness of their pricing - in such a position, a firm should have the confidence to say "take your time and shop our competition, we're confident you will be back."  For that reason alone, companies that want customers to close the deal as soon as possible seem a bit shady and convey the sense that there is a better deal to be had somewhere else and they are nervous the customer will find it, given time. In the incidents in which I have walked away from a too-eager vendor, this anxiousness has been the "red flag" that made me step back from the "buying" process and back into the "shopping" one to find a different vendor, and I don't think I'm alone in this.

As I consider this problem, I also recall instances in which the vendor's lack of urgency caused me no small amount of frustration: I was at the point where I was ready to purchase and a salesman continued to provide information about the product.   Or in a more direct sense, having to wait in line to complete a purchase represents a situation in which the customer's sense of urgency is poorly accommodated by a vendor who puts its own processes ahead of the customers' priorities - though this is generally for a different reason (the customer's sense of urgency comes from a desire to use their own time efficiently, rather than an immediate need for a product).

The essence of the problem in either instance is the seller's inability to appropriately accommodate the customer's level of urgency - to rush them into completing a purchase too quickly or to prevent them from completing the purchase quickly enough.   Given that, I don't expect there can be a single answer to the question of how fast is fast enough, because it largely depends on the customer's priorities - which differ from person to person and moment to moment.

Consider the way in which customers purchase an umbrella.   When it is not raining, there's little sense of urgency and the customer can inspect the merchandise casually, considering whether it is durable and the color he might prefer and whether he might get a better deal if he waits a week or a month for a sales event.  When it is raining, all of this is set aside - he does not care about the style of the item or its durability, color, or price (within reason) but needs a quick solution that will help him avoid getting wet.

In the same examples, the seller must react accordingly.   The attempt to close the deal on an umbrella on a sunny day is difficult to the point of being nearly impossible - and attempting to convince the customer that it might start raining at any moment is not likely to give the customer a sense of urgency he lacks.  By the same token, discussing the features and qualities of the item during a rainstorm is likely an annoying waste of time to a customer who is in urgent need of a solution and isn't thinking about the value of the product beyond its ability to serve the needs of the moment.

Of the two, a seller whose urgency exceeds that of the buyer is likely the more detrimental.   It's rare for an eager buyer to break off of the process and seek another vendor because the seller is not moving quickly enough, likely because the eager buyer recognizes he will have to invest time (that he doesn't want to spend) in finding another vendor.   On the other hand a leisurely buyer who is confronted by an anxious seller is willing to take time, not necessarily in interacting with vendors, before making the purchase and is more inclined to stall or walk away.

And it's also inherent to the nature of commerce that, for financial and psychological reasons, sellers are more prone to want to create a sense of urgency than to encourage slower pace - though the (few) sellers who do so are likely to be regarded as qualified and confident in the quality and price of their product.   As such, a less stressful selling process is likely not only a more pleasant experience for the customer, but gives them a long-term impression of the quality of the brand.

But ultimately, success is a matter of properly assessing and accommodating the customer's level of urgency - and the more difficult prospect of letting the customer control the speed of the process rather than attempting to control them to suit the seller's own desires.