Converting lurkers to members
I took a paper in Online Communities over summer. For the course we were split in to teams and tasked with building an online community. My team chose to create a social network for Stationery fans on ning.com called Stationary Stationery. The site was pretty successful and we got full marks for the assignment.
This is where it gets interesting. After the course ended we stopped contributing to the site. The members were all friends and classmates so they stopped contributing too. I changed the site from public to private so that it couldn’t be viewed without first signing up (because I’m a control freak like that).
A couple of weeks ago I started getting emails from Ning about new members whose accounts needed activating. The emails kept coming and I kept activating the accounts.
During the course we could personally identify every member as a friend, classmate or lecturer. Now I get an ‘Account needs approval’ email for a stranger every couple of days [1].
What changed?
There’s a question in the signup form that asks how the user found out about Stationary Stationery. The new users have been coming from all over the place. The three biggest sources are search engines, ning.com and the Wikipedia entry for stationery. The sites search ranking hasn’t increased and visitor numbers have settled at a level significantly lower than during the course (Google Analytics).
The only change to the site was the switch from private to public. This switch meant that users couldn’t view the site before they decided to join. Their decision to join Stationary Stationery was based only on the sites title, description and signup form. There’s nothing wrong with the site, I’d say it’s significantly more persuasive than the signup form and description.
What does this mean?
Making the site private increased the conversion rate. This is counter intuitive to say the least. In the case of Stationary Stationery users are more likely to join the site when they can’t see it before they join.
It seems what’s happening is that the privacy is forcing lurkers to become members. I’ll be doing some more research into this using demographic member data from Ning and stats from Google Analytics.
This doesn’t mean I’ll be making Cooked private, it’s just an intriguing idea.
[1] Initially I thought this was a case of the long tail of the web. It isn’t because International traffic has only increased slightly since I made the site private. What’s changed is the conversion rate.
