Critical mass

From Dar

Critical mass is the theory that there is a certain level of participation above which a community will take off in terms of self sustaining interaction, and below which efforts to start conversations tend to fizzle out, leaving the unappealing appearance of a dead group, bumping along the ground. The concept is largely accepted as a valid one, but the actual number of subscribers or active participants which represents critical mass may be different in each instance.

Cases

A large U.S. insurance carrier..

tested the question of critical mass when creating corporate CoPs from scratch. Before the pilot, experience with online communities had led to some beliefs:

(1) a critical mass (minimal number of participants) is required for a successful business-type community (we tested what that number is), and (2) a group over a certain size is unwieldy and will result in either the formation of more specific sub-groups or the collapse of the community

It was found that the motivation of the participants and the significance of the subject matter to the participants are the factors that determine how small a group you can successfully sustain. Certainly, casual/social communities have required many more people (usually in the 100-200 member area) to sustain them than focused, motivated work groups in a business setting. It was possible to test the lower end in the pilot project...with four different business groups, including two that had about 16-20 members, one that had 50 members and one that had 190 members.

peer group

One of the smaller communities was highly successful--the members knew one another, they did similar work, and although they were geographically dispersed, they came together face to face once a year so knew each other personally. They were a genuine peer group. They had similar job titles and goals for their geographic regions, and all had a common manager/leader who instructed them to participate in the pilot. This leader had some of his own management team participate as well, to gain first hand experience with the new way of working.

design

There were a lot of reasons for success, but for this particular small community, the most important reasons were (in their own words): personal relationships with the other participants (they knew the other people who were posting), direct management participation in the community (participants were being observed by people who had implicit control over their real world success), and advance preparation/coaching of the participants and moderators. The advance preparation was valuable in previewing what to expect (most of them had no prior online community experience at all...even at home) and how to use the technology. One final and very important reason for their success was the technology design--It was known that busy professionals want to work within their normal toolset, and not have to log out of one application, go to some other place, and log in in order to participate. So the community tool was integrated with their email. They could subscribe and read all postings in their normal email inbox, and reply directly from email into the system. They never had to log in to the system if they didn't want to. This one feature was cited as the most valuable of all.

vertical

The other successful community in the pilot was the largest one. It was an entire business line...a vertical community. That business group had previously had a Lotus Notes database that they used interactively as a community to share competitive and work related information, but the database was removed when Notes was phased out of the company a year previously. They felt a gap, and welcomed a new technology solution that let them share information in a way similar to how they had worked together previously. Yet in this community of 190 members, the reality was only about 30 of the people were active over the 4 month pilot, with about 5-7 active in any given week or subject...the rest were lurkers or really disinterested. The 30 who were active were, for the most part, underwriters...a subgroup with similar work/information needs, which reinforces the idea that a large group will automatically subdivide into a comfortable size group with similar issues/goals/needs.

Some of the learnings we had were these:

  * A small group of  under 20 people can have a viable community, but
    they  must be highly motivated to participate.
  * A small group has higher requirements for knowing the other
    participants in real life (i.e., meeting face to face)
  * Active management support and participation is a key success factor.
  * The larger the group, the more likely the core group of
    contributors will fluctuate over time, as various active members
    get sidetracked on other projects and don't have time to
    participate, and others step in.
  * Skilled group moderation is important.  Business groups generally
    do not have enough experience in community dynamics to sustain the
    interactions.  After a flurry of activity at the beginning, the
    conversation wanes, and moderators need to draw people in and keep
    new subjects flowing.  (We spent a lot of time training our
    community moderators in how to manage community dynamics)
  * There will rarely be more than 6-8 active contributors to any
    specific topic/discussion thread.
  * New leaders and experts emerge from even a small community.  The
    tool enables participants to present what they know on a wide
    variety of topics, and certain voices inevitably emerge as the
    "experts" on various subjects.  The reality of who actually
    emerges as the star can be surprising at times.  It's not always
    the one everyone assumed to be the expert.
  * Rewards and recognition are important to overall success (but it
    doesn't need to be valuable items...it can just be stars like
    Amazon.com has or approval ratings like eBay uses.  Professionals
    value peer recognition.)

After Kaye Vivian, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/com-prac/message/6316