Period Three Blog » Permission marketing and active-lurkers

Oct202009

Permission marketing and active-lurkers

Posted by Gene in Marketing, Creating Community

It’s not just that you have users who do stuff and users who don’t, there is an in-between too. The “active-lurker”. I’ve borrowed heavily from a couple of sources to make the following points, starting with Joshua Porter’s post on Designing for Active Lurkers.

This post and Joshua’s post are all based on idea by Bradley Horowitz when he’s talking about the communities surrounding Yahoo’s many services like Flickr, Yahoo Groups, Upcoming & del.icio.us. The idea is that there are phases a non-interacting visitor (lurker) goes through before he/she becomes a content creator or conversion:
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1% of the user population might start a group (or a thread within a group)

10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress

100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups (lurkers)

So, most of your users (even the contributors) are going to be passive most of the time.

This is permission marketing at it’s basic core. Real permission marketing is when people opt-in, not the legalistic definition not the CAN-SPAM law, but real people wanting to read your stuff and then choosing to participate when they feel passionate about a subject…

As Joshua Porter reminds us about what Seth Godin says:

“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went.” - Seth Godin

Here’s an example: On colamovies.com, we want more movie reviewers, but it makes logical sense that in order to get more reviewers we need to continue to focus on cultivating the visitor base that simply uses the website for movie times, then make it easy for those visitors to make reviews. The same is just as in the analogy Porter makes from Fred Wilson:

Just like bookstores use cafes to bring potential purchasers in the store, online retailers should intentionally cultivate an active non-transactor user base.

In other words, the big book stores use fluffy comfortable chairs and coffee to get you into the store to read the books in order to entice you into making a purchase…

So they key to transforming lurkers into active participants is to think of how to engage based on their current activity. Don’t just look at the current conversions and the paths those visitors took to convert. Look at the traffic patterns below the conversion, what are they searching for? What lead them to you? How are they using your website in ways you don’t intend?

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Permission marketing and active-lurkers

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