With the invent of peer-to-peer systems, the way in which we communicate and share both media and information has taken a paradigm shift. Networks such as Napster, LimeWire and Bit Torrent along with Blogs, Myspace and Face Book have created a strong push to understand the motivating factors that keep people logging in and providing information. If a system does not have enough people logging in and providing information or media for exchange, the system will inherently provide poor service resulting in member loss. As a network loses members there will be less information and media for exchange. There is somewhat of a chicken before the egg issue here. Researchers have been trying to solve this by more thoroughly understanding the motivation strategies that keep people logging in. There are number of related social psychology theories that are being considered important in researching this.
1. Reciprocation theory. People will need to benefit from their participation in any peer-to-peer network or for any other interaction for that matter. The network will not be sustainable unless it provides benefits that outweigh the costs of time, energy and resource expenditure by the members. A couple of questions to be considered with how to appropriately reward members are how to measure the members participation to appropriately reward them and what should the rewards actually be. The users need to think of the rewards as useful otherwise they won't contribute.
2. Consistency theory. Once people communicate a public commitment to perform an act they are much more likely to follow through with that act. This avenue is possible in peer-to-peer communities but the question that remains is how specifically to induce the member’s public commitment.
3. Social validation. One of the fundamental ways that people decide how they're going to act or react in a particular situation is to locate at what others have done before them. If a sizable group of their peers have already decided to engage in this, then they are much more likely to engage in it themselves. In most peer-to-peer communities a small portion of the members are the active contributors whereas the rest of the population is considered to be "free riders". As a result it is not necessarily a good idea to expose all of the activity in a peer-to-peer network. Regardless of the success of the network the disjunct between how many people are actually contributing and how many people are perceived to be contributing may have a very negative effect on new members coming in.
4. Persuasiveness of liking. It has clearly been found that people are much more likely to say yes to a solicitation when it's communicated from a friend or relative or someone else that they like. The question is how can you stimulate existing members of the community to invite their friends. A reward-based system that motivates this behavior would need to be put into place in order to do this.
5. Discreet emotions. What we mainly want to focus on here is the emotion of fear. An extremely negative emotion for people is the fear of potentially losing something that they already possess. So the theory is that inducing the possibility of privilege loss and then providing information with how to avoid this problem should increase participation.
Many of these theories have been employed in one way shape or form by most of the major peer-to-peer systems on the Internet today. Although some have been more successful than others, none of them have attempted to integrate the above theories in a way to allow the proper meshing of them. As a result even the most successful networks have seen negative side effects despite their successes.
So the question becomes what might be the best model for motivation in a peer-to-peer network? This very question has been posed and seemingly answered by some professors at the
They set up a peer-to-peer network that simply rewarded the active participants in the initial launch stage allowing them to gain more services and as a result momentum in the beginning. A number of weeks into the development of the network they instituted a tiered membership that allowed active participants to gain incrementally and progressively better services. Along with this they were able to gain publicly visible social status within the network through the user interface. This instituted an inherently existent fear-based module rooted in the potential for the individuals losing the services and social status they've already earned.
What you think happened almost immediately upon implementation of this hierarchical reward system? If you guessed that it exploded, your correct. The increase in contributions by the members increased by approximately 70% the week that this was instituted. Along with this, nearly half of the users began to check their accounts weekly to make sure their contributions were did not drop so as to retain privileges. Of all the participants actually 58% communicated that they tried to upgrade their memberships and out of the members who were checking their memberships on a weekly basis, 93% of them were working to upgrade their memberships. The results speak for themselves...
So what does this mean for you when I? In setting up a Blog or a forum we are in effect developing a mini peer-to-peer network. In an ideal scenario we are providing a service by communicating useful information to the people and in return we are hoping to get logins and communication back from other people. How can you implement the conceptual frame work from the model above to your Blog? The model proposed can and should be used as a determining factor in how you're going to set up and run your Blog if you are looking to maximize it’s effectiveness.
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