24 Nov 08 Influence v. engagement
A question on the WAA mailing list reminded me that it is important to distinguish between measuring influence and engagement. In fact this is critical on any site with a social component, since your goal should be to keep the influencers highly engaged. The people who write message that inspire others to participate and become engaged themselves are the most valuable people who visit the site. Whether you call them super-users, the core or something else, decades of social network research has shown that every community has them and they are the leaders. If you aren’t retaining and engaging your them, you are vulnerable.
I’ll add one warning. Beware of influencer cliques — influence that turns negative. It is great to have a stable set of influential people unless they use their influence to make new people unwelcome. Although that might look healthy based on low churn among the most active people, if it is accompanied by high churn among the new visitors, something is wrong. That is a time to look at what the influencers are doing to discourage newcomers and aggressively put a stop to it, even if it means you end up with a whole new set of influencers. Temporary high churn among that group is worthwhile if it lowers the churn among the newbies.
