FreshNetworks Blog

Our last post in our series on getting insight from online communities looked at the benefit you can get from photo uploads. We are going to stay with this area today but look at how you can maximise the insight benefits you get from photos (and indeed from other media) by running specific photo-based activities, by encouraging comments, ratings and responses to photos.

Online communities can sometimes be daunting when people join for the first time, or when we allow them to do new things or promote new features. People need to be shown what to do, they need to be encouraged. That’s one of the reasons we believe in promoting community management – a good community manager is part of the community and can help to introduce new features and parts of the site, and to encourage activity.

A great way of encouraging participation on the community and focusing so that it is of use to you is to run activities. Many communities have galleries, with no focus or direction to what photos should be uploaded, those that are better are those that are:

1. clear about why you should upload a photograph
2. include some element of activity or competition-based incentive (such as “over the next month we want you all to upload a picture of your favourite room in your house”)
3. allow rating and comments – not everybody will want to upload a photograph but they may want to comment on those already there, and others may just want to rate their favourite photos (or indeed, the ones they like least)
4. include tagging – allowing users to tag and sort photos will mean that they organise your galleries for you and make it easier to find content and related items

These steps are best as part of a concerted effort to increase photo-activity on your online community and will work best if you focus attention and encourage photos for a particular purpose or on a particular issue. People will know what they’re doing and why they’re uploading photos and then comment, rate, respond and organise them for you.

You’ll also get a wealth of insight. From the photos people choose to upload to the comments they get or the way they’re tagged. And because you’ve focused all this activity on one area or problem you’ll get a depth of insight too.

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Some more reading

• Do we need to incentivise participation in online communities? (freshnetworks.com)
• Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them (freshnetworks.com)

We’re halfway through our series highlighting ten ways of getting insight from online communities. We’ve looked already at ways of making the most of the profiling data, conversations, language people use, and ratings. In this post, we’re going to look at how allowing (and even encouraging) photo uploads can be a real source of insight in your online community.

Many online communities are very text-based. They are based on conversations, and the forum is the central area of the community where most activity takes place. But given the increasingly media-rich nature of the Internet, this is something of a shame. Some people just don’t express themselves as well in words as they do in other media. Sometimes a photo can convey an opinion or start a discussion. And sometimes a collection of photos allow people to work together on a problem, issue or problem.

You can get real insight from allowing people to upload photos, and even more from encouraging them. Hotel reviews on TripAdvisor are significantly more meaningful when you have visitor photos to accompany their reviews. If your online community was about a product or service, then finding out how people actually use it would be of real use – photos of where they store your product in their kitchen for example would give you a real insight into peoples’ lives. A community for a holiday firm could get real insight from photos of guests on holiday. A community about home improvement could be much more powerful with photos of peoples’ rooms or houses. In fact pretty much any community could benefit from photos.

There are really three levels of insight you can get from photos:

1. Understanding why people choose to upload the photos – what photos do they upload? Are some users more likely to upload photos than others? Do the photos that are currently in the gallery influence the photos people upload? Understanding these motivations gives you insight into your community members.
2. Analysing what people upload photos of – if you run a community for a holiday firm do people usually upload photos of people, the accommodation, the weather or the scenery? This probably gives you a real insight into what they associated with their holiday. People are going to upload photos that they feel reflects the aim or objective of the online community. Analysing what photos they choose to upload will give you real insight into their attitude towards the issue.
3. Observing what reaction the photos get – do people discuss photos that are uploaded? Do they post photos in response to those already on the site or is each photo upload a fairly extant experience? Are the community members using the photos to tell a story or solve a problem together or is each using it to illustrate their own point.

A photo upload is a source of lots of insight. Into the community member and the community as a whole. Into what they think about the subject or issue at the heart of the online community. Into what their real lives are like.

Photos can, of course, give you more insight. If you encourage and allow comments and voting on photos you can get much more insight. We’ll be talking about this in the next instalment of getting insight from online communities.

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Some more reading

• Social Media: it’s bigger than you might think (freshnetworks.com)
• The Ad Man Answers #53 (mjroseblog.typepad.com)
• Traditional media is spreading community messages (freshnetworks.com)