Encourage Community & Interaction By Making It Easier To Participate, Not Harder
October 20, 2008 – 10:53 am | by Daryl TayI was in Toronto to catch Jason Mraz live earlier this week, so needless to say “Jason Mraz” has been a much searched term for me on Google the past few days. Something that came up during one of the searches was a “Musician of the month” type post from Chapters Indigo (in Canada, Indigo is the equivalent to Borders or Barnes & Noble).
Jason Mraz on Chapters Indigo
So on this particular post, the author linked to a video to Mraz’s concert in Korea, which I coincidentally happened to be listening to. Obviously, that made me feel like commenting…. until I found out that I had to sign up to do so.
The problem is that I already have so many accounts with so many places that I keep forgetting my usernames and/or password, and I really don’t want to sign up again unless I really want to use the service. I’m certainly not creating an account just to post a comment. The end result? Indigo doesn’t get an enthusiastic comment and the opportunity for interaction is gone.
Now I get that businesses want personal data on web users, but sometimes it’s not all that necessary. Using essential parts of the service like purchasing a product or submitting user-generated content like a cooking recipe, sure. For small interactions like posting a comment? Maybe not so much.
I’ve mentioned this before on the Ping.sg discussion boards too, if we want to develop community and interaction, make the barriers to entry low and virtually painless for people to join in. If you’re truly offering something of value, eventually people will sign up after interacting for awhile. And who knows, maybe after they sign up, they’ll purchase something, and so on.
Tags: barnes & noble, borders, canada, chapters indigo, community interaction, creating online accounts, developing community, encouraging interaction, Google, jason mraz, ping.sg, toronto
2 Responses to “Encourage Community & Interaction By Making It Easier To Participate, Not Harder”
By The Lovable Rogue on Oct 21, 2008 | Reply
My sentiments exactly. By imposing registration upon users, a significant number of commentators will be detered from offering their thoughts and opinions on a subject. Remember though, these individuals still have access to the content, yet the blog owner has no opportunity to benefit from the reader’s insight. In my opinion, it is the owner that loses under such circumstances, not the reader.
By Daryl Tay on Oct 21, 2008 | Reply
@The Lovable Rogue: We definitely see eye to eye on this. When the owner is a blog author like you and I, it’s not a big deal. But when it’s a business that might be actively trying to leverage social media and community interaction, it can really mean the success or failure of the effort.