Online Community Leaderboards – A Competitive Edge or Disincentive?
I just finished reading an entry on Leaderboards Considered Harmful on the Building Web 2.0 Reputation Systems: The Blog by Randy Farmer and Bryce Glass. As positioned, the authors are correct in saying that the overemphasis on competitive measures can actually harm a community rather than enhance the experience. The major assumption in the article is that leaderboards must be a fixed, cumulative measure of activity that do not measure quality only quantity. But as a community leader, you can move beyond that simple use of leaderboards to truly recognize quality if you want to do so.
As part of a recent client engagement, we surveyed more than 30 B2B community sites to uncover how leaderboards and recognition features were being used to build loyalty and reward members for the quality of participation. We were shocked to find that almost all of the communities awarded icons based upon quantity only with no recognition for quality. These communities were using software from all the major vendors including Telligent, Lithium, Mzinga, KickApps, Jive, Small World Labs, Leverage Software, and others. Even where the software allowed some additional quality measures, most communities were not using the feature or if they were, they were not actively promoting its use.
While most leaderboards are set up poorly, it is due to the software more than to a lack of creative thinking. For example, we helped the Intel Software Network a few years back on a project to recreate their reputation/loyalty program for their community. In the course of our analysis and recommendations, we strongly recommended flexible leaderboards which could be updated to show members from all strata of membership, from long term members to newbies to those who selectively participate with excellent content. The response from their software vendor… “We can only do that if you pay X thousand dollars to allow us to develop this as a feature for our roadmap.” A poor answer if their ever was one… this software company for a modest investment could have developed flexible leaderboards into its product and sold it as an upgrade for its client base, making money for itself while helping its clients. Instead it wanted its client to pay for all development costs upfront, then be able to sell it to its clients. Needless to say, Intel backed away.
We manage the Cisco Networking Professionals community (NetPro). We’ve been involved for more than eight years in one way or another. In that time, we’ve seen our leaderboards grow with members who have dedicated their time to the community for several years and been awarded the member recognition points for their efforts. A new member today might be intimidated to try and get on the leaderboard recognizing that it would take years to even crack the top twenty. But that’s why we offer a second leaderboard that shows our top NetPros for the month. We even go one step further and rank each NetPro on quality. We do this by giving the original member asking a question or starting a thread the power to add a check mark to the response which solves or best answers the original post. These red check marks are the quality measure for all NetPros. By viewing a member with thousands of points, you see activity. By viewing a member with hundreds of check marks, you see quality.
One of the software packages on the market today that is moving in this direction is Jive’s Clearspace platform. By allowing members to award points for correct or helpful answers, Jive’s platform promotes the leaderboard approach. But since it also allows a check mark system to recognize a successful interaction, it measures quality as well.
So, in short, don’t let the leaderboard issue trip you up in your community management strategy. Leaderboards are a good tactic when used properly. Flexibility is the key, make the scoring useful to members rather than simply a competition for members. (And don’t be afraid to push your software company to develop more flexible approaches to this feature, it benefits everyone.)
If you’d like to learn more about community strategies and tactics for recognizing and rewarding members, please contact us. We’re happy to help.
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This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Best Practices, Community Moderation, Measurement & Reporting, Social Media Industry. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
2 Responses to “Online Community Leaderboards – A Competitive Edge or Disincentive?”
Impact Interactions says: Thanks Alex. Good to know about Telligent’s approach to this. It does show that in many cases it is the organization offering the community that is not aware of/implementing the features that are available to them. Most use the straight out of the box feature set rather than thinking through the longer term ramifications…
Regards,
Mike Rowland
First, thanks for the blog post! This is a very interesting topic and one that I’ve also had experience with in managing a bunch of developer communities. Leaderboard systems have consistently driven more interaction/traffic in the communities where we’ve used them so that is a +1 from me.
Community Server (from us – Telligent) also has a built-in membership system that functions as a leaderboard in many CS communities.
Similarly, Community Server also a Q&A feature that helps recognize quality interactions within a community.