The Inner Lives of Lurkers

By Sanya Weathers

There’s a group on your forum bigger than all of the rest of your board factions combined. They’re reading your Facebook page, they’re following your tweets, and they’re stalking your dev tracker.

Because this group is so enormous (between 10 and 15% of your entire customer base), you want to reach them. You want to charm them, amuse them, and learn everything you can about them so you can meet their needs. But they rarely speak, they don’t engage, and if you annoy them or anger them, you won’t even know because they’ll just melt away into the internet.

They are your lurkers, and you need them.

We tend to focus on attracting and retaining community evangelists at the expense of the lurking population, and with good reason. The evangelists are better for growing your customer base, and represent the most cost effective marketing possible (for reasons we’ve covered here before). But if you’re reaching for mass market success, or would like to at least keep your windows of opportunity propped open, here are a few basics you need to keep in mind:

–    Treat every conversation like a panel discussion. You know how it goes – five or six people are sitting in the front of the room having a chat. Fifty or sixty are in the audience following the conversation. Someone is recording it for the benefit of the five or six hundred that couldn’t afford the trip either in time or money. Well, your every conversation with a customer is exactly like that.

–    Lurkers don’t want change. Your engaged people are very active, and want active things from your product. They’re usually trying to convince you to do something, change something, adjust something, and in general tune your product to suit their needs.

Your lurkers who are also customers (more on that in a second), on the other hand, are happy with the status quo.  If they are not, the number of people lurking will drop (remember, you need usage metrics). Let me say that again, slightly differently: If your lurkers wanted change, they’d either leave or become active. Remember that when you’re deciding on how fast/frequent you want to make changes to your product.

–    Not all of your lurkers are sold on you yet. The lurkers who are not customers are seeing if your community is one worth joining. This type of lurker has the potential to become an engaged, evangelist type, and you want that to happen. This type of customer is more likely to stick around for the long term, and to think before speaking. You won’t convert him unless you’re respectful, consistent, and as thoughtful as he is.

–    Passive does not equal uninterested. Lurkers don’t want the fuss and muss of actually engaging in debate, nor do they want the time sink of most activities. But don’t confuse lurkers with casual users, or people with a shallow level of interest in the product. Lurkers are following all of your comments because they are very interested in the information you have to offer. Make sure you’re giving them something substantial every day.