Towards adaptive recruitment and engagement mechanisms in social systems

Although successful online communities have engaged thousands of users, designers still struggle to recruit newcomers and increase current contribution rates. Related work on encouraging contributions has drawn from Social Psychology, Sociology and Economics theories. Engagement mechanisms embed the principles of these theories, and experimental studies evaluate the impact of different mechanisms on the contribution rates. Significant differences among alternative engagement mechanisms have been found, however, the results are sometimes contradictory for different groups of users. Our hypothesis is that the effectiveness of engagement mechanisms may depend on users' characteristics, and not solely on the mechanism itself. To start exploring this hypothesis, we performed a study to evaluate the impact of recruitment and engagement messages on different users' cohorts. Levels of current participation rates and demographic data were analyzed in order to explain differences in the impact of these engagement strategies. © 2012 Springer-Verlag