How important are profiles in online communities?
At FreshNetworks we believe that the best way to be online is open, honest and truthful. You find it easier to earn respect that way, and easier to form relations and start real conversations with people. If you’re not open, honest and truthful then there is the danger that people will think you’re just hiding behind a fake profile or a fake name. They won’t trust you and so won’t engage with you openly.
To create this trust, the online communities we create and manage work on the principal of openness. Unlike forums where people adopt pseudonyms that seem funny or appropriate, our communities are about real people and so people have their real names. We go to some effort to design, build and manage the communities to make sure that they encourage this honesty. And for this reason, the community member profile pages are critical. This is the space where you can tell us, our client and everybody else in the community as much as you like about yourself - just some basics or a full profile.
Given the importance we place on the profile, and of trust and openness in online communities, I was intrigued to read about the experiences at Netflix. This US online movie rental firm had decided to get rid of the user profiles in its online community of members.
As soon as Netflix removed the profile function conversations started all over the web about this. It turned out that users liked this feature more than Netflix might have realised. In fact they might have liked the feature more than they realised themselves. We often find this. The element that people like most about a website or community is the one that makes them feel secure, but they may not be able to isolate one item until it’s missing. As they say in their own blog:
Because of an ongoing desire to make our website easier to use, we believed taking a feature away that is only used by a very small minority would help us improve the site for everyone. Listening to our members, we realized that users of this feature often describe it as an essential part of their Netflix experience.
The Netflix example reconfirms what we know and see at FreshNetworks - that users like profiles and that user profiles are critical to the susccess of an online community. It’s important to be open and honest online and users feel reassured by features that let them be this.
