Motivating Software

The first problem that any social media system faces is how to get the first few contributions from users.  This is known as the bootstrapping problem.  The basic problem is that each user gets value from the system that depends on how much useful information is currently in the system; but when the system is first created there isn’t any information contained therein, and therefore no one will want to use it.

Technically, this is an instance of a positive network externality; each user that joins the system makes the system more valuable to everyone else, but that user don’t take that value into account when deciding if he or she should join.  In this way, social media systems share this property with many other information systems.  Who had the first fax machine?

Bootstrapping problems are particularly difficult to deal with precisely because there isn’t much to work with; since very few users are yet on the system there isn’t much value that can be thrown at users to motivate them to join.  In general, there are a couple of different strategies that might work to overcome this problem:

1. Personal Benefits.   Give users a personal reason to use the system that doesn’t depend on other users.   I have discussed the example of delicious.com and its use of personal benefits and side effects for motivating users to contribute.  This side-steps the network externality; however providing both personal and network benefits adds that much more complexity to the system.
2. Setting Expectations.   Users join the site not only because of who is currently on the site, but who they believe will be on the site in the future.   Finding some way to set the expectations of a number of users that the site will be worthwhile can sometimes work.   If enough people believe that the site will have a lot of users, then indeed these expectations will be fulfilled and it will have a lot of users.  Major companies like Google, Apple, Yahoo!, and Microsoft often use marketing and PR to set these kinds of expectations.
3. Paying High-value Users.  Paying users is one way to get them to use the site.  Since they don’t have the network benefits yet, you can supplement by providing some external source of value at least until the site is self-sustaining.   However, all users of the system are not the same; some people are worth a lot more than others.   For example, recently Twitter benefited a lot when both Aston Kutcher and Oprah Winfrey joined and publicized the site.  If you are going to pay users, try to find the high-network-value users that cause lots of people to want to join.

None of the solutions I present here are all that good.  They each have their place.   But the bootstrapping problem is a open problem in social media (and often information technology in general) because there are many situations where these won’t work, or won’t work very well.

All social media systems need some way to get started. The bootstrapping problem describes just one thing that makes getting started difficult.

One interesting note is that the bootstrapping problem is fundamentally a strategic problem.  It is a case where each users’ decision affects many other users, and vice versa.  If I decide to not join and wait and see who else joins, then my absence from the system can influence others to not join.   Likewise, if I do join, then that decision can induce others to also join.  These types of strategic problems are often particularly hard to reason about precicely because of these complex interdependencies between user decisions.