Using Edgesense for online community management: integrating zero comments users

Zero comments people are bad for your community. Someone has made an investment of time and trust creating content, but no one is talking to them. The social contract has been breached.

In a healthy community all active participants are parts of the same conversation. In network terms, this means that the conversation graph has one and only one connected component: you can reach any user from any other user following interactions (Alice talks to Bob, who has left a comment to Charlie, who used to be in conversation with Dylan...). With Edgesense you can visually check that this is the case. An online community's interaction network has one and only one connected components if, and only if:

1. You see only one big graph, with no "islands".
2. There are no isolated nodes (black) below the graph.

That of a single connected components is an ideal situation. Most healthy online communities have more than one "island", but one of them is much larger than all the others. This is called the giant component. A measure of health of the community is

number of nodes in the largest connected component/total number of nodes

If a relatively large number of nodes are not part of the largest connected component, it could mean trouble. What kind of trouble that is depends on the nature of the community. For communities oriented to debate, it could mean that the conversation has become balkanised: people are only talking to people who share their same views. For communities oriented to action, it could mean lack of coordination or duplication of effort: people in one component might not be aware of what people in the other components are doing.

Identifying new "zero comments people"

When a user who has never been active before writes her first post, she will show up on the Edgesense dashboard as a singleton, i.e. a disconnected node with no edges. Singletons are shown at the bottom of the graph visualization.

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To identify new singletons:

1. click on the lock icon in the graph visualization toolbar. This enables interaction via mouse with the visualization.
2. click on the time slider above the graph and drag it to the left. As you move left, the date changes. Release the mouse button when you are at a date you consider appropriate. If you use Edgesense often, one period will be enough.
3. move the time slider back all the way to the right. If any new black dots appear, it means some new user has become active and written one or more posts in the period. No one has left them comments, nor have they left comments to anyone else. They are completely isolated in the conversation.
4. click on the dot representing the new user. A pop-up opens, revealing the user's name or numeric ID.

Take action on "zero comments people"

1. Navigate to your community website and locate the post made by that user. Leave her a welcome comment and encourage her to reach out to other members of the community, perhaps pointing her to some post she might like based on her interests.
2. The next time Edgesense crunches your network (usually in one day) the singleton will have been attached to giant component. Your comment will have created an edge from you to her; since you are part of the giant component, she now will be too.
3. To verify: click on the magnifying glass icon in the graph toolbar and type the user's name. Edgesense higlights the user and her network.
4. Check visually that the user is now attached to the giant component. The best result is for her to be connected not only to you, but also to at least one other user: this means she is now in conversation with the community.