Learning to embrace the LURKERS
Eben-Haezer Sión@ebenezer
7 years ago
A lurker is a person who lurks, in particular a user of an Internet message board, chat room, blog or website who does not participate in anyway visible.
There has been quite an interest on this subject of lurkers by many statisticians and data nerds over the internet. Just take a look at this post by The ElephantJournal, Distance-Educator and MappingOnlinePublics. People often wonder why such a wonderful post in their opinion does not have the level of engagement they would think such a content should generate.
And here are a few reasons why this has continued to baffle and interest web technologist and data scientist at the same time.PrivacyBecause of the increasing privacy concern about using the internet, there are lots of users who would rather prefer to use browsers that would hide their identity. Unless your target audience falls within the 17-22 age bracket who either does not know much about privacy or cares less about it. Either way this group are more open about their identity.
So who are these Lurkers? Lurkers, who are also known as silent learners, observers, browsers, read-only participants, vicarious learners, free-riders, witness learners, or legitimate peripheral participants, tend to be hard to track because of their near invisibility.Lurkers are afraid of being judged.
Lurkers have a high level of self worth and could be quite repulsed if their opinions are not taken into consideration, so they stay away from bein visible.It’s actually not the people you can see on your page that will support you the most, it’s the ones you don't even know are there.
Marketers have terms to describe the different groups and they are Enthusiasts, Dabblers and Lurkers.
