Last week we released our “The Talk About Phones” white paper. In the paper, we touched a bit on Chinese online community dynamics.

I thought it was pretty cool then to see that Matthew Hurst, on his excellent Data Mining blog recently referenced an article presented at the Communities and Technologies conference. The article, titled Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups, was written by Howard T. Welser from Cornell University, Eric Gleave from University of Washington and Microsoft Research, and Danyel Fisher and Marc Smith from Microsoft Research.

The paper discusses different roles taken by participants on online message boards (BBS).

There are many important social roles in online discussion groups: local experts, answer people, conversationalists, fans, discussion artists, flame warriors, and trolls (Burkhalter and Smith 2003; Golder 2003; Turner et al 2005; Herring 2004; Haythornthwaite and Hager 2005).

Digging deeper, the paper refers to research which characterizes the “answer people” in this way:

First, answer people tend to be disproportionately connected to alters with low degree. That is, they reply to relative isolates, authors who themselves answer few, if any, others. Second, their local (degree one) networks tend to have small proportions of three-cycles (i.e. their neighbors are not neighbors of each other) and they seldom send multiple messages to the same recipient (few intense ties). Finally, answer people tend to reply to discussion threads initiated by others and typically only contribute one or two messages per thread

There is still a lot to learn about Chinese online communities, but at this stage, we can at least see some similarities to what is happening in the West.

Take a look at this figure taken from our “The Talk About Phones” white paper. Here, we see that the “New Comers” (similar to “Isolates”) are typified by those who ask a specific question, and then are never seen again. They usually have very few discussions and connections with the other members in the community. The Top Poster (resembling an Answer Person) in the community had more interactions with posters who wrote few posts than those who wrote many posts.

This figure shows the connections of the Top Poster with the 90 New Comers who posted only one message in Q1. We can see that these New Comers have NO connections amongst each other. Also, there is only one communication between them (hence the thin connecting line).

There’s much more that we could analyze in this, but we think this has implications for brands that should not be ignored. These Answer People are self deignated “help desks” for brands. Their expertise and knowledge (which may help or harm the brand) is influencing the hundreds of consumers who come in into this “expert” and “trusted” community to ask a specific question. They are also influencing the likely thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of others who view the exchange (from naturally entering the forum or coming in from search engine).

My colleague Samuel was a substantial contributor to this article.

Note: I have edited this a bit from the original posting.