How peer photos influence member participation in online communities

Online communities (OLCs) are gatherings of like-minded people, brought together in cyberspace by shared interests. Creating such communities is not a big challenge; sustaining members' participation is. In this paper, we describe a technique for presenting members' photos and evaluate how it affects member participation in the community. We compare three different policies for presenting peer photos on the home page of the web site. Our results show that explicit requests in the form of simple and short messages on the home page of a community can induce participation. We show that we were able to motivate members to (a) log into the system to see photos of fellow members, and (b) upload their personal photos.