Last week I questioned in a blog post whether anonymous users have a place in community.  As I stated in the post, I believe the answer to this question is dependent upon the site, but in the end I believe anonymity is hard if not impossible to prevent. To quote the famous New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The simple fact is if you want to allow conversation to occur on your site then you should accept the fact that people will find a way to hide behind a digital disguise. Of course, you could go to the extreme and force everyone to provide a credit card in order to comment, but you immediately lose 95% of the audience.  

My take is you should not spend your time focusing on how to prevent anonymous users from participating; instead you should focus your time on how to help users create a meaningful digital disguise or encourage users to use their real identity. OK, sounds good, but how do you do this?

Encourage users to use their real identity

To get something you have to give something or at least make the economic costs to participate so small users don’t think twice. The following are two ways I believe you can make it easy for users to use their real identity:

1. Don’t make registration difficult –The more steps and information you require of a user to participate the less likely they will be to share valid information or even participate. JanRain and Facebook Connect are two great options to consider here. JanRain allows users to register on your site using an existing identity—Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. Facebook Connect allows users to register on your site using their existing Facebook credentials. There are some restrictions to how you use the data from Facebook Connect, so be aware of those. Two Pluck customers that have done a great job on this front are National Geographic Channel using JanRain and Livestrong.com using Facebook Connect.
    
2. Reward the user for sharing their real identity – This one seems obvious, but it is not frequently done. One very easy way is to reward users by labeling them with a “Verified” badge if they sign-in to your site using a valid identity—e.g. their Facebook account. We call these assigned badges in Pluck Rewards. A second way is to use the user’s identity to make their site experience more relevant. For example, if a user registers on your site with Facebook Connect, offer the option to invite their Facebook friends to join them on the site or find all their Facebook friends who are already participating on the site and allow them to connect locally. Remember Cheers, a place where everybody knows your name? You can immediately make a user’s site experience more relevant and familiar by filtering activity on your site by their friends.
   
   We’ve spent a lot of time at Pluck focusing on the value of friends at a product level. Our goal is to encourage users to bring their friends, make new friends, and leverage the value of their friends when using Pluck on your site. We’ve accomplished this in a few ways. First, when a user establishes a connection with Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn through our Social Bridging features we allow them to easily invite their friends and followers on those networks to join them on the your site. Second, when we designed the new Pluck 4 Comments and Pluck 4 Persona application we focused on leveraging the value of friendships. In the Pluck 4 Comments application we allow users to filter the entire conversation on your site down to just their friends. In the Pluck 4 Persona application we present the user with a feed of all their friends’ activities on your site. Both mechanisms provide users and instantaneous way to cut through the noise.

Help users create a meaningful digital disguise

You are all no doubt familiar with the principle, “You get out of it what you put into it.” This principle applies in the world of anonymity. You have to give anonymous users a reason to be more than just another digital disguise in the community. The following are a few ways to make this happen:

1. Force anonymous users’ first few posts to go through an approval process – When a user first joins your site and contributes consider pre-moderating their first couple of posts before allowing them to contribute directly to the conversation. You can quickly identify the folks that have something meaningful to share and can weed out the spammers and low value contributors. The Guardian is a Pluck customer successfully leveraging this approach using Pluck Comments and Pluck’s advanced moderation controls on Comment is free.
    
2. Recognize valuable digital disguises – Sure we are all altruistic to a point, but we are also motivated by recognition. Consider implementing a badging system that encourages your users to invest in their digital disguise. For example, if a lot of folks recommend your comments you likely have something meaningful to say and should be rewarded. Labeling a user with an “earned” badge is a great way to do this. However, if you have a high number of abusive submissions you most likely have nothing meaningful to say and should be blocked, filtered out automatically, or even labeled with a “dunce” badge. The Knot is a Pluck customer successfully applying this approach in their Pluck Forums.
    
3. Incentivize users to create valuable digital disguises – A little healthy competition can be a good thing every now and then. Consider implementing a leaderboard that encourages your users to make valuable contributions on a regular basis and in return get recognized as a leader in the community. Microsoft is a Pluck customer successfully applying this approach in their Windows Mobile 7 Backstage community using Pluck Rewards.
    
4. Build some switching cost – We all know how hard it is to walk away from something we have invested any time into. Consider making the user’s participation broader than just the immediate conversation. In other words, give them other reasons to come back to your site and to depend upon their digital disguise. A few ideas come to mind—allow them to build friendships on your site, track their contributions in one place, be recognized for their contributions, or give them a rank in your community. All these things can be accomplished with Pluck and a little work on your part. For example, consider picking the “top comments” of the day and placing them on your home page or in your print media. The more invested a user is in their digital disguise the less likely they will be to do something to harm or destroy it.

These are a few ways to channel your energy to make the most out of anonymity instead of using it to fight an endless battle. The other good news is you don’t have to fight the battle alone. You have a community of energized contributors waiting to help out. In my next post, I plan to address how you can use your community to decipher the winners from the losers.