Getting people to talk to strangers and participate in online communities and social networks can be challenging. The number of communities that have failed is astounding.

There is no easy way to create an environment where people feel comfortable sharing and talking with new people, but a project that Nina Simon led with 13 grad students from from the University of Washington provides some lessons relevant to marketers and community managers.

The challenge to the students was to create a $300 museum exhibit within 10 weeks that would get strangers to talk to one another. A full report of the project can be found here at Nina’s wonderful Museum 2.0 blog.

Some relevant highlights:

1. Ask provocative starter questions and make it easy for people to respond. In the case of one of the museum exhibits, the grad students asked a few seed questions, like “how do you mend a broken heart,” and put them on signs behind glass. People passing by stopped and wrote replies on post-it notes, read other notes and created conversation chains and spin off questions. The lesson for business is that provocative, open ended questions that appeal to widely or deeply felt issues elicit responses and help to jump start participation. (We’ve seen too many business communities that are bland and boring. No wonder people don’t talk back!)

The whole exhibit modeled the potential for someone to respond to your query, and as it grew, the sense that you would be responded to and validated grew as well. We saw many people come back again and again to look at the post-its, point out new developments, laugh, and add their own advice.

2. Someone from the company doesn’t need to provide the advice: The team created an Advice booth and found that the best advice came from strangers helping strangers vs. staff helping strangers. (In fact, one eight year old liked being able to give advice so much that he came back the next day.) The students found that it was more beneficial for the facilitators to be “part of the experience vs. the focal point.” Good advice for companies in managing communities.

Because they were a part of the experience rather than the focal point, they could impart an air of friendliness and participation without making people feel that they had to participate. They reminded me of street vendors or great science museum cart educators, imparting an energy to the space without overwhelming it.

3. Good things come from talking on the bathroom stall. An undirected part of the project was letting people write anything they wanted on a bathroom wall, which elicited many responses, none of them offensive.

But the bathroom wall turned out to be a brilliant exhibit element. It was a release valve that let people write crude things and draw silly pictures. The bathroom wall was “anything goes” by design. And while the content on it was not as directed and compelling as that on the post-its, it served a valuable purpose. There was not a SINGLE off-topic or inappropriate submission on the post-it walls.

The bathroom lessons for business:  people want to have fun and be able to be creative in unexpected ways. Mix up the ways they can participate.  (Like the story about the chair in the corporate lobby.)   Second, fears about people writing offensive or negative things are usually unfounded — even when you go so far as letting people write on the bathroom wall.