The 1% Rule
Reading a book titled "Citizen Marketers" by a couple of old acquaintances, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell. They talk about the impact of social networks on products / brands / companies.
They talk about the 1% rule... the percentage of your audience who are also content creators. A couple of examples from the book: (1) Wikipedia. In June 2005, 7.4 million people visited Wikipedia, but only 68,682 contributed content or changes. That's about 0.9%. (2) Quickbooks community is an online forum that helps Intuit customers address software and accounting challenges. Of the 100,000 visitors in July 2006, 900 of them created new content threads.
This immediately reminded me of a post Adam left a month back about the challenge of forming an informal "innovation network"... people sharing their ideas, lessons, approaches in the name of furthering knowledge of innovation. I think the 1% rule is at the heart of the challenge. Most people want to consume content, they don't want to create it. You have to build up a lot of critical mass for the 1% to be self-sustaining.
Take this blog for example. We have a very small readership, and so consequently, more than 1% of us are "creators". But, it is essentially a running dialogue between a handful of people. We don't have the critical mass to be self-sustaining. If one of us drops out of the conversation, we lose a lot of momentum. And so the challenge with the "innovation network" - to build enough momentum that it takes on a life of its own. If we can figure out how to do it, I sure would love to be a part of it.
Anyway, bottom-line, be aware of the 1% rule. Find the 1% of people in a network who create content and leverage them, inform them, empower them. Where else have you seen this in practice? Where has the 1% been effectively tapped? Is there any way to engage / expand beyond that core group?
They talk about the 1% rule... the percentage of your audience who are also content creators. A couple of examples from the book: (1) Wikipedia. In June 2005, 7.4 million people visited Wikipedia, but only 68,682 contributed content or changes. That's about 0.9%. (2) Quickbooks community is an online forum that helps Intuit customers address software and accounting challenges. Of the 100,000 visitors in July 2006, 900 of them created new content threads.
This immediately reminded me of a post Adam left a month back about the challenge of forming an informal "innovation network"... people sharing their ideas, lessons, approaches in the name of furthering knowledge of innovation. I think the 1% rule is at the heart of the challenge. Most people want to consume content, they don't want to create it. You have to build up a lot of critical mass for the 1% to be self-sustaining.
Take this blog for example. We have a very small readership, and so consequently, more than 1% of us are "creators". But, it is essentially a running dialogue between a handful of people. We don't have the critical mass to be self-sustaining. If one of us drops out of the conversation, we lose a lot of momentum. And so the challenge with the "innovation network" - to build enough momentum that it takes on a life of its own. If we can figure out how to do it, I sure would love to be a part of it.
Anyway, bottom-line, be aware of the 1% rule. Find the 1% of people in a network who create content and leverage them, inform them, empower them. Where else have you seen this in practice? Where has the 1% been effectively tapped? Is there any way to engage / expand beyond that core group?
posted by ROInnovation at 11:40 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Scott
I think this is true of many sites where there is a need to put up knowledge based content. However i think it is much less true for sites such as myspace or facebook which require profiles in order to be able to participate fully.
On these sites people are than happy to create a mass of content about themselves. Perhaps that is the difference, if it is about you it is easy to do, if it's a knowledge based site then it requires more thought and effort.
In terms of this site, I agree there are only a small number of us participating. In order to grow we need to increase our audience, but doing that is tricky. I think that we rely on personal networks rather than having new people see something interesting and join in.
Perhaps an evolution of this would be to turn this into a blog like endlessinnovation....
Though that would require a fair amount of work.
For me there is are also considerations around confidentiality and competition that I have to be careful of. There are lots of things that I could post, but cannot do so as these could impact on my company or clients.
Adam
I agree, the level of participation on MySpace, Facebook, etc is greater. However, I wonder what would happen if you looked at activity stats. For example, the most popular MySpace user is Tila Tequila. She has 1.8 million friends (which must make sending Christmas cards an expensive proposition), and 300 million page views. Compare that to the average # friends.
So, you raise a good point. Perhaps rather than focus too much on the 1% rule, we should look at participation as a power curve... or a long tail. Either way, it's important to get the "head" of the curve highly invested and engaged. Keeping them involved and active is big for a site's ability to build momentum.
Post a Comment
<< Home