The Hidden Truth of Social Media - If Just 1% of 1% of 1%...
We’ve been busy talking, educating, and demonstrating to a number of different audiences the power of social media. I’ve found that, despite all the flowery buzzwords and metaphors, it works a lot like pornography - you know it when you see it.
One of the hurdles we’ve been forced to address, and attempt to resolve, is the content creation gap. Creating content is hard. We’re often asked “Is it worth having a community before the event even happens?” I alway answer the same way. The activity demonstrates the classic hockey stick growth.. flat at first then growing rapidly once the event has completed.
Another dimension to that discussion, however, is one raised in a recent post by Bradley Horowitz (pointer from Bernard Moon).
There are a couple of interesting points worth noting. The first is that we don’t need to convert 100% of the audience into “active” participants to have a thriving product that benefits tens of millions of users. In fact, there are many reasons why you wouldn’t want to do this. The hurdles that users cross as they transition from lurkers to synthesizers to creators are also filters that can eliminate noise from signal. Another point is that the levels of the pyramid are containing - the creators are also consumers.
While not quite a “natural law” this order-of-magnitude relationship is found across many sites that solicit user contribution. Even for Wikipedia (the gold standard of the genre) half of all edits are made by just 2.5% of all users. And note that in this context user means “logged in user”, not accounting for the millions of lurkers directed to Wikipedia via search engine traffic for instance.
Mostly this is just an observation, and a simple statement: social software sites don’t require 100% active participation to generate great value. (emphasis added)
That last statement is really the most important (imho). We’re so trained that more is more, it’s hard to appreciate the value of social systems sometimes. Tt’s nice to have someone sitting atop one of the largest communities online providing this insight. I’ll be updating our own documents to make sure this is clear.