I heard an interesting “rule of thumb” statistic recently. Only 1% of the population of any online community will create original content for the community. The rest will read or “lurk”. Down in Austin, someone gave me a book called “Citizen Marketers,” which actually provides some research data to support this “rule”.
From Citizen Marketers, when people are the message:
The 1% Rule - …is simple: about 1 percent of the total number of visitors to a democratized forum will create for it or contribute content to it. Furthermore, we postulate that about 10 percent of the total number of visitors will interact with the contributed content. Interact may be described as writing comments or voting on content items.
This rule is not hard and fast, but here is some evidence the authors have gathered:
- since its inception in 2001, the percentage of visitors who have created content has always been about 1 percent…in (this time), 1.8 percent of the site’s visitors have created 72% of all articles.
- 1 percent of the user population might start a group or a thread within a group…After that about 10 percent of the total audience of any (group) interacts with citizen content.
- .9 pecent of its total visitors created new threads on the site in 2006
- less than .3 percent of all site visitors start a new discussion thread each month.
The book gives several more examples.
I find this data useful for a couple of reasons.
First, I’m wondering how many people will contribute content when we launch My Colts Network. Actually, I’m HOPING some people will create profiles (gulp) and I’m ALSO hoping fans will talk to eachother. So it’s nice to have benchmarks to compare ourselves to.
Second, on this (Sports Marketing 2.0) blog I’ve noticed the 1 percent rule holds true, but I’ve also noticed that not everyone shares content for the group. Instead, many readers choose to reply privately. I wonder why that is?
Over the past few days I’ve posted 2 public invitations to create content.
First, I asked readers of this blog to contribute what they think are the top 5 trends in sports marketing over the next 5 years. Next, I invited readers to work with me to launch a Sports Marketing 2.0 event. This blog gets just over 100 readers each day, so if the “rules” apply, I should see about 10 comments on each post. So far there’s only been one comment on one of the posts. But I’ve also received about five E mails from long time readers who shared very thoughtful and insightful stuff with me privately. It’s curious, I wonder why that is?
What could I do to increase the number of readers who contribute content?
I’m glad to know about the 1 percent rule. Makes me feel like I’m doing OK in terms of inspiring community participation. However, I will say that I hope someday the readers of this blog will break the (1 percent) rule.
I do have some “selfish” ambition. I want big sponsors to discover this blog and create partnerships with the Colts. I want my own thoughts to be out there so that someone might notice ME. But I’m not JUST in this for myself. I don’t have all the answers.
The big reason I’m writing this blog is to inspire contributions from the group. The big opportunity - for all of us - is to use this platform (the read-write Web) to share information and learn. Many minds are smarter than one. I’m trying to crack the code for Sports Marketing 2.0, but there’s no way I’ll do it alone. So I’ll stick my neck out again and ask for your opinions:
what can I do to inspire more participation for this group?
And please, if you have something to say, share it with the entire group (by using the comments feature). I love getting your E mails, but when you E mail me your thoughts you rob everyone else of the benefit of your thinking. Come on, jump in…express yourself online…the water’s fine.
I find that the more that I comment on other blogs, the more folks comment on mine. In a sense, it’s the “virtual conversation”. Sometimes all it takes is an introduction at a party to hit it off… sometimes we have to start that conversation and not wait for the other person.
With blogs, promoting commentors seems to help as well. I have a “Top Commentor” plugin that puts top commentors on my home page. I’m not sure if that motivates commenting or not, but at least it promotes those folks who comment. Let me know if you’d like that on your blog.
Doug
There are many blogs and bloggers that would quickly dismiss this statement, but blogs are not the ideal places for conversation. In most cases, there is one person (the author) with the power, forcing the rest of the people (the readers) into an inherently more passive role. Even when you are fortunate to get a long string of comments, contributions effectively put up more barriers to participation than they entice people to post. The longer the thread, the more one has to read to understand that micro-community.
I’m very interested in getting my hands on that book, since part of my current research is examining this issue of participation as a function of choice of forum type. I wonder if the overall participation levels would go up considerably if the forums above were structured to form small-group interaction. I wonder, too, if there were any studies of participation in social networking sites included in that book.
(BTW, not all of my comments show up. I think it has something to do with the presence of a link included in comments. For example, I see my comment to your previous post, but it doesn’t show up in the front-page sidebar of recent comments or part of the count in the post thread. Maybe there is an interface feedback problem for the user, and you are getting more participation than you think. Bottom line of the message: I’d love to help with the unconference.)
When I was 9 my mom gave me the the last version of the book “The Whole Earth Catalog.” Wow, a book where I could learn everything?
Come on, jump in…express yourself online…the water’s fine….
There was a great quote from the authors…”Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
I read an unrelated blog where the “owner” posts lengthy stuff sometimes, or he can simply put up a one word post like “cricket” and within a few hours there are 30 or more comments from the “readers”. It strikes me more as a forum than a blog, but where only one person starts the threads. A lot of the interaction is between people leaving comments, rather than with the “owner”. He is more a facilitator than anything. I haven’t seen any other blogs like that. The difference is that he does not make himself out to be an expert or an authority on any subject, although he is on several.
Which leads me to think… on a blog where there is an “expert” posting, there might be a “fear factor” for people. “Will I look stoopid if I post something that is wrong?”, “will I get shot down?”
Another thing I often do is use RSS. It gathers up all the new posts from the blogs I read, and I read them offline. of course it means I can’t click through to the blog on the web and leave a comment, but I can email right there. THen when I connect it goes through. I don’t know how many people do that, but RSS is pretty popular so it might be a few. Perhaps you could rig up mailto: link in each blog post, if I click it and reply, then when it’s received at your end, it goes straight to the comments. I guess you’d want to mark it clearly so that people don’t think their email to you is private.
I also think there’s a critical mass thing. If enough people comment, more people seem to do so. There’s a heightened sense of participation. Perhaps it is vanity? “it’s not worth posting my great comment on a blog that no one is participating in”. Chicken and egg stuff.
Finally, the email you get… is it on topic? I emailed you once, but it was a bit off topic from the post that triggered it. Maybe there is a bit of that in it as well.
I read this blog for the “marketing 2.0″ content and not as much the sports (though I’m also a Colts fan). So in some ways I don’t feel overly qualified to participate in “sports marketing” conversations. The other main factor for me, and this is probably even more important, is I read blogs via RSS in Bloglines. So almost all of the time, I’m not actually visiting the blog itself and thus don’t comment.
But I can sympathize with your frustration. I’m a big believer in blogs and other 2.0 technologies. But I know in my organization the 1% rule would quickly be latched onto as a good reason not to bother with those things.