Recently, I was at a group discussion that centered around creating sustainable user generated communities. One of the items that came up was this research study from Jakob Nielsen about the distribution of participation in online communities. Basically, his research reveals that:
User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:
- 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
- 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
- 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.
That 1% is incredibly important. Yet how often is our marketing strategy to appeal to the masses? Is there are way you could find out what that 1% is and appeal just to them? The masses will follow.
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