Social Media – Who Are Those Guys, Anyway?
By Joseph Hunkins at June 03, 2008 3 Comments|
The growing importance of Social Media has spawned a very interesting discussion about the future role of those who are not currently participating actively. Some are suggesting that participation can broadly be viewed as a pyramid where for every 100 people you can expect to have one who is producing online content (e.g. a website or blog), ten who are actively participating with that content (e.g. commenting) and 89 who are only passively involved (e.g. reading). I’d suggest that this general pyramid is correct, but that the numbers of participants are actually even lower – more like 1 in 50 who comment with the overwhelming majority just reading. But in any case the number actively participating is low, and Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson has posed these excellent questions about those who do *not* participate: Why aren’t they coming? Fred is optimistic about a future where everybody plays and everybody wins and that is appealing. However I wonder if we will find that the number of participants will never increase past a certain point. What percentage of the population simply has no desire to actively participe in social media in its current forms? I do think that the coming plethora of social community widgets inspired by Facebook, Myspace, Google, MyBlogLog, and others will create a “friendlier” face for social media, and encourage socializing via a person’s favorite niche website. The short answer to Fred’s questions is simply that people want what people want, and when they find it online they will hang around. When they find a way to easily socialize with others in their niche they’ll hang around even more. |
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Social Media
3 Comments
I’ve never seen this pattern of participation as a problem. In fact, the beauty of social media is that it doesn’t require 100%, or even 10%, participation at any one site to work. If it did, it would be doomed to failure.
We need to keep an eye on how easy it is for people to transition from observer to commenter to contributor, as their needs and interests change. But to answer questions about why people are participating, we need to look across sites to see how many people are the contributing type in general – do those one percents add up to more like 10% or 80% when you look at the web as a whole?
This blog is really useful, thanks.
People come to a particular social media site when they have a trusted friend recommend that they check into it, while assuring them that an important problem can be solved or that a pain can be mitigated. Of course the numbers don’t add up because each person can have multiple roles: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, and spectators (readers).
I agree with JP, but would go one step further to point out that it is critical to take into consideration not only where people are actively participating (i.e., multiple sites), but also what they are contributing. Being able to track the patterns of not only what type of activity, but also what topics or content that person views or submits is the very heart of the contextual power that social media gives us. It is one of the ways to identify new thought leaders, and how we can envision new strategic directions for an organization from a grass roots perspective.
Once we capture those patterns of both type of activity and topic of content, we can derive real business value. Marketing campaigns, recommendations, invitations to special functions, sponsorships, synergetic partnerships…the list goes on and on.
And, similarly, I also truly appreciate this blog. Thanks for keeping it up!