90-9-1 Redux

I wrote about the 90-9-1 rule of social media in last week's blog post, and was rewarded with some enlightening feedback that warmed my heart and broadened my appreciation of a few fundamental truths:

• Truth #1: You don't need a megaphone to participate or contribute something important to a given community
• Truth #2: Active, engaged listening is often the better part of discourse – without listening, you might as well shout to the sky or pound sand
• Truth #3: In every community, everybody matters

The 90-9-1 rule asserts that in most online communities, 90% of users "never contribute," 9% of users "contribute a little," and 1% of users account for "almost all the action." Even before the contours of the rule are colored in (what crayon would you choose to personify a Lurker?), the basic premise was viewed as objectionable to several Synopsys colleagues.

Gail Gauvin remarked that, "This model seems to imply that anyone who has 'only' been reading the newspapers/magazines for their adult life – and not writing a letter to the editor, let alone submitting a freelance article of their own – are not contributing to society. And what does it say about all those book buyers, who have been merely– dare I say it? – reading, and not actually writing a novel of their own?"

Touché Gail, who went on to say, "In any social construct (commerce, politics, entertainment…) we need producers and consumers. Consumers are not lurkers or inactive; they contribute by absorbing, distilling, disseminating, promoting, acting on, or teaching for or against the 'product' that they are consuming. Not everyone at the party likes to wear a lampshade on their head, or even dance, but many like to hear the music, tap their foot and feel the pulse of the crowd."

I heard similar sentiments from others, including this excerpt from an email received directly from another colleague: "I actually prefer to stay behind the scenes. I'm not usually very talkative, I prefer to listen. And when I do communicate, I still like to talk/write to a specific person directly, not some large unknown group. Even though I don't contribute, I do like being part of an online community. I enjoy reading your blogs. I find the information useful. I just wanted to let you know this. And I look forward to reading your next blog."

Thank you.

I hear you, one and all, and here are my conclusions:

• To my fellow bloggers: Don't assume that the number of public comments you receive to your blog has any correlation to the value of what you write in the minds of others
• To my fellow bean counters: Don't be too quick to judge the effectiveness of blogs and forums based on the Sirens call of low-hanging metrics, such as "# of Comments"
• To my fellow colleagues: Whether you write, read, occasionally comment or simply pass through from time to time, you matter
• To everybody: Let's broaden our assumptions and definition of what it means to "contribute"

90-9-1

I always refer to it as the "1-9-90" rule because that seems less confusing to say conversationally, but most definitions I've seen refer to it as the 90-9-1 rule.

The rule is actually a theory, which asserts that in most online communities, 90% of users are "lurkers" who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

In their book Groundswell, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li take the theory a bit further in presenting their Social Technographics ladder, which basically expands the three 90-9-1 groups into six categories. (In research parlance, that's called a finer level of granularity – which provides book authors and others with much more to talk about.)

Bernoff and Li's categories are composed of Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators and Inactives. Creators are people who author blogs, own a Web site or otherwise originate online content. Critics react to content created by others by posting ratings or reviews or participating in online forums. Collectors save URLs or bookmark pages, joiners maintain profiles on social networking sites, spectators consume what the rest produce and inactives are doing other things besides being online at all.

That's probably more granularity than one needs to see the main point: all large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks share one property, which is that most users don't participate very much. In that sense, they can be said to "lurk" in the background.

I didn't coin the term and don't much care for it. Given the definition, I have many friends who could be described as lurkers when what they're actually doing is reading, observing or otherwise engaging. Just because somebody doesn't choose to blog or jump into an online discussion shouldn't earn them such a pejorative label. OK, no more ranting (in this post).

This 90-9-1 paradigm where 90% of users are non-contributors (ah, now that's a much nicer term), 9% contribute from time to time, and 1% of users account for most contributions underscores an essential point that is easily missed amid the percentages and labels: all online users matter.

One could even say that the 1% of users who always seem to be online matter too much in that they are not representative of whatever group they're from. Whether the group is EDA, the electronics industry or the world in general, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from.

This has several valuable implications – and that will be the subject of my next blog post!

Social Media and ROI

How do you measure the ROI of social media? The first step is to define that which you're attempting to measure.

Wikipedia defines ROI (return on investment) as "a measure of investment profitability" and as "the ratio of money gained or lost relative to the amount of money invested." The wiki page offers an expansive discussion on the topic, but the bottom line comes down to a simple proposition: "If I do X, then I expect Y in return" – the difference between X and Y is the ROI (positive or negative).

There are many examples where ROI is fairly simple to measure: If I put $1,000 in a savings account, I expect to achieve an ROI measured in pennies. If I properly water and fertilize a field of wheat, I expect to produce a crop that ultimately returns a profit.

But in the field of marketing, ROI often defies such "cause and effect" simplicity. If you pay $10,000 for an ad, run it once, and nothing measurable happens, can you conclude that advertising doesn't work? Or that nobody reads the publication? Or that you completely wasted a bunch of money? Of course not, and the main reason is that marketing is not a one-time, flash-in-the-pan event.

Marketing is the orchestration of a journey of exposures, interactions and experiences that happen over time. Just as ads are conceived in campaigns acting in concert with other points of exposure (i.e., PR, seminars, trade shows, sales calls, etc.), social media is an increasingly important component that complements the rest of the mix.

Measuring the ROI of social media isn't about looking for a more granular level of accountability than what's expected from other marketing resources. The metrics that matter are in the realm of figuring out how to track progress towards long-term customer-centric goals such as:

• Building trust relationships

• Increased customer engagement

• Enhanced customer experience

• Rapid response to customer feedback

Stay tuned for much more on this topic in future blog posts.

BTW, one can never assume that the ROI of doing nothing equals staying even.

Tweet, Tweet… or Become a Birdwatcher?

Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows people to send content (called tweets) and follow the tweets of others. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.

Twitter will celebrate its second birthday next month. As with most two-year olds, there's plenty of hope and promise ahead, but nobody knows for sure how this youngster will actually turn out.

So far, it appears that Twitter has some valuable advantages:

1. Twitter provides a medium for forging and maintaining relationships through social interaction. To the extent that "who you know is often as important as what you know," Twitter can help LI>
2. If you have interesting things to say and can add value to the river of thought enabled by Twitter, micro-blogging can advance your personal brand as you attract and build new followers
3. As you follow and interact with others, you gain an opportunity to learn and be in the know ahead of the curve about a wide variety of topics and developments
4. If you need a hand or want to test a new idea, Twitter can provide an instant focus group to collect feedback from many valuable points of view

Yet there are some notable downsides to Twitter as well. Chief among these are:

1. The 140-character limit may be plenty to report on your current mood and such, but it's not ideal when it comes to communicating complex ideas
2. Forging and maintaining relationships on Twitter takes a considerable amount of time and intention, and to reap those benefits you must participate, and often
3. When worlds collide: in the Twittersphere they surely will, which circles back to the idea of personal brand. Is your brand "standing in line for a cup of coffee," or something more meaningful in a business context. Twitter is not Facebook where you get to accept or ignore friend requests. Twitter is a public forum where whatever you say is, for better or worse, public
4. This public aspect extends beyond any specific individual – when the day comes for an influential but skeptical manager or two to check out Twitter for themselves, will their first impressions of employee activity in this sphere convey business value or something that could taint their broader assessments about social media? Might they come away thinking, "Just wasting time on company hours?" If so, that would present a big downside on our broader social media objectives

With regard to the actual business case for or against Twitter, the jury is out. Twitter may be exactly the right Web 2.0 tool for some, but it's probably not ideally suited for all people or every business. While we're waiting for the verdict, however, there is one thing we can already be sure of: Twitter is a social media phenomenon that companies must monitor, or ignore at their own peril.

Listen. Monitor. Pay attention. These are forms of participation that are every bit as important as proactively tweeting or staking out a personal presence with a Twitter account.

In fact, the very first thing we should be doing as a company from a strategic perspective is to become savvy birdwatchers, developing a well-tuned ear for tweets that matter. What are our customers saying about us – or are we mentioned at all? (The answer is yes, there are a fair number of tweets about Synopsys and our competitors on Twitter.) To see for yourself, check out some of the Twitter tracking tools such as Monitter, Tweet Scan and Twitter Search.

Last but not least, if you're a Twitter user, what is your own first-hand experience with Twitter? Even more significantly, what would our senior staff think?