We often talk about what we call the “1-9-90” rule. This is the basic rule of thumb for most online communities:
- 1% of your community are people who will become highly active in your online site – they will make new submissions, comment on a ton of others, vote and just generally be so active you won’t know when they have time to eat, sleep and work. You’d love to have more of them. I’m going to call them your “Magic 1%”.
- 9% will be moderately active, checking in regularly, commenting and voting and they contribute a significant part of the content that is created.
- 90% of your community will be infrequent participants, coming back only when they remember, or are reminded to, and many of them coming once or twice and never coming back again.
The 1-9-90 rule applies to almost every social network or online community site out there. For businesses, being able to identify their magic 1% is worth its weight in gold (yes, even at $1300 an ounce). These are the people, for whatever reason, who feel so strongly about your brand or product that they are willing to sacrifice their involvement in other areas of their lives for you. They have the personality type that makes them comfortable in offering up new ideas for review, comment and even critique from other community members, and they are likely your brand’s best ambassadors who aren’t on your payroll.
So, how to you find that “magic 1%”? Crowdsourcing, in my mind, is perhaps the best way. Traditional market research techniques like surveys and focus groups just don’t give you the combination of the richness of interaction and the chance to observe participation over time that is essential to identifying those highest value participants. Crowdsourcing is typically conducted as an ongoing initiative, so it provides the perfect stage for those folks to come out and be seen. The discourse on a crowdsourcing site helps you identify not only the quantity of participation but the quality as well. We further encourage, award and highlight participation by using a number of different incentive systems, including badges, which the 1% personality types just love to earn for their profiles.
Many crowdsourcing implementations include a community aspect, where people can build their profiles, upload a picture or avatar, and optionally tell a little something about themselves. By cross-tabulating the participation data that is generated from an enterprise-class crowdsourcing site, and the profile data, you can start to see trends and draw conclusions about the types of people who are most attracted to your product and brand. Then you are well on your way to finding more of them!
Most people think the result of crowdsourcing is the winning idea. But equally valuable, if not more so, is what the sponsoring organization can learn from a well designed crowdsourcing campaign about their brand, their perception in the market and their market “sweet spot” by identifying their magic 1%.