Participation Inequality June 7, 2007
Not everyone who reads blogs comments on posts or writes their own blogs. That should not surprise anyone. In fact, according to Jackob Nielsen's Participation Inequity: Encouraging More Users to Contribute post from last October, only about 5% of Internet users blog. (Hat tip: Suw Charman)
Nielsen explains 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." Regardless of the accurateness of such figures, low participation negatively affects any community since the feedback produced by the contributors is likely not representative of all those who use the community.
For instance, how relevant are user reviews on Amazon when say 12 people review a book that millions bought? How about the search engines? If they use links as a major metric of measuring relevance, how good are their result pages since a very small subset of web surfers create links through web pages and blogs?
A recent example of participation inequality side effects is when a Utah school voucher bill was debated on the legislative wiki Politicopia. Utah State Representative Steve Urquhart — and voucher bill sponsor – launched the wiki earlier this year. With great fanfare from publications like the Wall Street Journal's sister site Opinion Journal, many observers were excited to see how the debate unfolded around the school voucher bill; it faced an uphill battle since similar bills failed during the last several years. In fact, activity on school voucher bill page on Politicopia is what many consider the reason for its passage.
Citizens upset that the school voucher bill succeeded — diverting state money from some of the lowest funded schools in the country — successfully collected enough signatures to have a referendum during a special statewide election in November to potentially overrule the legislature and reject the bill.
Although a group of Utah citizens did participate in the school voucher bill debate on Politicopia, the zeal and excitement surrounding the community was misinformed since participants were a small minority of Utahns. They simply did not accurately represent their fellow citizens.
So, what can one do about participation inequality? Nielsen says nothing; the best you can do is to increase opportunities and lower barriers to participation. A lurker rate of 80% is better than 90%. He gives a few suggestions on how to encourage greater participation.
I would also like to suggest reading Forrester Research's Social Technographics study; in it Charlene Li argues that sites should gradually train people to participate in simpler ways before inviting them to interact in a more complex fashion. For example, why would a site's audience create and upload videos if its members aren't even willing to post text comments?
UPDATE: (The individual post pages on the blog that the following links point to sometimes appear as "404 Not Found" pages. If this happens, visit the blog's home page at conversationhub.com.) Suw Charman has some interesting thoughts about on-line participation levels at the Conversation Hub group blog for the Supernova 2007 Conference. Also at Conversation Hub, Renee Hopkins Callahan argues that "it's considered essential to *frame* a specific challenge around which you want the participants to create ideas. Such an approach will also help keep participation levels up in any kind of social network."
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This is a great post. However, all the links in the “UPDATE” portion are bad. Can they be fixed?
John,
Thanks. I’ve double checked the links, and they are correct. When I click on individual posts on conversationhub.com, I also get “404 Not Found” pages. Visit the homepage using the link in this post.
But what is a ‘community’? It seems as if we come to believe that the online arena is filled with all these ‘communities’ that are somewhat defined by a commonality. It’s a relatively set amount of people. The doors are open to come in (and leave) but stability is the name of the game. And view what we call a ‘community’ as just that…a relatively stable group of people bound by interests and a certain affinity for each other. And 90% lurk, 9% participate, and 1% lead.
But wait…are those 90% (if that is in any way accurate) actually ‘lurking’? Or are they not even doing that? Are they ignoring instead? Then withdrawing?
Part of the promise of social media is to create communities. At least that’s what we believe and tell our clients. But are these communities much, much smaller, with the conversation being heard by a tiny amount of what has been originially thought?
Actually, didn’t Pew and a couple other research groups come up with a number closer to 12% of Internet users being bloggers? Perhaps that’s just the % of them who’ve created a blog rather than maintain one on a regular basis.
Anyway, I’m always fascinated by folks who want to find a way to break the one percent rule and get a larger percentage of people actively participating in online communities. I sincerely wonder if the community tools that are out there - MT, Wordpress, Prospero, Pluck, whatever - would be up to the task.
And apart from the capacity challenges of managing a larger percentage of participants, there are issues of editorial management and information overload. From the online community manager’s perspective, how easy would it be if your participation doubled, tripled, etc? Sites that lean towards the anarchic would probably be fine with it, but look at what WashPost has been going through. They’ve had serious growing pains when it comes to the sheer number of comments being posted on the site, particularly due to the negative, uncivil tone of many of them. News sites don’t deal with incivility well.
And as for information overload, what’s the threshold for even the most digitally native of us to manage keeping up with communities in which the majority of members participate actively? It’s not an easy task. So rather than trying to make more lurkers into active participants, maybe we should just be thinking of ways to make the community a valuable experience for all participants, no matter which way they choose to participate.
Andy,
Thank you for your perspective.
I reckon that your inkling that most of that 12% of Pew respondents who said that they blog don’t regularly publish content is correct. Then again defining groups in studies is tough. Do bloggers merely have a blog? Or must they publish content on-line on some kind of basis?
Also, you make so great points concerning the information and capacity overload. As a community member I don’t want to see comments that don’t contribute to a great discussion. Further, do I have the time or patience to plow through hundreds of comments as well before taking time to respond myself? Would I feel guilty of not actively participating in a discussion by checking a comment section every couple of minutes?
I guess if a community management team is unwilling to devote sufficient resources to moderation, then it leads me to wonder if news sites — for instance — truly want to develop communities in which participants truly represent the rest of the members. Perhaps that is where third parties like Pluck (and say The Huffington Post) can step in, they can provide a venue that is less concerned about civility while still providing access to the content via link or feed.
Shall we dare to wax normatively? Should community managers want all community members to actively participate?
Well, I’m not sure if it’s a matter of “unwillingness.” It’s a matter of what’s realistic, particularly if you work for a news company that’s actually a nonprofit, like I do. Almost everyone I talk to here is very eager to introduce social networking and user content features, but they also are concerned about making sure that civility can be maintained. I know we’ll be able to dedicate some people-power to managing our online communities (beyond what we already do with npr blogs) but it would be difficult for us to find the money to put more than a couple of warm bodies into those positions. For-profit media outlets, of course, are better positioned to do this, but that doesn’t mean they have unlimited resources for community management either.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting seeing how some vendors are recognizing this and are trying to fill this niche. Prospero, for example, offers content moderators by the hour, along with their software. It’s a smart move, because some companies going Web 2.0 for the first time might not anticipate the amount of FTEs required to manage their new sites, so being able to outsource some of the community management probably makes sense for some of them.