Confessions of a lurker
Most of the time I am a lurker. I hang around blogs not contributing. I scan forums and message boards without responding. I feel OK about this because 99% of people on the web are still lurkers to (details of recent Hitwise study below). There is a lot of web 2 hype is around user created content but lurking is the rule not the exception….
Hitwise have produced figures showing the proportion of visitors to YouTube, flickr and Wikipedia who contribute to the content is below 5%. Although this shows some advance on Jakob Neilsen’s 90%-9%-1% rule lurkers are still firmly in the majority.
If you want to be customer centric its important to keep taking a reality check on user generated content for two reasons: Firstly because the buzz about blogs and user generated content is much louder if you are working on web content full time. It’s easier to listen to the people you have lunch with talk about setting up a customer forum than to hear your customers who might still be talking about your broken booking engine.
Secondly because its hard work! If you want to create a site where people really participate then you have to really work at getting close to you customers, here is what flickr founder Caterina Fake has to say about building an online community
These kinds of communities are not as “step out of the way and let the community do its thing” …. First the community has to come into existence, and while this looks easy, it’s actually a very difficult thing to get going, as the many companies who have attempted to create online communities will attest
Community building article from Caterina Fake
Maybe I’m too cynical but I think a lot experiments in user generated content are technology led and divert attention from the tasks customers really want to do online.
More Details of the Hitwise presentation here
Bill says:
Added on April 30th, 2007 at 11:35 pm“Maybe I’m too cynical but I think a lot experiments in user generated content are technology led and divert attention from the tasks customers really want to do online.”
I disagree. The social interaction side of many of these sites make them what they are. While it’s true that reading comments left on YouTube or Digg is disheartening and leaves you with the feeling that education is simply not what it once was, other sites such as Reddit, or forums where users have little tolerance for un-thought-out remarks can be enlightening.
Do any of us REALLY care what professional politicians, or people who make a living from arguing one point or another think; people who are as ‘unreal’ as computer constructs? And that is what mainstream media has become these days. Far better to listen to smart people like you and me, with fewer social skills and oratory powers, but more in the way of ‘real life experience’, like paying mortgages and looking for jobs that pay less than 100 grand a year.
I lurk around a blog or three written by MBA types who drop the phrase of the day and talk crap using words never to be found in a dictionary, but I’d never call them communities. They’re merely amusement and fodder for sessions down the pub at the end of a working week. The real deal is rarely found on ‘official’ blogs and forums - watch the fringes where people have silly Sci-Fi type names and blogspot addresses.
Brian Lamb (blog author) says:
Added on May 2nd, 2007 at 9:21 amBill your absolutely right that social interaction sites do deliver “real” commentary and can be spectacularly effective at getting real customer views (the travel industry is waking up to this big time) It’s not the quality of posts that prompts me to be careful about social interaction initiatives it’s the fact that making them work clearly requires a different way of thinking and is not easy.
Peter Phillips says:
Added on May 7th, 2007 at 12:59 amTo: Bill and Brian
Your approach to information distribution and community-building exactly mirrors the beliefs and - more importantly - the actions of a group within the policy Unit of our monolithic public service organisation. We believe that our community mistrusts web-supplied material because it “comes from and goes to..” without the possibility of challenge, interrogation or just expectation feedback.
We compete for more than just enrolments. Without being accountable in public for what we deliver, we are just a government mouthpiece, paternalistically indifferent to our clients’ need or even beliefs. Our Web presence is that public face and we’re changing its dynamics along the direction the two of you have indicated.
Peter
Brian Lamb says:
Added on May 8th, 2007 at 10:34 amPeter
I take it from your comment that you are engaged in building a community site to more effectively get some real commentary from your customers? Love to hear more about it and how you are measuring success.
Bob Johnson says:
Added on May 14th, 2007 at 8:46 pmLurking about seems quite OK to me in the Web 2.0 context… if the number of lurkers increases at your website and if people return to lurk again and again, then indeed you have succeeded at giving them content they find of sufficient interest to return.
That seems, for instance, to be a real value universities that use stories told on student blogs to recruit future students. A recent CNN.com story reported that MIT (a strong user of student blogs) has 15-20,000 visits per day from about 5,000 unique visitors. With traffic like that, do I really care if the visitors are not adding new content themselves?