By now most of us have heard about that "1% of us" that are actual "content creators" online. Well, depending on who you ask, that number is any where between 1% and 50% (according to PEW/Internet, over 50% of teens are online content creators). OK, so now what? The rest of the 50-90% of us that don't create, simply consume?

Not exactly. In a recent post, Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations explained his theory about "Microsharing", or, as word-of-mouth marketers would have it, pass-along. Certainly, this is not new. There have been numerous studies that discuss pass-along in viral marketing, including this excellent piece of work from a paper published in the Journal of Advertising Research in December 2004[PDF]. The report revealed four email profiles used to identify those more likely to pass-along emails. Advertisers tend to focus on reaching and connecting with viral mavens, but some infrequent senders who received few but forwarded were found to represent another potentially overlooked but valuable conduit for marketing messages.

The importance of this work to marketers is something that I'm always asked in social media seminars and in any event discussing 'non-traditional' marketing means. The questions usually go like this: "You mean there's only 1% of people taking part in this? How do we know who our 1% are? If there's only 1%, or even 10%, why should we care about who's creating content?

As Rohit points out, and as the data lead us to believe, there's a "juice middle" of the market where people are sharing, passing along and all out 'moving your message along' in ways that aren't often tracked.

So, what do we do about everyone in the middle? It's simple. Virally-enable ALL of your content! Put DIGG and Sphere links, add social bookmarking chiclets and everything else that helps people spread the message. (according to MarketingSherpa, only 50% of websites have a 'send-to-a-friend' feature...we need to work on that!)

This was best summed up by one of my clients, who after I explained the virtues of social bookmarking and 'microsharing', turned to his marketing team and said "this is an absolute no-brainier, is there any reason we shouldn't do this on our websites?" He's right on. There is no reason not to give your customers, whether their the 1% creators or that 50% in the middle that some have called 'content curators', the tools they need to microshare your content.

[Update] Bill Flitter of Pheedo has an interesting take on microsharing that I found after writing this piece.