A few months ago I wrote about a Guardian article indicating that “if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will ‘interact’ with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it”….
Now Jakob Nielsen is looking at this phenomenon which he calls the “90-9-1 rule” and adds some interesting data (from Technorati, Wikipedia and Amazon).
Reflecting on how the unrepresentativeness of contributions can cause problems, he suggests five ways to make participation a little less unequal:
1. Make it easier to contribute;
2. Make participation a side effect of something else they’re doing (e.g. buying);
3. Have users modify something, rather than create it from scratch;
4. Reward – but don’t over-reward – participants;
5. Promote quality contributors and contributions.
Read the full article here.
Thanks Mark. I believe reader participation is critical to every blog post. A writer begins the conversation with an idea or two. Without reader participation, there is no conversation and the ideas are never fleshed out.
Come on readers! Participate. It’s good for the writer, good for every reader and good for you. Can you say free marketing for you and your business?
Hi Mark;
Great post. I have found on my blog, to incourage interaction, you must do a few more things:
- Write posts that attract your base / they find them interesting
- Ask questions and do not provide all the answers
- Allow auto email notification of new comments
- Respond to peoples comments (engaged them)
FYI, I really think that 9 is far too high. If 9 in 100 comments on our blogs we would not know what to do with ourselves.
Mike