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
