1:9:90 of Social Media — Truism or Fallacy?

There is a widely held belief that only a small proportion of people ‘contribute’ when it comes to Web 2.0 — from social media to collaboration. It’s something that Jakob Nielsen wrote nearly three years ago about in his post titled Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute when social media was in its infancy. It’s the notion that:

• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).

Source: Nielsen, 2006

This comes originally from Hill, Hollan, Wroblewski & McCandless’s research [1] that suggests user participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule. Nielsen goes further to examine a number of online behaviours:

Usenet [2]

• 2 million messages
• 27% of the postings were from people who posted only a single message
• Most active 3% posters contributed 25% of the messages

Causes app on Facebook [3]

• 25 million users in April 2009
• 185,000 users gave a donation, even though the application offers the ability to give to 179,000 different non-profit organisations
• Suggests 99.3% lurkers and 0.7% donation contributors

An analysis of statistics of types of online behaviour from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), however, paints a different picture [4] of Australian adults [5] who are online:

• 26% publish a blog/web page, upload music and video at least monthly
• 35% post ratings on a product, comment on blogs, contribute to a forums, edit wikis

Traditionally, these sorts of behaviours would adhere to Hill et. al.’s concept of involvement and engagement but don’t adhere to his 1:9:90 rules. Futhermore, it fails to recognise the wider range of activities and behaviours that people can now undertake in modern online Web 2.0 environments. For example:

• 16% of Australian adults who are online use RSS, vote for websites, and add tags to content, from video to photos
• 45% of Australian online adults maintain a profile on a social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn — an important aspect of allowing newcommers to online communities to understand who makes up that community, enables them to identify with those people, and determine whether or not they want to interact with them. Without this type of activity occuring it is likely that other types of online interaction with communities would not be possible (or would at least be significantly reduced)
• 63% are just spectators — those who typically read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video, read forums and ratings — again important behaviours that encourage continued creation of content by the 1.8 million of Australians who create content. I know that without these ’spectators’ and the views I get on my own photos on Flickr as a result I may not be as motivated to contribute my content.

Proclaiming the 1:9:90 rule, therefore, without an understanding of the variety of roles, behaviours, the relationships between them, and the actual statistics, dooms us to a view of the world that social media will only be attractive to a very small proportion of citizens online. But given there are 11.2 million Australians currently online (out of 16.4m), and a whopping 8.5 million who do use social media at least monthly, I think the future is rosier than this 20 year old rule would otherwise suggest [4].

M

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1. William C. Hill, James D. Hollan, Dave Wroblewski, and Tim McCandless, 1992 “Edit wear and read wear,” Proceedings of CHI’92, the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, CA, May 3-7, 1992), pp. 3-9. 

2. Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill, and Lynn Cherny, 1998: “The dynamics of mass interaction,” Proceedings of CSCW 98, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Seattle, WA, November 14-18, 1998), pp. 257-264.

3. Hart, K and Greenwell, M, 2009. To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green: Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising. 22 Apr Online at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103786.html

4. Analysis of ABS cat no.  8146.0 and ABS cat no.3201.0

5. According to ABS definitions, adults are those 18 years and over

Web 2.0 Workshop Card Game

I’ve started a web 2.0 strategy with a government department this week and have been asked to interview staff as to their feelings, attitudes, and web 2.0 participatory behaviours (notice I didn’t use the word “engagement”).

Talking to people, though, in a workshop environment has its problems. There are certain people who love to talk and so tend to hijack the conversation. There are those who will tell you their opinion and angst about things that have nothing to do with the topic at hand. And of course there’s the fact that people tend to tell you what is socially acceptable in relation to the group dynamic of the workshop, what they think you want to say, and what they believe you want to hear, rather than what they actually do worts and all.

Rather than just talk to people, though, I thought I would create a workshop game.

I put about 15 people into a workshop and allocate them into one of three groups:

1. project leaders — responsible for its governance
2. project team members — responsible for getting the project done
3. project stakeholders — those political people who are representative of end-users and can make or break the project

I then took the participants through an exercise to create personas for the project that represent end-users.

The next step was to hand out the cards — 30 in total for each group — that represented possibilities for communication, knowledge and information, social factors like trust and group cohesion, and then a third factor for expense (in $$$), that is, not only how much it cost but how much effort is required to manage and maintain.

Each group is then required to purchase $10- worth of cards. 15 minutes later, the groups got together to negotiate the final cards for the whole project, keeping in mind of course, the personas we created on the wall. The essential idea is to get as many points in knowledge (k), communication (c), social factors (c) with the $10.

As with all card sorting exercises, those cards people choose first are the ones that have most meaning, or are most often used by those individuals. People will then tend to lay those cards out on the table from left to right in order of importance from highest to lowest. If they sort down the table the highest value cards are at the top of the table and the lowest value cards are down the bottom.

The point of the exercise is in the doing, not the final result (particularly given the project is a fictitious one in this case), but it gave me a good indication of what web 2.0 social media tools are of most value to the organisation.

If you would like to download the current version of the cards they are available under a  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License. They’re not as pretty as the concept card at the top of the blog post, but they’ll certainly still work for your workshops.

M

Social media – not just for the young!

People typically think that social media is only used by young Australians. Finding hard statistics on Australian demographics though isn’t easy, particularly when you don’t have $750USD to fork out for the latest Forrester research paper. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), though, is a handy resource if you’re willing to put in the time and know how to analyse statistics.

With an ex-ABS employee on hand, we went through some of the recent survey data on Household Use of Information Technology and Population by Age and Sex, Australian States and Territories,  and started some serious Excel work.

Here’s what we found:

Age	Number of Australians Online	% of demographic	% of total population
15-17	731,000	83.9%	4%
18-24	1,536,000	72.8%	9%
25-34	2,106,000	71.0%	12%
35-44	2,303,000	74.1%	13%
45-54	1,949,000	65.9%	11%
55-64	1,281,000	53.1%	7%
65+	680,000	24.0%	4%
		Total Australians 15+	17,256,386

As a proportion of their age demographic more 15-17 year olds use the internet  than any other group. This includes access from computers, mobile devices, set-top boxes connected to either analogue or digital television and games machines. However, as a proportion of the Australian population, this number is fairly small –  only 4%.

On the surface, this seems to explain why older Australians tend to think that “it’s just for the young”, that is, because all of them are doing it. However, 35-44 year olds represent the largest demographic online at 2.3 million! Even the 45-55 age group outnumber the 18-24 age group!

Social media? Definitely not just for the young!

M