Coming late to the party, I just learned of Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell’s blog, Church of the Customer, and read the essential post, The 1% Rule: Charting citizen participation. I also watched them eat a meatball sundae, all the while making wry comments, so you have to like them.
A lot of the social media babble out there is just that, but I think the 1% rule rings true. The point of their post is that roughly 1% of the total number of site visitors will contribute material/create content for wikis and the like.
Gardenfork’s numbers support The 1% Rule. Roughly 7,000 people visited the Gardenfork site last month, and The Greenhouse, Gardenfork’s community site, which runs on Ning, has 71 active members.
These active members have to be excited by what your site is about. They are foamers, they are dedicated and they will participate. You will also get many many people who will read thru the site, but not participate. How to get them to do that is the Holy Grail here.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Jackie Huba // Jan 10, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Eric,
Thanks for sharing your numbers. Interesting to see that the 1% Rule works for your sites, too.
2 Travell Perkins // Jan 20, 2008 at 6:19 am
The 1% rule is is something that is coming home and hitting me hard. In the states where the focus is on the economy and elections a lot of niche players are wondering where the love is. Cathy Zoi, CEO for the Alliance for Climate Protection sent an email blast (funny you should bring up email marketing in your other post, which I know you love) asking of the hundreds of questions fielded to candidates why less than 1% where on the environment? I guess for me its just one more feather in the cap for platform plays. Do utility companies care about the 1% rule? Google cares, but doe s Comcast? All very interesting… EcoEgg.org gets about 100 users on average and we have 18 members on the social site that I will kill soon. My suggestion for the 1% duldrums… increase the “What’s in it for me?” factor. For something like Garden Fork I would suggest contests. Maybe a recipe contest where the winner has there dish prepared on the show. You have a couple of rounds where the people who make it to the finals have their recipe aired across two shows. This would also bring in a wider audience which is really the only way to really make the 1% rule work for you. The answer is in 1% of what?
-Travell
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