Category Archives: Communities

Do you believe in the 90-9-1 rule?

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A question on LinkedIn from Dr Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium Technologies:

Do you believe in the 90-9-1 rule? Do you think it is a hard and fast rule, or do you believe that it is just a rule of thumb?

What do 10+ years of data across 200+ communities say about the 90-9-1 rule? http://is.gd/aNWvx

My answer as part of the Online Community Manager group discussion kind of sums up where I’ve got to, hence why I thought it worth reproducing here:

Hi Michael,

It’s getting a little late on Friday evening here in the UK but I wanted to share my experience in case it’s of use to you.

I tried to use the 90-9-1 rule as a heuristic to help guide community development here: http://www.siftgroups.com/blog/heuristic-tools-help-community-managers – and used that rule of thumb in designing a drupal-based community metric package to help monitor the balanced between readers and contributors in various facets of measurable development.

In addition I believe it’s worth considering the value of designing feedback loops, so that your top contributors for example are rewarded for their efforts. I did a slideshare sketching out that concept here: http://www.slideshare.net/stuartgh/feedback-loops-3363641 – in fact that got me thinking about the broader topic of ‘viral loops’ but that’s another story with I was sharing with some great people at the Social Media World Forum in London this week.

Otherwise thinking about the 90-9-1 rule also has underlined to me recently the value of measuring offline use of online communities, especially to the majority of ‘readers’. I’ve blogged on that aspect here: https://stuart-hall.com/2010/02/08/measuring-e2-0-evolution-of-hello-bah-com/

Hope that’s of use.

Cheers,

Stuart G. Hall
@stuartgh

PS: I’m off on a skiing today but hopefully I’ll get chance to read Dr Wu’s in-depth piece on the subject when I get back from Rauris in Austria!

Pic from Ava Maria Seven’s photostream.

Notes on social media feedback loops

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A few slides to layout the principle of different feedback loops between your online community, your site, contributors, readers and other blogs and communities. Any feedback?

Feedback Loops

View more presentations from Stuart Hall.

…And thanks to tweet-feedback from Jenny Ambrozek (@sagenet) for the wider context around the power of feedback loops – see the Fast Company article on how Ning is using this concept (what they term a ‘viral expansion loop’) to great effect. [I’m currently at the British Computer Society at Covent Garden, so looks like I’ll be reading the print-out over lunch].

PS: It’s also a key way in which the world’s biggest social network site Facebook, by implementing the ‘status update’ feature, managed to rapidly grow its membership, as I outlined in a recent post. In other words this is a very powerful tool if done well, and with something people want. Anyone want my viral loop consultancy better get in touch quick as I’m off to see a London-based social media agency about this on Thursday!

In the meantime I’ve ordered Adam Penenberg’s book ‘Viral Loop’ (see the Amazon widget on my homepage to order a copy) after a ‘winning streak’ of blog posts on the power of networks & feedback loops led me to his virtual door. If you fancy creating some feedback loops, or plain user flows for that matter, I’ve tracked down what appears to be a useful site: Product Planner. It allows you to create your own viral loops and check out some that have already been created.

And of course I did a very quick search today on Twitter on the key phrase ‘viral loops’ which unearthed this gem of a slideshow, from Josh Jeffreys (Interactive Creative Director at BusyEvent) which provides (in his words) an overview of how to build applications that have built-in mechanisms for driving users to recruit additional users through normal use of the application. Look out for the new acronym ‘UDU’ (users drive users):Viral Loops: Making Self-Marketing Apps