Reconciling Social Technographics and 90-9-1

by Josh Bernoff

Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when
it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are
Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community
Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is
that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and
1% create it.

This confuses people, and I often get questions about
who’s right. In fact, there is no contradiction between these two statements.
Let’s examine why.

First of all, the 90-9-1 principle applies to a single
site or community. Let’s suppose we are talking about tivocommunity.com,
for
example. 90-9-1 says that 1% of its members create content. But our
surveys
might detect a TiVo community member who just reads the Tivo posts, but
who is an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter at myBO.com. Forrester’s
surveys would call her a Creator. But with regard to tivocommunity.com,
Jake’s rule says she’s in the 90% or lurkers. No contradiction, it just
depends on whether you’re looking at a single site or across all sites.
Since Creators (in the Forrester sense) include people who create
content at any site, they add up to a lot more than 1%

Second, our groups are designed to overlap.
Since we
also identify Collectors (who organize content) and Joiners (who join
social
networks), there’s no strict hierarchy. Some Joiners are Creators, some
Creators are Joiners, but neither group is a subset of the other. (When
creating Social Technographics I attempted to create a hierarchy of
behaviors, but carefully examining the data convinced me that was a
mistake.) So we allow our
categories to overlap. 90-9-1, which examines fewer activities, can
accommodate mutually exclusive categories.

Third, 90-9-1 is a rule of thumb. For example, according to 90-9-1.com,
only 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content, far less than 1%. A community of Webmasters
will have a lot more contributors than a community of senior citizens. Our
surveys are actual data independent of site-to-site variation. (So I don’t get
to create a nice neat rule, while Jake can.)

What’s it mean? It means that 90-9-1 is a good rule of
thumb for sites, while Social Technographics is a good way to look at
populations. And it also means that you should check the Social Technographics
Profile of your customers first, to see how many of them are likely to
contribute if you put them in a community.

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