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A reminder: not everyone twitters
Yes, Twitter is all over the headlines. It's new and shiny and exciting - and deservedly so, as it's nicely implemented. But a reminder. Blogs were at that point before. After the glossy magazines all run the cover story on the latest and greatest trend, they'll be on to the next trend - and then who's left actually using the services? Beyond the Internet types, that is...
The NYT reports that of the 7-10 million blogs online, around 1% of them get most of the pageviews... and concludes:
That's a serious letdown from the hype that greeted blogs when they first became popular. No longer would writers toil in anonymity or suffer the indignities of the publishing industry, we were told. Finally the world of ideas would be democratized!
And then from this Reuters article, a similar conclusion about Twitter activity:
A tiny fraction of those who use the fast-growing social network phenomenon Twitter generate nearly all the content, a Harvard study shows.That makes it hard for companies to use the micro-blogging site as an accurate gauge of public opinion, the Harvard Business School study showed. The Harvard study examined public entries of a randomly selected group of 300,000 Twitter users. The researchers studied in May the content created in the lifetime of the users' Twitter accounts.
It found that 10 percent of Twitter users generated more than 90 percent of the content, said Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, who led the research. More than half of all Twitter users post messages on the site less than once every 74 days.
Most of Wikipedia is written and edited by a tiny fraction of its users, too. That's not a bad thing per se - just a helpful antidote to any mesmerizing hype you might hear about everyone in the world joining hands into a shiny happy future 2.0. Most people don't have time to get involved, past glancing at what's quick & helpful, or quick & interesting.
Blogs and Twitter are both here to stay, just not likely taking over the world as the initial hype would have it.
Excellent points to consider anytime anything new is at the peak of its hype cycle. The past couple months of media frothing about Twitter has reminded me how this seems to be a cycle that occurs regularly: last year at was Facebook that was going to change everything, the year before it was Second Life, etc. Ok, Facebook's hung on well, but how many people really pay any attention to anything regarding Second Life anymore?
The fact that a small minority generates the overwhelming majority of the content is nothing new. This was true on blogs, it was true on web-based bulletin boards, it was true back in the old days of Usenet and BBSs. What's important to pay attention to is what the audience is doing. Most of the hype, as well as most of the marketing attempts to utilize a new medium or channel (most of which fail), focuses too much on the people doing the creating. It's the audience that matters. The fact that only a few hundred people really contribute to Wikipedia does not diminish how much value its audience places on it as a resource. The fact that only 1 percent of blogs really get significant traffic isn't what's important; what is important is how much influence they have with their audiences and the influence those audiences then have in the wider marketplace.
As long as there are a lot of people following that 10 percent on Twitter, Twitter will have lasting influence. That's where the attention really should be focused, and were I running Twitter, that's where I'd really be concentrating my efforts: toward making the service as easy to use and as valuable as possible for the people who are faithful followers but who may not contribute a lot.
Very well put, Steve, thanks!
Actually, McConnell and Huba wrote in Citizen Marketers their idea of the 1% rule, where content is typically provided by 1% of users. (Amazon reviews, wikipedia, etc.) Two things about this: those who do post have an impressive amount of influence, and the dangers associated with the fact that unhappy customers are quicker to comment than mildly pleased.
A small percentage produceing most of the content isn't a new thing. The same thing happened with blogs and before them online forum / bulletin boards.
The interesting thing to me is not the platforms per se; it's the entire model of community building as a position of leverage.
As long as Google and other search providers base their metrics largely on incoming links, there will be countless opportunities to add your two cents in every imaginable form.
The 1% (less, actually) rule also applied in past centuries to printed media; which did not reduce those media to uselessness - they did influence and many did change the world (as in the case of religious scriptures).
What I'm getting at is that judging a medium by whether or not "everyone in the world" takes part in producing it, and everyone reads it, is not a good criterion. The value of social media does not depend on such ubiquity.
The main difference the Internet brought is that today anyone can publish widely and for free to their heart's delight, which was not an option in the past. And in fact the 99% of people whose blogs have a small reach are still enjoying it - or they wouldn't be publishing. Since everyone is happy, what is the problem?...
Beats drinking Gin: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html