When we started SDN and I joined the team, there was Harry Max consulting for O’Reilly. He helped me tremendously to grow into the community guy that I became. Tonight I had the chance to be part of en event where his new stomping ground Rubicon Consulting was introducing research they did around Online Communities.
Here are my running notes:
Harry Max, Michael Mace and Nilofer Merchant at interesting Spark event around communities organized by Rubicon Consulting.
Concept of community comes up in business strategy conversations more and more.
Criteria for Rubicon to select a theme
1. Strategic for technology companies
2. Theme that nobody knows what the hell is going on
3. [I forgot ;-) ]
Update: Nilofer Merchant from Rubicon send me their three criteria for selecting a topic to tackle: critical to winning markets in future, not well understood, something we could add meaning/value on…
Michael Mace introduced first set of slides.
Community definitions
* Pier to pier
o Snowboarding
o Threadless
* Developers to Company
score SDN singled out as well known example in the valley
* ???
For their study 3000 US Web users were questioned.
* 10% of users create 80% of total “community” activity
o 90% of uploaded video
o 90% of reviews
o 80% of comments
o 60% of total visits
* 25% of users create 98%
Structure of the community
* Intense contributors 10%
* Occasional contributors 50%
* Silent lurkers 23%
* Abstainers 17%
For a company, online community is theater. 10% performers and 90% watchers.
[That was the perspective shift of the evening for me]Profile of the 10%
* About 50% more likely to live in the south
[Speculation from the room: More talkative culture, nothing else to do ;-), same with blogging in Europe mainly happening in the southern countries. I counter with most active wiki users are German language. Anonymous contributions preferred. ]
* Younger
* Voracious users
Points to ponder:
* When you get feedback online, who are you hearing from?
[We should reread our survey feedback from that perspective too.]
* To drive a web community, who do you need to take care of?
* Are these people influencers or fanatics?
o Is there a difference?
o [it doesn’t really matter]
Q: How do I ???
Now Harry Max:
Community sites can be differentiated by the purposes they serve:
– Proximities -> Craigslist
– Practice -> Work, business-related, SCN J
– Providence -> Business related LinkedIn
– Purpose -> eBay, amazon
– Passion -> dogster
Providence sites get the most daily repeats, but only 65% of all users visit them.
Purpose sites get the most visitors over time 95%
Questions to ponder:
What community type do you need for your business goals?
Are these different users similar to the Tipping point: Active users are Connectors?
Is there a way to touch the most active group of people?
From make it easy to contribute starting with things like Yes/No Was that review interesting? Roping people into becoming more active.
Gender issue? How will the behavior change?
Compare non-online to online community
Laura Baldwin from O’Reilly: Usual cost to get a book to market 100K. O’Reilly has 4 books out written by the community. Cost was mainly setting up the site.
Really interesting study, many of the points enforcing what we are seeing here at SCN. They had gathered a really good crowed with interesting insights.
They will come out with the white paper within two weeks.
Cross-posted at SAP Community Network.
Picture taken by Mark & Marie Finnern: Harry Max, Michael Mace and Nilofer Merchant at Spark event around communities organized by Rubicon Consulting at the nice San Jose Museum of Art.