The 90-9-1 rule and comments on blogs

fav.or.it has released stats on blogosphere commenting statistics and while they don't reach a conclusion it's plain from the distribution analysis that people tend to post comments infrequently as they ping around the blogosphere.

It's not a surprising result - for most active users of blogs what one post talks about today might elicit a comment, however what another post tomorrow talks about might not interest you at all. Same as it ever was. Or, just as likely, there's work to be done so you don't have time to talk online, or you're at the match, or you're spending time out, or you can't be bothered. Whatever.

In essence it still goes back to the old 90:9:1 rule (corresponding to a Zipf Curve). 90% are lurkers, 9% stick their toes in the water once in a while and 1% are the hardcore that make up the majority of posted comments.

So while the format may change (I saw the same stats as fav.or.it's work on blogs in my own work on forums four or five years ago) the propensity to comment (or, more specifically, the propensity not to comment) stays about the same.

I feel the aim for a community manager* should be to get either the 90% lower, or the 1% higher (in other words, more people talking, or more people talking more often). The first one invokes a clearer democracy to the comments/chat, the second invokes more passionate views expressed.

Chris Brogan's blog is featured as one of the test sites (one of the graphed commenters on fav.or.it will be me!) and he's doing exactly what he should be doing to change his own site's 90:9:1 rule, by commenting with the commenters, to gee them up, to get them talking, to get them to come back.

With any blog, forum, messageboard or chatroom, this has to be done as standard if you want to bring more of the 90% into the fold. In fact it's a pre-requisite of the social media marketing economy.


*The important bit for a marketer is to make the 100% larger!

Labels: blogging, community, ethos, management, theory, zipf