90-9-1 is an open challenge to do more and do better! Thanks for sharing @communitygirl

Miles Maker
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I look at in terms of 10% of members participating with 1% being VERY active.

I agree with Scott’s point #1, this approach has seen our membership (ergo activity) increasing rapidly over the last 12 months.

Activating existing members is a hard metric to report on but still something worth trying also. As a Community Manager I often pay attention to popular or contentious threads that lure lurkers into posters (they’d be the people with low post counts but not a new membership). Incidentally I find blog comments are good for this as the interaction is slightly more two-directional, and therefore some ease into it better/find it less daunting as a participant.

Even Joe Cothrel who used our data from work with Cisco, Sony, AARP, SAP, and others in his research at Participate.com would admit that it’s a stretch to over-simplify community participation rates like this.

Instead, we should be focused upon how the offering (blog, community, social network, wiki, etc.) helps the client meet a tangible objective that is measurable. Then put that objective against the benchmarks of your other clients’ work from a similar industry and effort to judge its effectiveness.

Where I do agree completely with Jake is that there is distribution of who participates and who consumes. But there is not a quick ratio that works for this stuff. Your mileage will always vary.

For more see our blog at http://impactinteractions.blogspot.com/ including the multiple factors that will influence your offerings ratios.

Mike

The most useful aspects of 90-9-1 in my mind are threefold:

1) If you want to increase quantity of activity in your community, it’s more effective to increase the total population who visit your site than to get current members to participate more (not that you shouldn’t do both, but the former will typically be more effective than the latter).

2) If you want to increase the quality of activity in your community, focus your efforts on those 1% who contribute the most.

3) If you want to find out what the total reach is of your community, be sure to count the 90% or so who are spectators as well as the 10% who are posting.

In the end, whether 90% are posting or .01% are, as Jake says above this is simply a distribution, not a measure of quality. What is important is how you can use this knowledge to help you further the goals of your community.

In my community, I would probably further refine the 90% into sophisticated lurkers, those who visit the game’s third party fansite forums, and unsophisticated lurkers, those who do not participate in forums at all and whose only interaction is purely the game.