Business Intelligence and the 1% Rule
The Customer Evangelists have an interesting article about citizen participation in social websites (like Yahoo Groups and Wikipedia). Basically, their thesis is that in a community-driven site, 1% of the people will actually create content. In addition, they figure that 10% will interact with content (aggregate, synthesize, etc.). However, the overwhelming majority of people will be passive consumers. It ends up looking kind of like this …
The 1% Rule is important to help set expectations for the appropriate role of user-generated content within your information architecture. As I read this, I thought of:
- How users often resist moving to a self service model for business intelligence, even when it might benefit them.
- Why a wiki might be dominated by a few strong individuals.
- A good argument for limited customer participation in design.
