Counting your influencers - Tuning for India

Any community builder (and i have been for past 3 years in emerging market like India) comes to a point when he thinks, let's take stock. The no. of influencers he has been able to connect with is one of the main areas. This is the set of people who will stand with you and you will for them. The success of community IMHO depends on these friends!

For a professional, it is important to measure everytime.. so when do you know you have achieved with the community what you set out to achieve i.e. get your influencers. is there a way to quantify the right amount of influencers whom you have connected with and recognised?

Having more no. of influencers are always desirable, there are following pitfalls to consider as well:

  1. Having "too many" recognised influencers lowers the value of recognition. Then recognising someone has no value.
  2. Having a lot of influencers might mean that one has lowered the bar of quality for influencers.
  3. Having too less of them would mean that you are leaving some very valuable people out of the circle.

All of the above are not nice scenarios to have.

Here is a measure that saw, modified and used to reach the "optimal" no. of influencers:

It is based on the 90-9-1 theory proposed by Jakob Nielsen in the article:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Steve Rubel also links to it as:

http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/10/lurkers_outnumb.html

I would like to propose that the no. 1% is good to be used for general purposes. One should look at the size of the community to tune this no. further.

If a community is as large as 1.8 million users (approx. users on MS newsgroups) it would throw up 18,000 influencers (using 1%) from newsgroups alone. This is way above the no of influencers that MS recognizes from all its community avenues. I considered the various sized communities, their influencers and then verified with my gut feel:

Community members Estimated No of InfluMy
Comments		Feels Right
Very large communities 1,800,000 18000 Way off charts!!!3500
(0.2%)
Large communities 50,000 500 Seems preposterous50
(0.1%)
Average sized Community 5000 50 Starts to feel large10
(0.2%)
Small community 500 5 Feels alright1
(0.2%)

Given the above data, there seems to be that there is a theoretical percentage of 0.2% that can be considered as the optimum..

So a company willing to invest in community and influencers should target in the range of 0.2 - 1% of community members to be recognised.

Technorati tags: ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Community Star Discussions and Future

In my continuing discussion with Community Stars across the country, I had a discussion today with Sadashiv. Though he works out of chennai and was here for a short trip, he found time today to discuss the opportunities for Community Star program to improve on. Some of thoughts we generated out of the discussion are as follows: 1. Community Stars are disengaged 'cause of lack of communication with them from MS. Better communication channels need to be developed. 2. Award experience and delivery of the Community Star benefits leave a lot to be desired. 3. Community Stars feel that MS is not laying enough importance on Community Stars and do not value their contributions much. More information needs to flow to CSs. From our end, we are doing the following: 1. Launch an extranet portal exclusively for Community Stars. We will host issue submission on this site. Also, we will share opportunities via this site e.g. beta opportunities 2. Re-launch the Community Star distributi
Read more

Making Vista Search your PST Files

Vista can index a lot of files and for some reason it doesn’t index the MS Outlook files.. maybe it is as Outlook is already doing the same.. in case you still want to search PST from Vista Search here is what you can do: Go to the Control Panel Choose "Indexing Options" Click on the "Advanced" button Click on the "File Types" tab Check the checkbox next to "PST" to include it in the search Select the bullet next to the option "Index Properties and File Contents" Click OK and OK again on the message that appears. This is especially useful for information workers like me who have large PST files and are forced to archive from time to time … indexing the archives would return the information from these forgotten folders as well :) Tip taken from On10.net Technorati tags: Outlook , PST , search
Read more

Technocratical Society

In the past days, I haven’t been blogging. A lot has happened in that time – terrorist attack in Mumbai, MNS lost track, global recession set in and Congress advanced in the country. Here’s an ode to the state of the society as viewed by my nephew, Shantanu Chandra who is in Class XII, Amity International, Gurgaon. The lines below capture the times prevailing and the need for us to drop the “chalta hai” attitude but with caution: This techie world of gizmo and gadget This eerie feeling of incongruous widget Which gives us pleasure and takes pain Along with it makes us insane; Absurdness to such a horizon from where one would never fall And still people call you “Microsoft—…That’s all” A teen like me can’t do without a mobile-call Even though I know it is killing my brain cells, after all; This techie world of gizmo and gadget Makes a non-techie guy weird and hollow The bureaucrat are more concerned about their Sunday meal Than to serve the poor people whose w
Read more