Sunday, April 8, 2007

Sanjaya and the 1 percent


Building on an earlier post about "it's the user dummy", I'd like to point out what the ongoing journey of Sanjaya Malakar reveals about virtual communities.

Sanjaya is a fellow with hair and singing of equally dubious quality, and yet he persists on American Idol, prompting much hand-wringing from various quarters. This thanks (perhaps debatably) to the efforts of Howard Stern and his listeners.

What's interesting is that virtual communities can have big effects on the non-virtual world. That's not new, but this example highlights an interesting reason:

Virtual communities have no carrying-capacity for lurkers.

That is, while a community can have only so many active participants before it starts to schism or subdivide, there's no upper limit for the number of people who lurk. So, if these lurkers feel sufficiently like part of the community, their actions in service of a project dreamt up by more active members can have a huge impact.

Now, my argument relies on Stern's listeners being a virtual community, but I'll venture that that's not such a stretch. A lot of Howard Stern's success, I think, stems from how well he encourages audience members to think of themselves as part of his community. He talks to them well, occasionally plucks listeners from obscurity to feature them in ongoing roles, and generally does a better job of creating community around his show than other radio jockeys. I'd be interested to hear your takes on this in the comments.

So what's the takeaway? Well, a lot of the press about the 1% rule (not much of your community produces content), whether staid or er . . . not, focuses on the content producers, not the hidden power of the lurkers. I feel we need to take the lurkers more seriously. They may not be writing online novels or learned articles on the (amazing) cuttlefish, but perhaps they have better things to do than spend all afternoon blogging (for instance). They're still affecting the world around them; treat them with an according respect.

6 comments:

Rob Windstrel Watson said...

This reminds me of an article on advertising click throughs I once read.

Apparently a 1% click through is approx what people get from ads published on pages of content.

Problem with content may be that it doesn't find it's audience.

The Internet is so big that there must be a lot of readers out there for practically anything that is written.

Yet people who know what they are talking about (apparently) suggest successful freelance writers spend their time 1% writing content 99% doing marketing.

This suggests a very inefficient Internet.

Anonymous said...

I AM SO SICK OF WATCHING HIM...AND HIS VOICE IS HORRIBLE ...I DONT UNDERSTAND THEY ARE LETTING GOOD PEOPLE GO MAY BE THEN WOULDNT OF WON ....BUT HEY ARE FAR BETTER THEN SANJAYA...HOW CAN HE SMILE ...HE KNOWS HE SHOULD NOT BE THERE ITS LIKE F@@K YOU ALL ...WHY HAVE JUDGES IF THEY ARE OR CANT DO ANYTHING

Anonymous said...

If you vote for Sanjaya you are asking for everyone to boycott the next American Idol. This guy has made it to far this time around yes its the judges fault for putting him in the top 24 but its everyone who voted for this cretant, he can not sing he gives out thru half the song this maddness has not to stop we can't have him win this, if he does its America's fault or the ones that put him thru he can't make it thru to the next round. If by some small chance he does win I will NOT watch next years American Idol. Enough is Enough take him out of the competition its not fair that everyone who voted for him let him as far as he did there were better people. STOP THE INSANITY VOTE OFF SANJAYA

Anonymous said...

Good words.

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