Content Consumption and Communities
An interesting report was released this week from UC San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center. Titled “How Much Information?“, the report measures the American consumption of information in words, bytes, and hours including printed materials, radio, TV, and computer. There’s a PDF download of the entire report. The study measured consumption in 2008, and it measured the flow of information – not the static existence of it, such as what’s found in a book. The summary says that consumption measures”100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.” Let’s face it, that’s a lot of data flow. Let’s tie this consumption information into the content that flows in and out of communities.
Many online communities do not center around content at all. In fact, it’s relatively rare for a community to care for content as a goal of theirs. Usually the meritrocacy has much bigger plans and goals than just “let’s make some content flow.”
Jennifer Leggio uncovered a very interesting point about the amount of content in a community when she interviewed Mike Hardy, strategic communications program manager, about the Pitney-Bowes support community. As you can imagine, Pitney-Bowes community members were interested in getting mailings out the door, not creating a bunch of posts about postage! Here’s the revelation that I found most interesting from the ZDNet article:
There were some lessons learned along the way, however.
“We came out of the gate with way too many topics out there,” Hardy said. “We quickly learned that with too many topics and not enough interaction to start, it made the community seem empty. It’s what I call ‘empty restaurant syndrome’ — if you look in a window and no one is in there, you likely won’t go in.”
Hardy said that the company quickly pruned down the community and focused the activity, and also put some promotional power behind the community. After making those small changes, the community really started to grow.
These revelations from others who have been there can help you shape a plan for building your own community. As Rachel Happe puts it, “Communities gather around a concept or common goal not around a collection of content (although content does plays a major role, it is not the impetus for the community).” So while content creation tempts someone like me, a writer, it’s the way that the content helps people accomplish something that really counts.
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