Standing Out From The Crowd

“Orkut, Linkedin, Friendster, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Digg…”  The list grows bigger and bigger each day.  And I am not even close to covering all the other websites and e-commerce venues that offer some kind of social networking feature to improve sales and/or increase references.

With all the buzz around them, do social networking services work? Definitely.  Do they work for everyone? Definitely NOT!

As with all things Internet, what works for some sites may not necessarily work for yours.  Without careful analysis and planning, you may end up investing time and money in features that won’t add value to your product or that none of your customers will use.  Or even worse, you may find yourself basing major decisions on input from a very small percentage of customers that does not accurately represent the needs of a bigger target audience.

In his last column, ‘Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute’, Jakob Nielsen asserts that “In most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action”.

See the column’s full text here.