Guy Kawasaki recently asked Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, co-authors of Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message what inspires people to create digital content?
We think there are three reasons:
The first is that the people who helped build sites like Wikipedia, TiVo Community, or Mini2 aren’t part of mainstream culture. They’re what we call the “1 Percenters,? the people who live at the edges and are different than from 99 percent of the world. Our research for the book led us to create the 1% Rule, which states that about 1 percent of a site’s total number of visitors will create content for it. The 1 Percenters flout cultural conventions. Americans love rebels, therefore the 1 Percenters often become the influencers of American culture.
The second reason: Their work is a hobby. Hobbies are fun, certainly, but hobbies can be viewed at a deeper level as an extension and reflection of one’s identity. Hobbyism grants one the permission to consider their work as recreation while subconsciously it works as ideological re-creation. It replicates the skills of the workplace and adds value that may often be lacking from it. Their content is their production.
The third reason is the sense of community. We’re not talking cities but more like extremely large families that scale. It’s easy for other hobbyists to find one another. The human need to bond with something is strong, even if it’s with a commercial entity.
Photo by Henkster .
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