Yesterday an interesting conversation broke out at Social Media Breakfast Austin and it revolved around the notion of ‘lurkers’. The word was first brought up in the morning by Jackie Huba of “Church of the Customer Blog” and Society for Word of Mouth in relation to stats that say 90% of folks involved in your social media activity are lurkers and 10% are active participants. I’m sure we could argue the actual numbers and obviously this is different depending on your business, but this notion is important as you are considering social media. We all want hundreds of comments and a passionate user community, but often times the lurkers are ultimately the best business lead.
My term for lurkers would be ‘listeners’; people who are reading the blog, quietly joining the LinkedIn Group, etc. The beauty of these people, as long as you continue to supply good content, is that they become the most educated about your product and service and when they are ready to participate it is most likely as a qualified business lead. Think of the person who walks into the Saturn dealership with a ream of printed materials from automotive websites, collected over a few weeks of ‘lurking’ versus the person who walks in and just wants to talk with someone about their cars. The former is already in negotiating mode, the latter needs to go through the research stage in real-time, with a sales person who just wants to close. Which situation would you rather have, not only for selling, but for the customer experience?
Jackie hit on one of the reasons this is important; don’t forget your lurkers/listeners. Just because they aren’t outwardly participating does not reduce their importance to you, particularly over time. In fact, one might argue, these folks are more important to your business and should be kept in mind with everything that you do.
Tomorrow–why should your company also be a lurker?
9 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
I do like the term “listeners” better than “lurkers.” I’m going to start using that in the future.
Thanks for coming out to the event, Kyle!
Kyle:
This “lurking” topic is one that I’ve been kicking around as a potential blog topic, too, so I was pleased that it came up at our Austin Social Media Breakfast discussion yesterday.
Dawn Lacallade pointed out that she’s trying to develop a strategy for reaching lurkers, or “watchers” as she prefers to call them.
It is true that most of our marketing work focuses on the 10% of active participants in communities, when there can be such value for us, too, from the lurkers/watchers/listeners.
@Jackie–Thanks for leading a great discussion, looking forward to more.
@Bryan–It really is interesting and we are doing something similar to Dawn so I’ll have to compare notes at some point. Thanks again for the SMB.
Kyle,
Being more of a “lurker” myself, I appreciate your choice of words here: Listener vs Lurker. It sounds much less sinister and more approachable. I don’t remember the reference, but I did recently read some stat that said (roughly) 90% of your audience is Listening “lurking”, 9% respond occasionaly, 1% regularly provide responses. These numbers may not be exact, but they were in this range. Sorry I don’t have the reference. If this is true, then yes, one might argue that the Listeners are at least equally, if not more important to your business. That 90% still includes potential customers.
Thanks
Ed Stafford | @pixel8r
Hi Ed, glad to hear from you. I would say those numbers sound about right from the social media projects I’ve done and from our work at http://www.breakingpointlabs.com. And you said best: “That 90% sill includes potential customers.”
/kff
Hey Kyle …
love that you talk about calling our visitors ‘listeners’ instead of ‘lurkers’ … ‘lurkers’ just sounds so creepy and i certainly don’t think of my self in that way when i visit a blog and read what someone has to say without commenting/participating in the discussion.
I’ll be back tomorrow to see the post on why a company should be a lurker. It gives me a good idea for the blog that my company is launching in the next week.
I’m on twitter and would love to connect
—
http://twitter.com/franswaa
Hi Frank, I’ve started following you on Twitter, looking forward to connecting.
Working on the follow up post as we speak ;)
/kff
Continuing the Discussion