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Mavens wanted
We are in the midst of developing a web 2.0 site for a client. You’re probably wondering what that is (unless you’re a complete tech geek). Well, it’s basically a site with lots of social elements and technologies that focus on interaction, collaboration and sharing of information - Phew!).
It’s one of the first projects that I’m involved in since I started working for Precedent, and by now it has become crystal clear that an in depth understanding of the people who use the site is essential (who could have guessed?). But what may be of even greater importance in this case (and probably for most sites that rely on their visitors for content) is to develop an understanding of the people who actively interact and submit content. This is important because the entire concept for most web 2.0 sites is based on user involvement, but this can be a somewhat fragile concept. Why? Because the whole community won’t submit content, most of them will actually be rather passive.
Statistics from Wikipedia makes this evident. Wikipedia is one of the most famous web 2.0 sites and it is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website. 50 % of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8 % of all users. Another example is YouTube.com (online video site) that each day has 100 million downloads and 65 000 uploads. That puts the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5% (Guardian)
Dot.net magazine analysed the phenomenon in their latest issue and they concluded: “It would appear that web 2.0 is being powered by a relatively small number of people: these are the net mavens”.
So what is a maven? A maven is an expert in a particular field, usually one that is self appointed and who seeks to pass his knowledge on to others (Wikipedia). The beauty with mavens is that they contribute to these sites for other reasons than financial. It seems that they will use your website to satisfy their personal needs and this will be essential to the success of your web 2.0 site. What strikes me as important is to find these mavens and ensure that they have the best possible platform to express their needs, as well as satisfying the non contributing audience’s needs.
The maven concept was popularised in Malcolm Gladwell’s “the Tipping Point”. Gladwell also talks about connectors who make the information widely known. So although we’re looking for mavens right now, I’m sure we’re going to need connectors too. Really, I was just looking for a reason to promote the work of a fellow Canadian