Those Who Can, Do...

Those who can't, scribble?

That was my initial reaction to some recent discussions of 90-9-1 as it applies to Jive. Whether my reaction makes much sense is unclear, since "doing" and "scribbling/teaching/creating/contributing" are not either-or categories. And, I'm struck at how fundamental language/conversation/writing is to the creative process. So, I'm not implying that speaking/writing is necessarily wasteful...it's just that I get the feeling that separating signal from noise is getting exponentially more difficult.

Regardless, much of the discussion of 90-9-1 is about increasing the percentage of those who contribute (vs. lurk), and not much is said about increasing the signal-to-noise ratio.

In the context of enterprise social media this distribution makes me wonder...when should we start worrying a little more about quality and a little less about quantity?...do our metrics emphasize quantity simply that's what's easy to measure?...or perhaps the emphasis on participation is simply because enterprise social media is in an orientation phase where the key challenge is getting folks to participate because they'll never "get it" until they do?

Is this the sort of space where you have to increase the noise to a tipping point before you can begin to detect really valuable signal?....or before you get emergent value?...I'm not sure anyone really knows.