Content Creation and Word of Mouth

The "rule" of 90/9/1, ascribed to various sources, maintains that 90% of Internet users are passive consumers of information, 9% are active consumers of information who will pass along content from other sources, and only 1% are creators of original content.   There are various sources that cite these figures - and while none of them provides a reference to the original research, the proportions seem entirely plausible.

Consider that very few individuals maintain blogs or personal websites, and even many of those are merely collections of content that has been gathered from other sources, so it's more likely that the 1% of "originators" may well be closer to  0.1% or even 0.01% - and in all the "voice" of the Internet is merely people repeating things that other people have said.

Until the advent of social media, user-generated content was largely a niche activity and was often communicated in closed environments (the limited number of participants in a bulletin board that was behind a password gateway).  But in the present day it is quite voluminous, highly visible, and is given greater credibility that company-sponsored content on the Internet.

However, given that the vast majority of people who communicate in social media are merely commenting on, sharing, or otherwise calling attention to something that someone else said rather than contributing something of their own to the conversation, the notion that the voice of the crowd will entirely replace traditional advertising seems to be ill-conceived.  The crowd is merely repeating things it heard elsewhere - so while people might not be hearing the message directly from the advertiser, the advertiser is still the point of origin and the crowd is more of a medium through which their message is spread.

Given that people who redistribute information are picking it up from another source, the voice of the advertiser may in fact be stronger than ever before.  In literal word-of-mouth promotion, the message was likely mutated by intention or fault of memory - people can often remember an interesting or funny commercial, but not the brand.  So when they speak of it, chances are the brand identity is stripped - but when they link to it, or cut-and-paste the content, the message is redistributed intact, complete with the identity components.

A common caution relates to the "telephone game" in which each person modifies a message as they repeat it to someone else - but this too is an inaccurate reflection of the manner in which messages are passed along in social media.    People do not rewrite an advertisers content - they link to it in its original source, or create a digital copy without modification.  At worst, they may excerpt a shorter message from a longer one, but it is not a common observation that they alter the substance of the message itself.

In all, this suggest that the "voice of the crowd" is less ominous than many would imply: the crowd is merely a flock of parrots, and the advertiser is still firmly in control of the message they deliver.