Ever wonder what kind of behavior you can expect from your audience?

By the way, did you see that news video of the train station in Madrid where a person fell onto the tracks? Did you notice that only one man jumped down to help while a dozen or so waved frantically? And a few stood and watched. Why did only one person go to the extra effort to help?

Because that’s normal human behavior.

Fact is, most of your audience is made up of passive watchers. The pyramid below matches what was shared in the book, Groundswell.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

This book describes three personality types, Creators, Editors and Audience. Let’s look at each:

1. Creators (like the business to business lead generation expert known as the Fearless Competitor and the President of Find New Customers) are rare indeed - making up about one out of 100 in a group. In a group setting, the Creator is the speaker. These folks create content like white papers and eBooks, write blogs, post YouTube videos, etc.
2. Editors (who comment and speak up) are a small minority - 9 out of 100). They are the handful that raise their hands to speak up in a meeting. These are folks who read and comment on blogs, but don’t write their own.
3. Audience (who listen and do nothing) is the great majority - 90 out of 100. (In a meeting, they sit and say nothing.) These folks might occasionally read blogs, but they don’t comment. They choose not to get involved.

Think about the implications for hiring. Do you want to hire the speaker, the questioners or the one who sit on their hands and say nothing?

IMHO, Creators make the very best employees, but hiring managers are so risk- adverse, they often select Audience with industry experience. They hire people who sit on their hands and say nothing - because they have industry experience.

We strongly recommend that hiring managers learn to ask questions to uncover personality types in interviews and look for clues on personality types when reviewing resumes. We’ll share more insights on how to hire top people in a post in a few days.

What do you think? Does this match your observations? We love comments and those who share our content on social networks. And lastly, we hope you will also visit our business site dedicated to lead generation marketing Find New Customers.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is President of Fun and Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is a lead generation company in New York.

Find New Customers helps businesses (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) develop and implement marketing lead generation programs to improve the way they find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in business to business lead generation. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.