A small minority of online Americans create the overwhelming majority of influential posts, recommendations and comments in social media

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"A minority of people generate 80% of the impressions. Take a look at the graphic. About 6.2% of the online adults generate 80% of the influence impressions. Around 13.8% of the online adults generate 80% of the influence posts. We call these two groups Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens (if you've read "The Tipping Point" you know where we got the names.). If you're a marketer, you probably want to know who these people are (demographics, where they share, that kind of thing) -- once we've identified them, we can find that all out through the survey."
Source: Josh Bernoff, of Forrester, in AdAge, 20th April 2010
Note - influence impressions and influence posts are defined earlier in the article:
"First, there is influence from people posting within social networks: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so on. We call these instances influence impressions.
Second, there is influence created by posts: blog posts, blog comments, discussion forum posts, and ratings and reviews. We call these influence posts."