We're a Nation of Joiners, Spectators and Creators
New Data Show Nearly Everybody Uses Social Technologies
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| Josh Bernoff | |
We just published our third-annual such profile, called "The Broad Reach of Social Technologies," written by Sean Corcoran with help from our data expert Cynthia Pflaum. The data across North America, Europe and Asia are now publicly available.
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| The Social Technographics Ladder |
The headline: More than four out of five online Americans are active in either creating, participating in or reading some form of social content at least once a month (see second chart).
- In the U.S., social technology Creators and Collectors grew slowly, and Critics didn't grow at all. Creator activity appeals only to those who like to create or upload content, and regardless of the ease of blogging and YouTube uploading, this doesn't apply to everybody. You might believe that in the future everybody will be creating or organizing content, but we disagree -- it's a matter of temperament, not technology. As for Critics -- those who react to content -- that group hasn't grown at all. Looking deeper into the data, that is a result of a small but actual decrease in the number of people contributing to discussion forums. Why? Probably because much of this activity has been sucked into social-network sites such as Facebook.
- At the same time, Joiner activity exploded, and Spectators became nearly universal. The explosion in Joiners, from 35% to 51% of online Americans, reflects the appeal of Facebook, as both press coverage and invitations from friends suck more of us into social networks. Meanwhile, Spectators -- those consuming social content -- reached all the way to 73% of online Americans, which should end any remaining skepticism about whether this social thing is real. Soon, with the level of social content being put out there, it will be virtually impossible for an online consumer not to be a Spectator. Marketers, if you're not doing social-technology applications now, you're officially behind. We expect a wave of website reorgs and redesigns to include social activity. Looking at the data by age, we now see that participation among those under 35 is nearly universal (less than 10% are Inactives) and even among those 55 and over, about two-thirds are participating. The trend is clear: Soon, if you're online, you'll almost certainly be consuming social technologies.
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| More Than Four in Five U.S. Online Adults Now Participate Socially |
A few highlights from data around the world: Europeans continue to adopt these technologies more slowly than Americans, with about 40% Inactives in the countries where we do surveys. The Netherlands and Sweden have the most participation, Italy has the most Creators, and social networks are most popular in the U.K. For more details, see the summary of Rebecca Jennings' report on social technologies in Europe.
Asian social participation is typically as high as or higher than in the U.S. For example, South Korea, where I'm going next week, has only 9% Inactives and 48% Joiners, as a result of the popular CyWorld social-network site. (The international data are sliced by country, age, and gender. You can even put the data on your own site -- we've made it embeddable.)
In my travels, I've found that marketers have a variety of attitudes about social technologies, ranging from "It's obvious that they're growing" to "It's a flash in the pan." The point of data like these is to provide a real, solid, objective basis for planning and discussion that goes beyond personal experience. No matter who you market to, and in what country, you need to know what your customers are doing. Figuring that out is the first step.
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
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Josh Bernoff is co-author of "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," a comprehensive analysis of corporate strategy for dealing with social technologies such as blogs, social networks and wikis, and is a VP-principal analyst at Forrester Research. He blogs at blogs.forrester.com/groundswell. |
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http://www.brianlaesch.com
Jane Stone
VP Marketing
http://www.pointbanner.com
The real challenge is figuring out how to use this information.
Adam Dyer
www.blackboxstrategy.net
1. Convince your boss it's time to do a social media marketing project.
2. Use the demographic cuts to figure out which kind of social activities your clients' customers are interested in.
3. Survey your clients' customers (or come to Forrester -- we probably already have data about those customers) and use that detailed information to build an approriate strategy.
In case you're wondering, that's what I spend much of my time doing.
I think we're a couple years past that daft sentiment. The real puzzle is "whether this social thing represents an opportunity for effective marketing." The same % of the population watches TV, but marketers are being told to stop advertising there because it is (supposedly) a waste of everyone's time and money. Sales of HDTV's continue to climb, and cable/telco pay-TV subscriptions grew right thru the recession.
Yet YouTube (today's "viral strategy" included) still flails about, with gazillions of eyeballs tuning in daily. Now that would be a neat project for the Forrester social media guru team, with a nice little social media case study at the back end. Pudding, proof. How 'bout it?
Kevin Horne - NYC
Your sub headline, 'New data show nearly everybody uses social technologies' is misleading.
Let's clear the air, there is a clear corelationship between internet usage and education. As only about 1/3 of the U.S. population have more than a high school education, by definition, most people DO NOT use the internet frequently or at all!
Don't take my word for it, look at the numbers. Oops, there aren't any!
The internet has yet to demonstrate itself to be a mass, measured medium. Further, Social Marketing 'pundints' need to recognize just how fragmented existing internet user groups really are.
Radio, telivision, magazines and even newspapers...they are the mass media that reach the general population. It is a fine idea to experiment with the internet as it continues to evolve; just try to keep it's limited marketing value in perspective.
Cordially,
Gary Lumsden
And if you have Firefox with ad blocker plus (and no scripts which disables the ad serving networks completely) like I do often there are no ads to click through.
Gary: I didn't write the headline, but I do agree with the sentiment in it. You said: "By definition, most people DO NOT use the internet frequently or at all." What planet are you from? Our data show over 75% of US households using the Internet. The ones that don't are generally not big targets for marketers, frankly.
hgoldfarb67: Hard to argue with "I have the numbers somewhere." Given the billions Google and others bring in with search ads, somebody's clicking. Certainly a lot more than are using ad blockers. But you're missing the point -- this is about social technologies, where people are actually stimulated to participate, not about banner ads or search ads.
Kevin: There is actually a document that has 25 full case studies and 40 other examples of people using social technologies to accomplish measurable business value. Go to Amazon.com or any bookstore and you can get it for less than $30. It's called Groundswell. No fluff -- we required every example in the book to have proof it drove business.
I guess I'm feeling a little snarky this morning, just wanted to clear the air . . .