Forrester Groundswell Awards: How we picked the winners

by Josh Bernoff

Since the competition was so intense this year for the Forrester Groundswell Award winners, I wanted to create as much transparency as I could around the judging process. This is in response to questions from some of the entrants, who clearly put an enormous amount of effort into their submissions.

Q. What exactly was the judging process?

Three people at Forrester were involved in the judging: Zach Hofer-Shall (a researcher on our interactive marketing team), Jeremiah Owyang, and me. We took a first pass to separate the most promising applications in each category, then we spent more time on those promising applications, looking for those which we thought were good enough to win. For an application to win, Jeremiah and I had to agree it was the best in the category. We were looking for both innovation and proof of business (or non-profit) results -- the winners in each category were excellent on both counts.

Q. It looks like some of the entries ended up in a different category from where they were submitted.

In working with clients, we have found that deciding on objectives is often difficult. Successful applications often start off meeting one objective, and end up delivering on others.

In this process, we looked at each application and asked, in what category would this application be most likely to win? Usually, but not always this was the category in which it was entered. But we made some changes as well. In the case of the Brooklyn Museum, there were three entries in different categories, but taken together we thought they demonstrated excellence in the Social Impact category, which is the category in which they won. "In the Motherhood" by LiveWorld was submitted for Supporting, but we thought it was an excellent Embracing application, since the actors in it acted out scripts suggested by the groundswell, and that's why it was a finalist in the Embracing category.

Just like last year, there was one company that stood out for its transformation. We felt this year's entries from Intuit were best recognized together, rather than as separate applications, which is why we gave Intuit the Company Transformation award. I don't know if we could make this a regular category, it just seemed to emerge from the other entries.

Q. How much weight did you give the evaluations from the community?

We were pleased at how many entrants sent their followers to our site, and the reviews that were generated. We all have to acknowledge, though, that the people coming to the site through that kind of promotion were much more likely to say very positive things. Partly because of the potential for this sort of gaming, we weren't going to pick the winners based on a popular vote.

However, many of the comments added insights that we might not have noticed otherwise. So the main value of the reviews, from my perspective as a judge, is that they helped to enlighten me. Taken together with all the other information in the entries and the sites they linked to, this gave us a clearer picture of what was outstanding (or in some cases, flawed) about the entries.

Q. Does this process favor large companies?

Absolutely not. It favors excellence. A small company can deliver outsized results with a small budget, as the Common Wealth Credit Union of Alberta did, and as the Brooklyn Museum did. National Instruments was a medium sized company with an incredible Supporting application. On the other hand, big companies and their agencies or vendors, like Hershey's with House Party, Mattel with Communispace, Starbucks with Salesforce Ideas, and Accenture deserve to be recognized for excellent work, too. It's not about how much you spent; it's about how effective and creative you were.

Q. What exactly does it mean to be a "finalist"?

Finalists are basically applications that could have won, except that somebody else was even better in the category. The 44 finalists this year were a lot, but they reflect the number of excellent entries. However, there's a clear distinction; the winners deserve to be recognized as the best of an excellent group.

Q. Will you do this again? What will you change?

We will definitely do the awards again in 2009. One thing we changed from last year -- making all the entires publicly available -- was a big plus, I expect that to continue. I expect us to make changes based on what worked well and what didn't this year; for example, I hope to start the process a little sooner to give people a longer time to prepare entries and vote on them. I welcome your suggestions.

Some fun from Alberta

by Josh Bernoff

One of the best parts of judging and awarding the Forrester Groundswell Awards is that we pick companies based on the power and success of their applications, not their size. This means that sometimes the winners are big companies like Starbucks and Mattel, and sometimes they are small companies with big ideas and excellent execution.

This was most visible this year in the Marketing category, in which a small credit union in Alberta vaulted over some of the biggest brands in the world. The reaction from Tim McAlpine, whose agency Currency Marketing created the campaign, was gratifying to say the least.

Tim's Groundswell Awards entry page on his site is itself is a masterpiece of exposition for what they did and how they did it.

But even more fun is the YouTube video he made about his experience and how hard it is to keep a secret. And Tim, I promise, you don't need to suck up to us to get noticed, all it takes is wit and the skill to create an application as good as the one you did for Common Wealth Credit Union.

2008 Forrester Groundswell Awards Winners

by Josh Bernoff

We've pored over all 150 entries. These were difficult choices -- the quality of social applications improved markedly in 2008, and many were excellent, with real proof of business value. Today we announce the best of the best -- the winners by category. Here they are, with links to their entries:

Listening

Mattel's The Playground Community by Communispace. A private community of 500 moms, created by Mattel and Communispace. Paid off when Mattel had a series of product recalls of popular toy brands in Fall 2007. They used this group as a sounding board for advice on how to handle this crisis. Result: despite the recalls, Q4 2007 sales were up 6%.

Talking

Young & Free Alberta by Common Wealth Credit Union. A credit union in Alberta started a campaign to generate more young customers. They conducted a contest to find a young spokesperson, who then used a blog, YouTube, and Facebook to connect with other young people in Alberta. Result: 2 million impressions, 2,300 new accounts, and $4 million Canadian in new deposits.

Energizing

Hershey's Bliss House Party by House Party. A campaign to introduce a new line of little chocolates. Pitch: sign up for a party, get bags of the chocolates, share the product. Those who participated got to do a party blog or upload photos or videos. Result: They energized 10,000 parties, reached 129,000 people, and say their campaign was seen by 7 million people. Overwhelmingly positive response, most people hadn't seen the product before, but after the parties, most said they really like it.

Supporting

Nerd Network by National Instruments. Highly active community of 110,000 people who use National Instruments’ LabView software. Community members answer 46% of all support questions. This is no ordinary forum – it also includes areas to generate new product ideas, a champions program for LabView experts, and even an area for mentoring high school students.

Embracing

MyStarbucksIdea.com by Starbucks. Among many excellent embracing applications, this one stands out. It includes thousands and thousands of participants. They have 75,000 ideas suggested. Some of the suggestions have changed the way the Starbucks company does business – including new products and service ideas already implemented by Starbucks.

Managing

Borderless Workplace by Accenture. Accenture is a huge company with thousands of consultants. With its new sharing applications, 100,000 of its 180,000 employees use its "People" Facebook-like app, 60,000 every month. The application logged 3,450 questions from these staffers and 4,157 responses in the last quarter. There are 577 pages in its knowledge-sharing wiki. Over 100 clients using the company's extranet pages to keep up on projects and status.

Social Impact

Brooklyn Museum for all three entries:

• ArtShare Facebook App
• Brooklyn Museum's Click Exhibition
• Brooklyn Museum Posse

Among many companies using social technologies for the greater good, we recognized a little museum in New York, the Brooklyn Museum. Why? Because of the multiple ways they have used social technologies to put their visitors in charge. They created a Facebook application in which 2,000 people identified and shared the bits of art in the museum that they liked best. They created a community curated exhibit – 3,000 people chose which art pieces to put on display, based on a total of 400,000 votes. And the museum has put the whole collection online, where the community tags it with identifying terms, allowing you to see pieces of art similar to the ones you like, or on specific topics.

Company Transformation

Intuit for four entries:

• TurboTax Inner Circle
• Quickbooks — Just Start Contest
• Quickbooks Community Site
• TurboTax Live Community

Intuit transformed the way it  does business based on social technologies. We recognized this as a category of excellence beyond individual applications.

Intuit puts social deeply into every one of its products. Let’s start with the Quickbooks forum, which gets 3 million page views a year. 90% of visitors get their questions answered. Then add the TurboTax live community, which is built right into the front screen of TurboTax – the product connects you with the community on the home screen. This cut support costs for TurboTax by 40%. TurboTax has assembled a panel of 17,000 people into its “Inner Circle” – internal product teams often run product ideas by this panel and get instant feedback. Finally, I’d like to cite their “Just Start” contest for Entrepreneurs, who could submit videos and compete for startup money for their ventures. They received 2,500 contest entries and through this program distributed 300,000 sample CDs for the QuickBooks product to qualified prospects.

Finalists for the Forrester Groundswell Awards

by Josh Bernoff

The quality of this year’s Groundswell Awards entrants was very high – we were very impressed. Many of these entries deserved to win and would have won last year, but this year the competition was much tougher. To recognize these excellent entries, we’ve listed Finalists in this post. Winners are shown in green.

Listening

• ABC Studios Community for "Lost” Emmy Nomination by Passenger
• ACT! Online Community by Sage Software
• Mattel's “The Playground” Community by Communispace
• MY M&M'S Mbassador Community by Satmetrix

Talking

• Acuvue Wink Facebook Application (Australia)
• American Express OPEN Forum by Digitas and LiveWorld
• “Colonel Tribune” by Tribune Interactive
• Cubby Bernstein, “Xanadu” Tony Campaign Manager by Undercurrent
• iGotShotgun by General Motors
• Intel Tudou 07 User Generated Advertising (China)
• Travel Channel's Kidnap Facebook App by Rapp
• Young & Free Alberta by Common Wealth Credit Union

Energizing

• ABC Lost Theories by Mzinga
• “Do You Deliver” by OPI and SheSpeaks
• EA Skate Reel by Blast Radius
• Hershey’s Bliss House Party by House Party
• Oracle “The Customer Collective” by Oracle Passenger
• Next Gretsch Greats by Jackson Spalding
• (Re-) Meet Martha Stewart by Reprise Media

Supporting

• allicircles by imc2
• Dell Community Forums
• Fitness Magazine “You Can Do It” Site
• Hubspot Customer Forums
• Men’s Health “Belly Off! Club” by Neighborhood America
• Nerd Network by National Instruments
• Open Port Community by Intel
• Recommendations on The Knot by Baynote
• Reebok Run Easy by Molecular

Embracing

• In The Motherhood, sponsored by Sprint and Suave, by Mindshare and LiveWorld
• JC Penney “Ambrielle Team” Community by Passenger
• Mountain Dew’s DEWmocracy by WhittmanHart Interactive
• MyStarbucksIdea.com by Starbucks
• MTV.I.P.s Community by Communispace
• Swarovski Enlightened Watch Design Community by HYVE AG (Austria)

Managing

• Borderless Workplace by Accenture
• cubeless by Sabre Holdings
• Greater IBM by IBM
• “Limo” Social Network by Universal McCann
• ORT Argentina Digital School Project (Argentina)

Social Impact

• Artshare, Click Exhibition, and Posse by Brooklyn Museum
• AstraZeneca Breast Cancer Celebration Chain by Digitas Health
• Fanista “Burma: It Can’t Wait” by Digital Influence Group
• Knowmore.org Corporation-Watch Search Engine
• su2c.org Cancer Awareness by WhittmanHart Interactive

Company Transformation

• Intuit

Reflections on turning 50

by Josh Bernoff

Yes, today is my fiftieth birthday. I am really that old.

I don't feel 50, and I think the reason is I am still having an incredible amount of fun and getting a lot of psychic rewards from my job and my work life. (My family life is pretty good, too, but that's not what I'm writing about here.) When I say I don't feel fifty, I mean that I have a lot of enthusiasm, a willingness to embrace change, to take risks that might pay off bigtime and to get back up when I fail.

I am egotistical enough to believe that you might benefit from some of what I have learned, so I'm going to share some of that here. This is not advice, unless you are exactly like me (and if you are, lord help you). But I thought you might enjoy seeing what worked for me.

Let's talk about careers. First off, I didn't plan my career. Or more accurately, my plans had very little to do with my eventual career. I can tell a narrative of how I started out studying to be a Ph.D. in math, then took jobs at startup companies, rising in responsibility -- how I started and grew a user group, got the attention of a great research company, became the top TV analyst, and then wrote a bestselling business book. But while the facts are true, the story is a lie. Because that's not what really happened.

What really happened is that at each job I tried to learn as much as possible, took pride in doing the work the best I could, and when I got bored, continued to do the job well even as I searched for something new and interesting. No amount of money is worth being bored.

When looking for that new opportunity I was always trying to build on what I had, while stretching to do what I did not know about. At my first job I learned that while I thought I could write, I could write a lot better if I listened to my editors. At one of these software companies, MathSoft, I told the president of the company how interface for the software should work, and eventually, he actually listened. As an analyst I learned to be bold and spot big trends -- and that in making big predictions much of the time you will be wrong, but you have to learn from that as well.

Let's talk about talent. I have found there are some things I do well. One of them is writing -- I love doing it, I have always loved doing it, and I like to write anything from press releases to software manuals to research reports to business books. Another is math -- I studied that, I was good at it, and while a career in math was not in my future, my analytical abilities have served me well in all my jobs. Having two talents made a big difference in my career -- I could always move to new challenges based on one or the other, and I could do jobs that weren't open to people with only one of those talents. I still think the best, most succesful, least boring career paths are open to people who have more than one talent and develop them all -- if you're young, or even if you're not, you should keep this in mind.

After I joined Forrester I developed another talent I didn't know I had, or could have -- speaking and connecting with clients. I am pretty good at this, now; I wasn't, when I got there. I developed this talent at age 40, give or take, and have continued to improve it. (I took a standup comedy course in there somewhere -- that actually helped somewhat.) Always learning. Always fun.

Let's talk about flaws. There are things I am bad at. Remembering people's names is one. Another is grace under pressure. I am not good looking and my personal style is, well, rumpled. I'd love to get better at these; realistically I haven't been able to very well. It's good to know your flaws. I feel bad about these but I forgive myself and move on; luckily, others are typically able to forgive me, too. I am good at apologizing when I have hurt somebody as a result of my flaws and I am sincere about it.

Let's talk about goals. I always have them. I have short term goals, on my todo list. I have medium term goals (create an idea that a whole industry talks about; learn to give speech that gets rated very highly by the audience). I have very long-term goals, too, which could also be called dreams. I have always wanted to write a book. In 2006 my Forrester password was "writer50" which was my way of reminding myself that I wanted to write and publish a book by the time I was 50. I was ready to quit Forrester and take a year off to do this; luckily thanks to George Colony I didn't have to. Don't give up on your dreams, even if you are 48 years old. Keep laying the bricks in the foundation and framing out the structure; you'll eventually find building the dream to be within reach.

I sometimes wonder if I should have written the book when I was younger. But it was a lot easier since I had accomplished the other things first that made it possible. It's easier to start near the top than at the bottom.

Let's talk about failure. I have made a lot of mistakes. Few of the startups I worked with could be called successes. I took a risk at one company and gave up a secure job to head up their CD-ROM development; within a year, they shut it down and laid me off. When I got to Forrester, within the first six months I had done poorly and was sure I would be fired. I have made major predictions (most notably about interactive TV) that were completely wrong. My first book proposal, about television, was rejected by 13 out of 13 publishers. I invented a major product called TechPotential; it sold to a grand total of one client. Am I a success? I feel like I am. Everyone says you learn from failures, and you do, but nobody sets out to fail. You go into these things believing in them. The key is figuring out when to give up and move on, and not getting discouraged. It's called confidence. There's a whole book about this if you're interested; it's Seth Godin's "The Dip".

Let's talk about fear. I have it; we all do. Admit you are afraid. Then act anyway. Fear is like hunger; it's uncomfortable, but if you address what's causing it, it will go away.

Let's talk about concentration. You need time to think. Find a way to get it. Big thoughts take time to work out. An hour, a day, a week, a year. If you have no time to think, you're not going to get anywhere. Change the way you work so you have time to think. For me, writing is the way I think big thoughts. How do you think big?

Let's talk about collaboration. It is my favorite thing, which is strange for someone as egotistical as me. I love to be edited; it makes my prose stronger. Working with Charlene Li on Groundswell was the most wonderful intellectual effort of my life; no one will ever know which ideas are mine and which are hers because there is no answer -- we built them together. Find people to work with who are generous and don't care who gets the credit; then you be one, too. If the people in your company are not like this, find another company. Life's too short.

Finally, let's talk about curiosity. Curiosity drives everything I do. It is a good quality in an analyst, but it is a good quality in anyone in any job. If you know everything that is going to happen in your job, you will get bored. If you wonder whether things can be better, what could be different, what if we worked with people in India, started an online store, set up a page in Facebook, smiled at every customer, gave away our intellectual property for free . . . if you wonder what would happen, you will not be bored. And you might just find out something interesting.

I have an impish -- some would say childish -- sense of humor. I like to turn everything upside down and see what's on the other side. I like to ask weird questions. It's fun. And that's where many of the best ideas come from. Very few people think like this. Try it -- you might come up with some new ideas.

Here's a quote from my favorite author on the topic:

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I've found it!), but 'That's funny...' -Isaac Asimov.

Thank you for reading this far, my friends. I have enjoyed sharing everything with you. A lot of this stuff has worked for me; it took 50 years to figure most of it out. I intend to keep doing it.

Visionary of the year?! Thank you, SNCR.

by Josh Bernoff

In a development that left me breathless, SNCR (The Society for New Communications Research) has decided o give Charlene Li and me its "Visionary of the Year" award. We're getting honored along with the founders of Twitter for Innovators of the Year, and Dell for Brand of the Year.

I'm even more tickled by this since the manuscript for Groundswell, the book that led to this honor, was completed in November 2007, almost a full year ago. You try to be visionary with that sort of delay . . .

If you're not familiar with SNCR, it's a great organization that helps share research and insights on new developments in media and marketing. From their site:

The Society for New Communications Research is a global nonprofit think tank dedicated to the advanced study of the latest developments in new media and communications, and their effect on traditional media and business models, communications, culture and society.

SNCR will be giving out the awards at its annual Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Friday, November 14 (right down the street from me). Have a look at the event -- it's well worth a visit to get a look at what's on the leading edge of new communications technologies in business. I'll see you there.

Why Wal-Mart Will Succeed In Social Applications

by Josh Bernoff

I just got back from a trip to Bentonville, Arkansas, home of America’s largest and perhaps most controversial retailer. While there, I met with the company’s top management, IT staff, and a couple of social media folks.  

You may believe that this company will never “get it” – and that in any cases, it has so many enemies that entering the social world would be suicidal. Let’s see if I can convince you that Wal-Mart will become social media’s biggest success story.

Wal-Mart’s social saga starts with a couple of missteps, including a blog that was revealed to be funded by Wal-Mart’s PR agency, Edelman, and a Facebook application for college students that attracted lots of negative comments from Wal-Mart haters. But when 138 million Americans go into your stores every week, you shouldn’t ignore social media, and you can’t hide from it. Wal-Mart didn’t give up after these setbacks, they got up off the mat and tried harder.

Exhibit A: ratings and reviews. Walmart.com is one of the biggest Bazaarvoice installations in the world, powering a site that sells over a billion dollars worth of stuff every year. Wal-Mart is not afraid of negative reviews from customers – for example, the top rated bicycle on the site had 139 reviews including “7th gear skips fairly frequently. . . but at $150, you can’t expect not to find problems.” Wal-Mart is famous for driving hard bargains with its suppliers; we met their PR folks in one of the very windowless, grey rooms where those prices get beaten down. Reviews on walmart.com have most likely extended that power, as the company now has concrete evidence about which products consumers consider to have acceptable quality, and which not.

Exhibit B: the checkout blog. Wal-Mart’s buyer blog is still growing in popularity, but has enabled the company to join the conversation about products. It’s a genuine voice for Wal-Mart’s product folks, enabling them to explain decisions like choosing Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, (a choice that basically put the final nail in the coffin of the HD-DVD format). A post on Wal-Mart buying only milk from cows that don’t receive growth hormone generated a lively and in some cases uncomfortable discussion with 256 comments. Wal-Mart has learned to join the conversation, even in a world full of critics, and is not smothering those that disagree.

Exhibit C: elevenmoms.com. Emboldened by its experience, Wal-Mart tapped a colony of mommy bloggers who write about topics like how to feed your family frugally and how to get ready for Halloween. Don’t sell moms short – these are some pretty sophisticated blogs and Wal-Mart hasn’t changed them at all, they just link to them, and are now bringing the bloggers to Wal-Mart HQ for updates and suggesting products for them to review. Learning from past experience, Wal-Mart and the moms have both made it clear that these bloggers aren’t paid and are under no obligation to slant things Wal-Mart’s way.

Exhibit D: management attitudes. This may be the most powerful of all. Some members of Wal-Mart’s senior HR staff had read Groundswell and asked me to present on the social media topic to 75 senior VP and C-level executives from around the world, including CEO H. Lee Scott. We followed this up with a workshop similar to the ones I run around the country, in which people use the POST method to generate social application ideas. Could a group of C-level executives break into groups and successfully devise social applications? I started to get worried when I saw they’d put all the lawyers together as one of the groups.

What happened next amazed me. When I kicked off the workshop, I mentioned that they might be feeling a little hesitant about these new ideas, since they involve a loss of control. Lee Scott actually interrupted me to say “You’re wrong, we’re not hesitant, we’re ready to embrace this stuff.” And they were. What followed was some of the most rapid ideation I’ve ever seen. I can’t tell you in detail the strategies they came up with – they deserve the chance to develop and announce them when they’re ready – but every single one was a viable, customer-centered idea around concepts like customers saving money or sustainability (that is, green) ideas for Wal-Mart. Even the lawyers came up with a decent application. 

(For cynics who might want to believe this was done just to fool me, trust me, the world’s largest public company has better things to do than bring its top management together from around the world to fake out a business book author.)

Having done lots of these workshops, I’m aware there’s no way to know when these plans will see the light of day, but what I saw was a company open and receptive to embracing and empowering its customers and employees online, regardless of what they end up saying. In short, advanced groundswell thinking. 

Think about the situation Wal-Mart is in. It has plenty of detractors, hundreds of people who feel the company’s labor practices, effects on small-town America, purchases of products from China, and general ways of doing business are a threat. These Wal-Mart haters have gathered in sites like Walmartwatch.com, tend to be socially savvy, and are ready to pounce on any Wal-Mart news or rumors and spread them using social technologies.

But on the other side of the ledger are hundreds of millions of customers. When these customers think about Wal-Mart, their most likely thought is “they sell the stuff I need at really low prices.” If you don’t believe me, see what they’re saying right now on Twitter – it’s mostly about saving money. Wal-Mart wants to turn these millions of voices to their advantage, to use them as a counterweight to their detractors. And with more and more Americans participating in social technologies, they can do it. 

Have I convinced you?

The Wal-Mart haters won’t go away (I expect plenty of them to comment on this post, for example). But this company has legions of people who think of it as a place to get good stuff cheap, and a commitment to pro-social activities like saving energy and responsible sourcing. It’s going to be a battle out there in the social sphere, and Wal-Mart will continue to take its lumps. But with so many customers on its side, I think Wal-Mart will win that battle. Just watch.

New 2008 Social Technographics data reveals rapid growth in adoption

by Josh Bernoff

Data is my secret weapon.

Every time I visit a company, we bring data we’ve collected about the social behaviors of their customers, structured according to the Social Technographics Ladder we introduced last year, a technique we rang the changes on in chapter 3 of Groundswell.

 

When I go to Vanguard, I show them the profile of their customers – and their competitors'. I went to a company that makes replacement hip joints – I showed them the profile of people with arthritis. I just came back from Brussels, where I showed a bunch of direct marketers how Europeans participate – and how many people who resist direct marketing still embrace social technologies. We’ve published lots of this data right here on the blog, including data on voters. Data settles the pointless “everybody does this/nobody does this” arguments and allows people to invest in the appropriate technologies for their customers.

But data gets old, especially in the rapidly changing social world. Time for an update. Today, we’ve released our 2008 data from around the world. Go ahead and play around with it, free, at our just-updated Social Technographics Profile tool page. We’ve got data from 11 countries around the world, by age and gender. (For the Canadians who’ve been bugging me since Groundswell came out – yes, we now have Canadian data, too.) 

Forrester clients can see our complete analysis of the 2008 data in a document we just published, called The Growth Of Social Technology Adoption. (If you’re not a client, the link will just show you an executive summary.) I'll also be speaking on this topic at our 2008 Consumer Forum.

Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives -- people untouched by social technologies -- have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators -- those who read, watch, or consumer social content -- have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.

As you can see, there was also a nice healthy jump in Joiners (social network participants), Critics (those who react to social content they see), and especially Collectors (those who organize social content). None of these are quite as popular as being a Spectator, but I think there’s plenty of growth ahead for these groups. (If it’s bothering you that the numbers add up to more than 100%, remember that these groups overlap – this is not a segmentation.)

I find it just as interesting that the Creators group grew only slightly, from 18% to 21%. I have long suspected that there aren’t more people blogging, creating Web pages, or uploading video or audio, not because the technology gets in the way, but because they’re just not the kind of extroverts who want to talk about themselves or anything else online. I think this group will continue to grow much more slowly than the others. Interestingly, this kind of participation is far greater in some places like Korea and China.

As usual, the real story comes when you look behind the statistics. Where is the growth in consumption of online content coming from? From older people – the group my young colleagues who manage all this data call “middle-aged.” (Ouch!) Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content. Even among 45-to-54 year-olds, 68% are now Spectators, 24% are Joiners, and only 28% are Inactives.

Here’s what it means. It will soon be no more remarkable that your grandmother reads a blog than that she reads email. Social content is going mainstream. Social content ranks high on search engines because it changes so frequently and gets linked to more often, so more and more online adults are becoming exposed to it, accepting it, and embracing it. If you’re a marketer, no matter what group of consumers you’re targeting, this means you must pay attention to the social world online.

But the future of social applications online will not include contributions from everyone, because not everyone has the temperament to create content. Don’t count on all your customers to contribute, and don’t believe that what you see online is representative of your whole audience. The shy among your customers are reading this stuff, but most of them aren’t ready to contribute, and won’t be for a while.

This is the power of data – the power to see beyond the hype and see what’s really changing. I’d love to bring some to your company and start the conversation. 

Postscript: I’d be remiss if I didn’t give credit to the people who make this data collection possible (and excellent). Cynthia Pflaum is the secret force behind my data insights – she not only finds these tidbits that companies find so useful, she’s also my watchdog for maintaining consistency in our surveys worldwide. Reineke Reitsma is in charge our worldwide data collection and her support of this project (and her budget) make this possible. And Roxana Strohmenger for the second year assembled our worldwide data so we could put it into the profile tool. Thank you, colleagues.

Feed me

by Josh Bernoff

Since we changed the URL for Groundswell, the traffic has remained about the same. But since we changed the feed ID, subscribers are down.

I'll make you a deal. I promise this week you'll see at least two really interesting posts, one on Monday, and one as soon as the company I worked with verifies the facts. All I want from you is to put the feed in your RSS reader.

Just click on the icon in our blog or right here. Thanks.

Ask analysts questions at our consumer forum in Dallas

Coming to our Consumer Forum in Dallas October 28 and 29? This is your chance to get one-on-one meetings with analysts who write about the topics that matter to you.

Starting Monday (October 20), if you're registered, you can schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with people like Jeremiah Owyang and me. These book up fast, folks.

Here's the list of analysts attending.  Book early!