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.