Reconciling Social Technographics and 90-9-1

by Josh Bernoff

Forrester’s Social Technographics surveys show that when it comes to social content 21% of online US consumers are Creators, 37% are Critics (those who react to content created by others), and 69% are Spectators.

The 90-9-1 principle, recently publicized by Community Guy Jake McKee at 90-9-1.com, says that in a community, the rule of thumb is that 90% of visitors only view the content, 9% only comment or react to it, and 1% create it.

 This confuses people, and I often get questions about who’s right. In fact, there is no contradiction between these two statements. Let’s examine why.

First of all, the 90-9-1 principle applies to a single site or community. Let’s suppose we are talking about tivocommunity.com, for example. 90-9-1 says that 1% of its members create content. But our surveys might detect a TiVo community member who just reads the Tivo posts, but who is an enthusiastic Barack Obama supporter at myBO.com. Forrester's surveys would call her a Creator. But with regard to tivocommunity.com, Jake’s rule says she’s in the 90% or lurkers. No contradiction, it just depends on whether you're looking at a single site or across all sites. Since Creators (in the Forrester sense) include people who create content at any site, they add up to a lot more than 1%

Second, our groups are designed to overlap. Since we also identify Collectors (who organize content) and Joiners (who join social networks), there’s no strict hierarchy. Some Joiners are Creators, some Creators are Joiners, but neither group is a subset of the other. (When creating Social Technographics I attempted to create a hierarchy of behaviors, but carefully examining the data convinced me that was a mistake.) So we allow our categories to overlap. 90-9-1, which examines fewer activities, can accommodate mutually exclusive categories.

Third, 90-9-1 is a rule of thumb. For example, according to 90-9-1.com, only 0.16% of YouTube visitors upload content, far less than 1%. A community of Webmasters will have a lot more contributors than a community of senior citizens. Our surveys are actual data independent of site-to-site variation. (So I don’t get to create a nice neat rule, while Jake can.)

What’s it mean? It means that 90-9-1 is a good rule of thumb for sites, while Social Technographics is a good way to look at populations. And it also means that you should check the Social Technographics Profile of your customers first, to see how many of them are likely to contribute if you put them in a community. 

Got it? Looking forward to your comments.

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.

Data chart of the week: forums, ratings, and reviews around the world

by Josh Bernoff

More data from around the world -- and from Chapter 2 of Groundswell.

As a companion to our data charts of social networks and blogs and user-generated video around the world, here's a look at forums, ratings, and reviews around the world.

Unlike our previous international data cuts, this one is far more likely to reflect cultural differences than the prevalence of specific sites in a country's home language. We again see the advanced participation of Japanese and Americans in discussion forum. Koreans participate a lot less -- any Koreans out there that can shed light on this?

As for ratings and reviews, more than one in five online consumers read them in the US, UK, Germany, and Japan. (Note that this includes only people who read them once a month or more -- there are doubtless a lot of less frequent readers of ratings.) Americans, Japanese, and Koreans are the most likely to write reviews -- Brits and the French have the lowest proportion of ratings readers who are writers as well.

These "Web 1.0" technologies are the mainstay of the groundswell. They're easy to use, easy to participate in, easy to benefit from. All they require is that you react to what's in front of you. That's why Critics are biggest of the active elements of the Social Technographics ladder -- and why I think they'll grow to include more and more online consumers every year, in every country in the world.

Data chart of the week: social networks around the world

by Josh Bernoff

There's a lot of speculation about social networks, and predictions usually go in one of two directions:

• This is growing and soon everybody will be on one (or more than one)
• This is a fad and even the college students will tire of it eventually.

(You could also call these the "Facebook is worth $20 Billion" and "Facebook is worth nothing" factions.)

To add fuel to the debate, this week's data chart, from Chapter 2 of Groundswell looks at participation in social networks around the world.

Important caveats on this data -- while these surveys were all taken with 6 months of each other 2007, the methodologies are not the same: US is an online survey, Europe is a mail survey, and Asia is a telephone survey. In each case, the base is all online consumers, and people were asked the question "do you visit a social networking site at least monthly?" or "how frequently do you visit a social networking site?" with examples from their own country. We count only those who visit at least monthly.

That said, this variation is fascinating, to me at least.

Does Korea have the highest participation because of CyWorld, or because Koreans love to connect?

Why are Germany, and especially France, so low? Is it something about the way French people behave online, or is there an opening for a great French social network (or the French version of an existing one, like Facebook)?

Charlene says that in the future, social networks will be like air, surrounding everything. If she's right, the very nature of this question will change.

I challenge you -- will the US become like Korea, and will France become like either one? What do you think?

Data chart of the week: social profiles for elements of a segmentation

by Josh Bernoff

So far, all of our Social Technographics Profile examples have used consumer behavior or attitude variables, like a comparison of car owners by brand or an analysis of Alpha moms. But we're finding, increasingly, that clients don't want to hear about the profile of the customers. They want to hear about a profile of their customer segments.

Most companies that sell to large numbers of people have segmented their customers. A retailer analyzes its shoppers and finds some come for convenience, some for price, and some for selection -- and some because their mom shopped there. Or an electronics manufacturer creates low-end easy-to-use products for the technology laggards and high-end sophisticated products for the early adopters.

Segmentation is smart if you use it to design products and marketing plans for different groups of customers. If you're growing a product line, it may be essential. Typically, a research project leads to customer insights, which leads to a segmentation, which leads to actions based on those segments. So when creating a social application for these segments, you need to ask -- which strategies apply to which customers?

Here's a good example. A large communications company had already segmented its customers and came to us with segment descriptions. Using the descriptions, we profiled three of the segments. The results are shown below. (The client's name and the descriptions of the segments are proprietary, I can't share them.)

What would you do if these were your customer segments?

Here's what we told the client.

First, the two segments shown here in blue are extremely active with social technologies -- some of the most active groups we've seen. We recommended creating groups within Facebook to engage them, building idea communities, and identifying and energizing customers by monitoring blogs and social networks. Failing to engage with these customers is a big mistake. Furthermore, although the company had identified two separate segments, we recommended using the same programs for both segments, since they have such similar profiles.

The third segment, shown in orange, features 61% Inactives and only 20% Joiners -- well below average. We recommended spending marketing money on this segment elsewhere, rather than on social programs, which would be difficult to get going with a profile like this.

One final note. Both in this project and another similar one for a beverage company, we found the companies had difficulty identifying their own segments! The first time this happened, I found it strange, but twice made me think it's a pattern. For any companies out there planning or implementing a segmentation, remember: you need some mechanism to identify who's in those segments. If you think segementation leads to insight and then you're done, you'll may find it frustrating (as we did) to take those segments further into a realm like targeting for social applications.

Data "point" of the week: Data alone is not enough

by Josh Bernoff

I've been thinking about data lately. This is partly because of Bill's comment on our last Data Chart of The Week (Seniors) and also the responses we got to Part 1 of our recent Webinar series. In the Webinar, I chose to focus almost exclusively on several Social Technographics Profiles -- data about how different groups of people use social technologies -- and while most of the responses were positive, a few people responded that they were unsatisfied with the result.

Confession: I love data. I helped start Forrester's first consumer surveys, called Technographics, in 1997, and I love the idea that we can answer consumer behavior questions around the world now. As an analyst, I love having the ability to dive into data and find the answers to a client's behavioral or attitudinal question. And I find it endlessly fascinating to see how people's attitudes vary with age, or where they live, or from year to year. Having the ability to ask questions of the form "I wonder if people . . ." and actually get the answer is intoxicating. That's why data about People is the first step in the POST method for social technology strategy formation.

But data isn't the whole story. Data looks backward, and answers only questions you thought to ask. Surveys have biases. They have margins of error and sample size issues. I believe our surveys are the best, most comprehensive set of data available anywhere on technology. That said, if you start and end with data alone, you will go wrong.

That's why we always try to provide analysis along with, or driving, or surrounding the data we present, which creates the basis for intelligent decision-making.

There are experts on this stuff, most notably my colleague Brad Bortner. But I've learned a few things myself in a decade of research with consumers. So rather than present more data this week, I will offer up these bits of advice:

• Better to have data than to trust your gut. In the absence of data about your market, youi are driving blind. You intuition about your customers may be right, and it may not. (It's useful to remember that in every stock trade, one side expects the stock to go up and the other does not -- why are you so sure you are smarter than everyone else.) If you can get access to consumer behavioral data about what you're doing, then by all means study it.
• Data is not insight. What does it mean that 40 year-olds are twice as likely to create social content than 20 year olds? That depends on what you want to do about it. Use data to start and bolster your argument. Then ask, "Is there any other way to interpret this?"
• Check the source and the base. All Forrester data charts have a source (typically a survey) and a base (the group of people surveyed). The source will tell you when the survey was conducted -- and data is perishable, since people's attitudes change over time. The base us important to -- is it online consumers, people with mobile phones, or people in metropolitan China? Sample size is also important -- results from 200 people are interesting, but clearly not as as solid at results from 10,000. That's why I can tell you the social Technographics profile of people who own Mercurys, but not people who own Hummers -- we only reach a dozen or so of the latter.
• Protect against bias. All surveys have bias -- most notably, they reach only people willing to take surveys. Another common bias is "social desirability bias" -- people want to believe they are better than they are. This is why PBS gets higher ratings in diaries than when measured with a meter. Always ask "is there a bias here that could reduce the value of this data?"
• Beware of overinterpretation of a question. I will often show survey data in the form of a question and the percent who gave various answers. An audience member will ask "did they mean this, or did they  mean that?" It's a hard question to answer, since I wasn't in the brain of the person answering. Strictly speaking, they read the question and they gave the answer -- it's up to you to interpret. Similarly, just because people participate in discussion forums doesn't mean they want to talk about your products. Data gives you a feel for how people are thinking, but it's still up to you to engage them.

I promise to keep showing you data, but always with a context on what to do about it. What bits of advice do you have about working with data?

P.S. To language purists. I know the convention is to treat "data" as the plural of "datum" and all credible statisticians do so. I also know, in my conversations with businesspeople, that they often use "data" as a singular. Since that's who I talk to, that's how I use the word. "The data are" just sounds wrong to these people, so I avoid it.

Data chart of the week: Seniors

by Josh Bernoff

This week we'll look at a group that gets less attention online, seniors. (If you're new to this weekly data chart or the Social Technographics Profile, check out the previous weekly data charts.) This chart is from Chapter 3 of Groundswell.

This chart raises an interesting question. Let's say your product is aimed at seniors -- like Flomax, or retirement communities. Obviously, your market isn't nearly as active in social applications, with less than 10% Creators and under 40% Spectators. Should you give up on the idea?

Not necessarily, but you'd better proceed with caution. Here are some situations in which approaching seniors with social technology makes sense:

• You only spend a little. Sometimes it's worth it to reach 30% of your market, especially the most active 30%. Just don't blow your whole budget on social applications.
• You tap into existing communities. Eons won't let you in until you're 49. Gather hits a more mature audience than most social networks. You can reach the social portion of your older audience more easily there, since they've done work of recruiting.
• Your audience has a strong need to connect. Cancer patients are a lot older than the average consumer. They're also strongly attracted to connecting with fellow sufferers and sharing support and information. As a result, the American Cancer Society's Cancer Survivors Network is extremely active, despite having a lot of older Americans in it.
• You make it easy. The imbalance between Spectators and Creators is especially vivid among seniors. This puts the onus on you to help them out. Seed your networks and applications with content and make it effortless to respond. Seniors are a lot more likely to participate if you make the on-ramps easy to navigate.

Data chart of the week: international blog and user-generated video participation

by Josh Bernoff

In today's post we're showing off our international data capabilities with some data about participation in creating and consuming content in different geographies. This is the first table in Chapter 2 of Groundswell.

I find it amazing what a high degree of variability there is in this data. Note that this reflects percentage of online consumers only. These surveys were done between March and September of 2007.

The blog readership and commenting numbers in Japan and South Korea area astounding. I believe this is where North America is going. I'm at a loss to explain the relatively low level of participation in Germany  and the UK -- any ideas on why this is happening? In the UK, I don't know of any cultural reason why online participants should be reticent to read blogs -- I expect this to reach par with the US (or it may already have done so).

It's an interesting pattern that approximately half of those who read blogs comment on them, with somewhat fewer writing. I'd love to know why readership of blogs is higher in Japan, but writing blogs is more common in South Korea.

The US is the clear leader in both creation and viewing of user-generated video, which is at least partly due to the fact that YouTube is mostly in English. (I refuse to believe we have more idiots making idiotic video in the U.S. -- we don't have a way to survey that!) Given the very high bandwidth available in Japan and Korea I would have expected higher participation there -- is this cultural, or is it because there is more production quality video (on-line television) in these geographies?

Podcasts still haven't caught on the US after years of availability. And they're non-existent in Korea. I am skeptical that these numbers will increase significantly in the U.S. or that other parts of the world will surpass the U.S. number.

One note: we use different survey methodologies around the world (for example, what you see here came from mail surveys in Europe and online surveys in the U.S.) Also, the surveys were not taken in the same month. So direct comparisons are subject to significant variation that's not explained by geography.

If you found this data interesting, you can learn more. We have social technographic profiles from around the world available free. And clients can get access to all of our survey data.

Data chart of the week: who do people trust?

by Josh Bernoff

For today's weekly data chart we'll look at a different kind of data for a change -- not a Social Technographics Profile but some attitudinal data that's highlighted in Groundswell. Today's question is: whom do you trust?

As you can see, 83% trust the word of a friend. But perhaps one of the more interesting points is that the number who trust consumer reviews by people they never met on a retailer's site (like eBags, the example in Groundswell) is 60%, only slightly lower than "a review by a known expert."

Why do people trust strangers?

They don't, not as individuals. But they do in groups. Strangers are assumed not to have an axe to grind. If 100 people on eBags say a laptop bag is great, then it is great. If they say it's inferior, then it is inferior. Regardless of what a so-called "expert" might say.

What does this mean for your brand?

It means that a focus on "influencers" is not enough. You never know who may be reviewing your product, or where. Influencers may touch a lot of people, but so do the masses of reviewers on Yelp, or Amazon.com, or TripAdvisor. And heaven forbid you get people talking about your brand on The Consumerist.

If most of your customers like you, the lesson is this: help them to talk. Install ratings and reviews on your site. Create a blog and let them respond. Give them online tools and energize them. And embrace the fan groups they form on social networks. Fan the flames.

What if your customers don't like you? Shutting them up is not an option. My only useful case study for this is Dell, which (1) started to seek out bloggers who were complaining and solved their problems to make them happier and (2) actually improved their customer service. That's expensive. But if you're in a cutthroat market it's required.

Frankly, I don't have a completely satisfactory answer, so I'm throwing it open to you. What should a company with a poor customer reputation do about social media? Join the discussion about it on our discussion board.

Data chart of the week: car brands

By Josh Bernoff

Today we release our fourth data chart.

Our surveys cover hundreds of brands including retailers, computers, cars, and financial services companies. This allows our analysis to go far beyond what you can learn from demographics, like the profiles from our profile tool. For example, we recently published an analysis of 13 car brands and their owners. Below is a subset of four interesting brands. (You can see the full analysis if you’re a Forrester client or you buy the report; otherwise the link above will show you only the abstract.)

In every market we examine, patterns emerge. Some brands have intensely engaged customers – those brands are missing the boat if they don’t get started with social applications rapidly. Others have slower moving customers – they can affort to wait. And even among those with high engagement, the type of social participation varies.

In this case, we see that Pontiac owners have very few Inactives and the most Joiners of the four brands. With 30% Joiners (social network participants), it’s imperative that Pontiac connect with its owners where they’re already connecting with others. In fact, Pontiac started a college scholarship “Game Changing Performance” campaign on Facebook.

Honda has the most Critics, at 29%, but Honda hasn’t yet created a blog for them to react to, even though Technorati shows over 300 blog posts linking to the Honda site. The top Honda blogs are on automotive.com and motortrend.com, plus one maintained by a fan.

Jeep has the most Creators, at 22%. Sure enough, YouTube shows almost 40,000 Jeep videos and there are hundreds of Jeep blogs. I hope that Jeep is monitoring this activity through a service like Cymfony; it’s an important source of feedback and insight.

Of the 13 brands that had enough customers to allow us to do a profile, Mercury had the most Inactives. In my opinion, brands with a profile like Mercury’s shouldn’t put aside much budget for social applications, aside from maybe some basic monitoring or a private community from a company like Communispace. What would you do if you were a brand manager at Mercury?

Plug: this post is sponsored by our Technographics team. They want to hear from you if you're interested in data like this about your brand.