Research company Forrester have published a fascinating piece of research with the slightly off-putting title of Social Technographics. Essentially it examines the different levels of participation of the US population in the varied strands of Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, RSS & social bookmarking sites. The research makes some very interesting points, but before I go into the nuts & blots of it, a quick word on its terminology.
The research categorises people according to their level of participation in social media.

• Creators: Publish web pages or publish & maintain a blog or upload videos (YouTube etc..)
• Critics: Comment on blogs or post ratings & reviews (eBay, Amazon, etc..)
• Collectors: Use RSS or tag web pages (del.icio.us etc..)
• Joiners: Use social networking sites (MySpace, Facebook, etc..)
• Spectators: Read blogs or watch uploaded videos or listen to podcasts
• Inactives: Engage in none of the above

I’m not going to try to cover all of the points raised by the report, simply due to time & space, but I would like to pull out some of the main points that I found really interesting.

According to the report, around 13% of the US population (or those that can be defined as consumers) can be designated as Creators. Considering the fact that there are only about 24m English language blogs (which is not to suggest that all US blogs are in English), this suggests an incredible number of people are uploading videos - which is backed up by YouTube’s popularity, and again backs up my feeling that Google got itself a bargain last year.

But this 13% of the US consumer population is touching the 33% of users who can be deemed to be Spectators. So whilst blogging may still be thought of as a minority interest, it is obviously reaching a much wider audience (although again, the popularity of YouTube is almost certainly a factor here). This backs up my theory that those this report deems Creators or Collectors can be thought of as existing at the bottom of an inverted pyramid of influence. It is this phenomenon which means that a story from the website of the magazine New Scientist which was submitted by one person to digg (a Collector), and was then voted for by just over 600 people (Critics), lead to 13,000 visits to that story from the digg site (Spectators).

The report includes great advice for marketers on how to use social media depending on their target audience’s age & interests. So, entertainment brands are much more likely to have a high proportion of users involved in social technologies than family brands, and can therefore market these technologies more aggressively.

Obviously as with any research I don’t agree with every assumption, for example the report states that around 8% use RSS. I would suggest that evidence such as this video and this report suggest that a lot more people are using RSS, but simply don’t realise it and therefore would answer in the negative if asked in the course of research such as Forrester’s.

That’s a minor gripe though, and shouldn’t hide the fact that this should be an essential piece of research for anyone or any company interested in harnessing the various tools that Web 2.0 offers to influence the wider population.

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