Forrester: Six Degrees of Social Media Separation
by Joe McKendrick
ZDNet’s Dan Farber just pointed to a new Forrester Research report that splits the social computing realm into six groups.
Forrester says it surveyed 4,475 US adults in December 2006 and 4,556 youth in October 2006 and to learn about their use of social computing technology adoption. The consultancy breaks down consumers according to reported participation in at least one of six areas:
“Creators” (13%): Publish Web pages, publish blogs, upload video to sites like You Tube
“Critics” (19%): Comment on blogs, posting ratings and reviews.
“Collectors” (15%): Use RSS, tag Web pages
“Joiners” (19%): Use social networking sites
“Spectators” (23%): Read blogs, watch peer-generated video, listen to podcasts
“Inactives” (52%): Yeah, the rest of the world.
You can deduce from the above statistics that at least 48% of the world Forrester surveyed are non-Inactives when it comes to social computing, which is significant. The percentage of consumers who are, at a minimum, spectators seems to be fast approaching Internet usage as a whole.
I’d love to see a breakout of the differences between the adult and youth populations. My guess is that it would be something like 20% adults, 95% youth.
Interestingly, as Dan notes, Apple users tend to be much more engaged consumers of social media services than Dell (read: Windows) users. “Apple users drink more from the Web 2.0 fountain than Dell users, which is expected given the profile of Mac users and the much bigger market share that Dell maintains,” he said.
