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.

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.

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.

by Josh Bernoff

As you can see, we've made a few changes here at the Groundswell blog. As the availability of our book inches ever closer (about two weeks away now) we've put the blog in the context of a broader site with a whole bunch of goodies for you.

Feel free to browse around, but I'd like to draw your attention to one key feature: a free data tool about consumers around the world and their behavior around social technologies.

You may recall that we group people in the social world into six overlapping groups: Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives. We show these groups as steps on a ladder based on their increasing levels of participation in social technologies. (We've conducted more surveys and refined our definitions since our original post on this topic almost a year ago.) Basically, you're in a group if you participate in one of the behaviors shown in this graphic on that rung, at least once a month.

Now comes the fun part. Forrester painstakingly collects data from countries on four continents: North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. And we can calculate the Social Technographics Profile -- basically, the level of social participation -- for any group of people we can identify in any of those countries.

Chapter 3 in the book is filled with these profiles and we show throughout how they drive strategy, but we wanted to give you a chance to see what we've seen -- just how diverse the world is and how profiles vary based on the country, age, and gender of the participants.

If you play around with this tool, you'll soon see that, as you would expect, there's an inverse relationship between age and level of participation. But would you have guessed that 33% of people in the US age 55 or older are connecting with social applications in some way? Because they are.

Why are the differences between men and women's participation so much greater among people aged 25-34 than among those that are younger? Will those gender differences go away as the Millenials get older?

You might notice that 41% of Koreans are Joiners -- members of social networks -- more than anywhere else in the world.

Or that in Metro China (we survey a subset of people in Chinese cities) 36% of people are Creators, creating blogs, maintaining content, or uploading video or music. That's an amazing level of participation.

It's very expensive to collect this data. Why are we giving it away for free? Because we wanted to give you a taste of how real data can open up insights into people's behavior, and to think about it in some of the ways we think about it.

And if you're looking for a group not shown here -- like Toyota owners in the US, or people with Fujitsu PCs in Japan, we've probably got that, too. Go ahead. Ask us.

I'm looking forward to your reactions.

P.S. If you hit a "No Data Available" message, that just means you've asked for a slice of our data so thin we can't show a valid answer. Just set the Age dropdown back to "Not Specified" and you'll see data for the country you've asked about.

by Josh Bernoff

We don't normally do political polling. But when we did our last Social Technographics survey I got sneaky. I asked people who they were voting for. The result is a fascinating peek into the minds and social behaviors of voters. The full report is available to Forrester clients here, but I'll share the data we published with all of you blog readers below.

First, for your reference, here's the social technographics ladder again, most current version. As we described this spring, it show how people are at different levels of participation in social activities, and the groups can overlap.

Just as with business travelers, we can apply this to any group of people we can identify. So let's see how social participation differs among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. (For the purposes of this survey we classified people who usually vote Democrat as Democrat and people who usually vote Republican as Republicans -- the Independents are those who don't consistently vote one way or another. There weren't enough third-part types for us to get their profile.) Here's the data (over 10,000 online people surveyed nationally):

Right away you can see there is a persistent tendency for Democrats to participate more fully in social technologies. Looking at the index (all adults = 100), you can see that Democrats are at least 10% more likely to do just about anything involving social technologies. The Republicans are the opposite -- they're a lot LESS likely to participate (like Nixon's "silent majority"). They're 22% less likely to be a social network (Joiners) and 21% less likely to be uploading video or blogging (Creators). These are not extreme differences, but there are definite tendencies here, likely correlated to the fact that Republicans tend to be older than Democrats on the average. Notice that the Republicans are near par for Spectators, though -- they're watching, even if they're not as active participants. The Independents are somewhere in the middle, approaching the average in Joiner and Critic activity.

Now let's look at it by who people are voting for. Here's how the Democratic field looks (these are the top four most popular candidates in our national survey; we included Al Gore in the survey in case he decided to enter the race). Remember, these are the profile of the candidates' supporters.

There are important differences among democrats. One in three Obama voters is a Joiner, which may be helping the my.barackobama.com strategy. Edwards voters (62% Spectators) are the most likely to be consuming social applications; Clinton voters are the least, with only 49% Spectators and 42% Inactives. 34% of Gore voters are Critics -- he ought to connect with them in some sort of community or forum to make them a force for his issues in the general election. Obama, Clinton, and Edwards voters are all rich with Creators (at least 22% of their supporters) -- energize those voters and they'll start getting the Spectators excited.

The profile of supporters of Republicans is perhaps the most revealing:

Note the relatively anemic levels of Creator participation -- no Republican gets above 16%. The Creators are the voters who energize everybody else with their contribution. As we get into the general election, which of these candidates can energize the online social world? (Ron Paul, who didn't get enough votes in our poll to generate a profile, clearly could, but it seems unlikely that he'll get the chance.) It's also interesting that Mitt Romney's supporters are more active than the rest of the Republicans' -- he ought to be doing more than just having his offspring blog.

Interestingly, while as far as I know we haven't been contacted by the candidates since we published this research, we have been getting some interest from other companies. Why? Because marketers see the social drama playing out in the election and want to see what lessons can be drawn for their own brands.

Listen folks -- I can do this type of analysis for just about any group of consumers. What would you like to see next?

by Josh Bernoff

Charlene's April post about the Social Technographics ladder got picked up by hundreds of bloggers -- no surprise since it's some of the only hard data out there about how different people participate in social technologies.

Now it's time to show how that data can be put to use.

In the previous post I talked about the POST method of social strategy, the first step of which is PEOPLE. You can't undertake as strategy until you know the behaviors of your audience. But how do you analyze those behaviors?

At Forrester we solved this problem with a survey that asked not just about social behaviors but about many, many other behaviors of consumers. The result is we can create a Social Technographics Profile of just about any group.

For example, have a look at these two graphics, which are the Social Technographics Profiles of people who travel. (For the definitions of the six groups I refer you back to the Social Technographics ladder. And remember, since the groups overlap, they add to more than 100%).

What can you learn from these? First of all, leisure travelers participate in social activities at about the same rate as average online adults. So if you're planning on using social networks, or blogs, or other forms of social applications with them, you can expect some participation. But just like average Americans, 43% of them are Inactives -- you won't be able to reach this segment.

Business travelers are different. The index of 150 for Creators means that these folks are 50% more likely to blog, upload videos, or indulge in other social creation activities compared to average Americans. They're more likely to be Critics (people who react to others' content), Joiners (people in social networks) and especially, Collectors (people who use RSS or voting sites like Digg).

If you're selling business travel, now you know that you have a high chance of success with a discussion forum, you could probably ask your customers to upload pictures and have it work, you should have an RSS feed, and you may want to look at marketing through LinkedIn or Facebook. All of these are more powerful for business travelers than leisure travelers.

What should you actually do? Well, that depends on your objectives. Start with People, go on to Objectives, then follow up with Strategy, and finish with choosing a technology (POST, remember?).

If you find this interesting you should know:

• Sarah Rotman Epps' insightful report on travel and Social Technographics is available to Forrester clients here. That's where I stole the graphics from.
• There are a dozen similar graphics in Groundswell. This data is part of the value we're trying to create in the book. It's behind everything.
• We can use this to analyze anything from Toyota owners to online banking customers to Target shoppers. We are building these questions into nearly all of our surveys moving forward so we can score just about anything.
• And if you've gotten this far, stay tuned. On Monday we'll display the Social Technographics of voters -- Democrats, Republicans, and supporters of the top presidential candidates.

I think data like this is fascinating. Do you?