Far be it from me to be a pessimist; I think I'm more of a glass-half full kind of strategist, or at least that I have idealist/humanist leanings. That said, I can say that after checking out Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li's Harnessing The Power of Social Applications from the Sloan Review, that I need to give some of my readers a swift reality check. I'm in the midst of writing a social media strategy for four fairly well-known consumer packaged goods brand, and while I don't want to scare the shit out of them, I want them to leave my workshop equipped with solid tools, solid strategy and a realistic mindframe to execute from.
So, based on the aggregation of the Forrester studies from 2007, based on the United States, here are the key take-aways that I have, about our social media use, on average:
- 75% of your customers don't read blogs
- 89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
- 71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
- 75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
- 82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
- 75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
- 89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
- 92% of your customers don't use RSS
These percentages are based on a metric of one-monthly usage. Keep in mind that these are broad-stroke averages, and I'm not attempting to belittle the importance of social media here. I'm just trying to set a realistic baseline, so that my clients and readers know who they're trying to engage with, when working with social media tools. So, for example, I'm working with a tea company that has about 500,000 unique customers in any given year, they can assume that the amount of current/prospective customers they'll be engaging with, in social media, will be about 100,000, give or take a bit.
And that's still a shitload of people. Better take 'em seriously.
I'll be at the Social Network Applications Platform Summit 2.0 tomorrow as well; if you'd like to record a podcast for Metzmash or LaunchSquad's Exclamation blog, come up and talk to me.
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