mi-space

Key takeouts from Forrester Report on Social Networking

Forrester: Social networking will be biggest enterprise 2.0 priority by 2013; Smaller businesses reticent

ZD NET Posted by Larry Dignan @ 7:47am, April 21st, 2008 (charts included for North America & Europe)

A lot of very big numbers

You can't argue with the power of MSN Messenger when you see numbers like this:

We explore a dataset of 30 billion conversations generated by 240 million distinct users over one month. We found that approximately 90 million distinct Messenger accounts were accessed each day and that these users produced about 1 billion conversations, with approximately 7 billion exchanged messages per day. 180 million of the 240 million active accounts had at least one conversation on the observation period. We found that 99% of the conversations occurred between 2 people, and the rest with greater numbers of participants. To our knowledge, our investigation represents the largest and most comprehensive study to date of presence and communications in an IM system. A recent report (6) estimated that approximately 12 billion instant messages are sent each day. Given the estimate and the growth of IM, we estimate that we captured approximately half of the world’s IM communication during the observation period.

Read the full report on Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network

UCG and Social Media recognised by IAB

The IAB have today released an report covering User Generated Content (UGC) or CGC / Social Media and Advertising ahead of a conference they are holding in June.

The file is available for download from the IAB site here or Download 2008_ugc_platform.pdf here.

The report gives a thorough overview of the platforms and components of social media - blogs, wikis, branded communities, forums, widgets etc., as well as dealing with the issues for marketers and brands.  No longer are we in a world were we by time or space on fixed media in a totally controlled context - we need to be creative, we need to integrate and co-create with our consumers.

Social Media has also changed our expectations of who is consuming where and when.  The report cites analysis from Comscore Media Metrix "UGC and Social Networking isn’t all “child’s play” either [...] more than half of MySpace users were over 35 years old, and that 25-year-olds accounted for 71% of Friendster users. Separately, executive networking site LinkedIn, reports that its average user is 39 years-old and has an annual income of $139,000."

It's a challenge for brands, agencies and marketers but the sky is the limit.  It looks like we have all finally admitted the world has changed.