Ten stats for sceptics

Like a lot of you, I do the rounds touting social media wares. In my case, I sometimes roll up in front of an audience, who while they think that what I have to talk about is interesting, they aren’t at all convinced about the immediacy of it.

Comments I’ve heard recently from some very intelligent people include “it’s all one big computer game, isn’t it?”, “this is less relevant for us as we’re not cool”, and quite simply, “I hate blogs.”

While that makes it a much tougher sell, it also reminds me that the orthodoxy of getting with the social media programme is by no means universally shared - not the impression you’d get if you constantly listen to the echo chamber.

It also forces me think of ways to convey the fact that, practically whatever your brand, this is relevant. And an obvious way of doing that is through hard facts and stats. As every week a new report seems to do the rounds with the result that there are now zillions of facts and figures about, I’ve given some thought to whittling them down to ten I can use again and again.

Here is my first draft for starters:

1 – This isn’t the preserve of young blokes with too much time on their hands and too little exposure to daylight. The most active group online in the UK is 18-35 year old women (I understand that in the US it’s the same – women are online more than men). The fastest growing group on MySpace is married women 35-50

2 – This isn’t about 20 somethings, it’s appeal is universal. Both in the UK and US , there are more over 50s online than under 18s. At the other end of the scale, a quarter of children 8-11 in the UK have social media profiles

3 – “Blogs” encompass much more than personal sites. They also include sites maintained by almost every newspaper. And they have influence. More than 4/5 bloggers post product or brand reviews, or shout about about products they love or hate

4 – A small number of people can potentially achieve a great deal. As a tool like Twinfluence proves, someone with ‘only’ 100 connections, could in fact have a potential reach of 100,000 once you look at their friends’ friends.

5 – 60% of people will trust the opinion of someone on a review / recommendation website who they have never met before.

6 – You Tube has been called ‘the biggest tv station on the planet'. According to Cisco, a third of internet traffic will be online video by the end of 2008, by the end of 2012 that will rise to half.

7 – There is a direct link between people going online, and exposure to traditional media falling. Over the past year, 530 US newspapers saw a circulation drop of 3.57%. And it’s not necessarily true that they are simply reading the online equivalents of offline media. In the US, only 20% have visited their local paper website in the past 30 days.

8- Standard websites are losing viewing share to social ones. In the UK, ‘content’ websites saw their share of total website minutes go down by 7% to 8.4 billion in April 2008. In contrast, ‘consumer generated media’ went up from 2.7 billion minutes in Apr 2007 to 4 billion minutes in Apr 2008.

9 – Last year for the first time, according to Hitwise, messages sent within social networks in the UK overtook messages sent within webmail programmes. Apparently the same is now happening in the US.

10 – Chances are, your competitors are already there. Peter Kim has compiled a list of 270 brands, from Absolut Vodka to Yoplait who are engaged in social media.

Any other killer stats? Would love to hear them.

Photo – “The Internet sucks” by ‘The Jof’

Postscript (21 Oct) - Continuing the theme of making social media relevant to a wider audience, Svetlana Gladkova has an excellent post today about the relatively low adoption of "RSS." Svetlana asks whether the problem could actually be that as yet there is no consumer need.

I wonder whether one of the problems isn't actually our tendency to use terms like 'RSS' in the first place. From experience, talk to people about RSS and you get blank faces. Set up a Netvibes page (or similar) for them and they instantly see why it's useful. As with so many social media tools, it really only makes sense once you are using it.

And on that note, thanks to Damien Basile, who pointed me towards David Pogue's (New York Times) piece about the tech jargon he avoids at all costs.