Have you ever noticed, the increasing interest of your old Aunts  in facebook or other social networking websites? Have you ever noticed, people updating their status messages (provoking conversations and chitchats). I have observed these kind of behavior and sometimes participated in these conversations as well. But where am I heading with all this? Letme ask you a question, How social are you?

Answer comes from a researcher Josh Bernoff who noted a “new behavior” in patterns of social technology usage by the people, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” Bernoff defines conversationalists as “people who update their social network status to converse” on at least a weekly basis. According to Forrester surveys, the category is 56 percent female, more so than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. All of which fits quite nicely with my anecdotal evidence.

They take a close look at the social and demographic structure of the social web population ( To be more exhaustive and close to accurately model the user behavior, they analyzed the profiles for over a hundred clients, profiling Walmart shoppers, non-profit donors, and doctors).  The categorization of users is different than  Technorati’s statistics which mostly focus on raw blog growth numbers and structural features of the blogosphere.

P.S: Note that participation at one level may or may not overlap with the participation at other levels — so the ratios sum up to over 100%.

I am trying to explain as well as compare the increase and change in the user behavior for two years of their research. Results for previous year research can be found here.

Creators publish blogs, maintain Web pages, or upload videos to sites like YouTube at least once per month. Creators include just 24% of the adult online population. Creators are generally youngsters the average age of adult users is 39 — but are evenly split between men and women. This percent in year 2007 was just 13%.

Critics participate in either of two ways commenting on blogs or posting ratings and reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Critics represent 37% of all adult online consumers and on average are several years older than Creators. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Collectors create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, e.g. by saving URLs on a social bookmarking service like del.icio.us or using RSS feeds on Bloglines. Collectors represent 20% of the adult online population and are the most male-dominated of all the Social Technographics groups. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Joiners use a social networking site like MySpace.com or Facebook. Joiners represent 59% of the adult online population and are the youngest of the Social Technographics groups. They are highly likely to engage in other Social Computing activities — 59% also read blogs, while 30% publish blogs. This percent in year 2007 was just 19%.

Spectators represent 70% of the adult online population and are slightly more likely to be women and have the lowest household income of all the social Technographics groups. The most common activity for Spectators is reading blogs, with only a small overlap with users who watch peer-generated video on sites like YouTube. This percent in year 2007 was just 33%.

Inactives. Today, 17% of online adults do not participate at all in social computing activities. These Inactives have an average age of 50, are more likely to be women, and are much less likely to consider themselves leaders or tell their friends about products that interest them. This percent in year 2007 was 52%.

What we see from the above classification is a drastic change in behaviour of online users in last two years, most changes are directed towards the Inactives and Spectators. So now next time if you see your aunt updating her status message in Facebook, consider her among the new Joiners to the world of social networking.

Article Previosuly mirror-posted by me at Global Thoughtz.

Anand

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This post is partially motivated by my colleague(I hope he is not reading this) who spent all his Christmas and New year Vacations at home with his PC still running next to my desk. I am amazed to calculate how much electricity he just wasted. Well, you wouldn’t leave your television ON for all day while you are at the office, and yet, across the world, millions of work PCs are left on all night—wasting energy, costing owners millions in utility costs, and contributing to global climate change.

Generating the electricity needed to power those computers requires hundreds of power plants that produce billions of tons of CO2 emissions. Many of those machines sit idle for 12 to 16 hours per day, burning electricity, but not doing any work, because businesses habitually leave their computers running overnight.So how much does this one click matters? Here is an awesome report published by Harris Interactive some time back.

Some Numbers Worth Understanding

A mid-sized company with nearly 10000 PCs,  wastes more than $165,000 a year in electricity costs for computers that have been left on overnight. By turning these computers off, an employer can keep more than 1,381 tons of carbon dioxide (C02) out of the atmosphere.  Across the nation(read USA), this adds up to more than $1.72 billion dollars and almost 15 million tons of CO2 . When calculated using EPA’s  Green House Calculator the emitted Carbon is equivalent to  Annual CO2 emissions of  4  coal fired power plants.

As of April 2007,  145,800,000 Americans have full-time jobs. 72 percent of all employed adults regularly use a PC for work purposes at their jobs. Combining these findings suggests that more than 104 million workers reach the end of the work day with a PC to shut off—or not to. Next most important things is to analyse the reason for this type of behavior from the office goers.

Workers Attitudes behind this Wastage:

In an enterprise like situation, when asked whose responsibility it should be to save energy in the workplace, 28 percent of PC users said it should be down to management or the IT department. More than half (53 percent) said they were not at all concerned about their companies’ carbon footprints, indicating that effecting change in “shut down” practices at the behavioral level might yield disappointing results.

Making Business Out of IT:

Almost all the industries (be it mid or large sized) are facing similar challenges of harnessing maximum output with minimum power and infrastructural expenditures. And with global recession the idea of Cost cuttings also include supervised use of Power and Infrastructures in the enterprises and commercial centers. No  company likes to waste money. On the surface, the financial impact of 24-hour computer power consumption may seem insignificant compared to traditional concerns such as payroll, supply, and rent—but the waste is actually substantial. A few important findings from enterprise point of view :

• Energy costs—typically 10 percent of the corporate technology budget—could rise to as much as 50 percent in the next few years.
• If not exaggerating, a good  Power management software can reduce a PC’s power consumption by 80 percent, allowing companies to save between $25 – $75 per desktop PC.
• Turning off PCs, with their heat-intensive power supplies, will also reduce the load on air conditioning equipment, leading to even more energy savings.

If you are working in/for an enterprise, its your responsibility to turn off/hibernate  your PC when you are not working. On the funnier side, Gary Hird, IT strategy manager at UK retailer, John Lewis, says “I joined the company in 1989 and one of the first things I noticed was that every light switch had a sticker next to it, reading ‘switch off, you’re burning my bonus” .

But on a Serious Note “It takes between 60 and 300 trees to absorb the yearly CO2 emissions generated by a single PC left on 24 hours a day. That means it would take between 1.24 and 6.24 billion trees to absorb the emissions caused by the nation’s office computers that are never shut down.”

Take one step towards being Green, try to hibernate the PC whenever possible.

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The coming weeks, I’ll be pretty busy with a business development project in the technology sector. As usual, I cannot discuss it in depth (ok, it’s Fight Club, we bash each other half to death every week and can’t talk about it), but I want to discuss some stumbling blocks that we’re sure to be hitting. To give you an idea, some of the questions are now:

• Patents and their limitations: while we have filed for a number already, the issues are whether there is prior art and how to deal with it, as well as whether patents are really enough protection against competitors. Since, I’ve attended a pretty interesting New Venture seminar last week on IP, I think that will be my next post.
• The usefulness of market research: I breached this topic before already, but I don’t believe in researching innovations that consumers cannot touch yet, and will instead focus on expert-input, I think, as well as getting a testable prototype ready as soon as possible (we’ll be looking for subjects!). I hope to have something more to write about it soon.
• Pricing strategy: this is really exciting! I’m reading the excellent book “The strategy and tactics of pricing” and am in the position to apply some of it’s lessons now. Thoughts about it to follow on Tech IT Easy soon, but to give you an idea, it’s about the battle between costs, what the competition charges, and what your customers want to pay for your product.
• Dealing with bureaucracy: Since, we’re going to be applying to an incubator, it might be interesting to see how that process goes.

In other, equally important news:

• Verteego: You may have noticed a new badge on our site. It’s the Verteego sustainability badge, which links to a report analysing our weblog. I’ll be trying to increase our grade a little there/here and will write about my impressions. I didn’t even know that I can take leave for pregnancy-reasons, wow!
• Public transport in the Netherlands: I don’t know how it is in your country, but we’re doing exciting RFID-related stuff here. Starting February, we’ll be going through the transition of going from a stamp to a beep, and I’ll write a little about my impressions here.

That’s all I can predict for now, and I hope to make it all a reality soon! Until the next time, on Tech IT Easy!

Vincent

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I get a lot of Twitter-followers, based on keywords like, eh, ‘Screenplay’ and ‘Consulting,’ and it annoying to say the least. Why? Because I don’t believe in mass-networking and I will explain why in the rest of this post (there are other reasons, this was just the trigger).

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of experience in market research and I’ve become pretty good at it. From selling myself over the phone in a minute or less, to overcoming gatekeepers, to learning to really listen to people, to arranging personal interviews and transcribing the results, to designing and co-ordinating mass-research campaigns, and analysing them, I feel I’ve seen a lot and I’ve also seen a lot bad practices.

Why does market research get a bad rap? Because a lot of it focusses on getting as many results in as possible. It’s called “statistical significance,” for the newcomers to this field, and it means that getting the answers of 10 people is less subjective than getting the answers of 2. Of course you have to take into account that there are different types of market research: those that lead to clear outcomes and those that lead to lot’s of data that can be analysed and interpreted. Being a practical guy, I much prefer the first as the other kind often feels like a waste of money to me.

How do you design an outcome-focussed research campaign? Pretty simple: you get as close as possible to the outcome and you test it. In tech-world, this would be developing a prototype and testing it. In web-world, this would be something like A/B-marketing, where you design different versions of the same page and test their effectiveness on different samples. Of course, you can conduct plenty of market research before also, but as a favourite lecturer of mine once told me: “how do you research innovation (i.e. something new)? You can’t, because people really don’t know how they feel once the innovation is there.”

The other kind of market research, the one that produces a lot of data, is a gold-mine for journalists, analysts, and consultants. They all love to deal with abstractions that can be applied to many different situations. “Research showed that people are getting tired of green advertising. Therefore, we can write an article/report/advice to our clients that green advertising sucks.” The end, pay me.

That is not to say that more results does not provide a more unbiased perspective on a problem, but it’s just not as simple as asking a lot of people the same questions. There are ways around that, such as collecting demographic and psychographic data and I don’t want to cheapen that. I’ve written before about how statistics only matter as much as where your data comes from. But I’ve also written that triangulation is a large part of my research philosophy, which means getting different perspectives on the same issue. Yes, kind of like A/B marketing. So, I do desk-research, I do web-based surveys, I do interviews with consumers and experts. All of which provides me with a more objective view of the solution to a problem.

Networking, and now we come to the gist of it, is also a philosophy with different flavours. One, the Twitter-kind, focusses on buzz-words, reciprocity (I follow you, you follow me), and the masses. Facebook and LinkedIN are more about: so, how do you know this person? Similarly, in real life, business cards are the equivalent of Twitter: “I’m a consultant, here’s my card, can I have yours?” And friendships, both business and personal ones, are the ones that are about: “so, how do we know each other again?”

I have yet to get much value out of the web, so my cynical view on Twitter may be too cynical. I have also, as yet, received fairly little value from business cards, I should mention. I don’t go browsing through them and call people at random, same way I don’t twitter at random. Facebook is my number one web-tool, as I use it as a platform to do other things. Similarly, my friends in real life are an important platform for me also, to discuss ideas and hopefully build on those.

I think there is some kind of parallel between what I feel is effective market-research (many different perspectives, not quantity-, but quality-focussed) and networking (essentially the same). Arguably, my stance on networking may come from my own personal attitudes, I won’t deny it, but also because I believe, from my marketing background, that it just isn’t effective.

But this is just my opinion. What’s yours? Network in mass or Network in class?

Vincent

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Dear readers,

These last few weeks, months, you will have noticed that content on Tech IT Easy has mainly been provided by me, Vincent, with sporadic, but much appreciated interjections by other bloggers. Why this is the case differs for every person on this blog and I will not go into those reasons.

When this blog was started by Jeremy Fain, it came out of his vision, one which he expanded into building a group-blog, which, for a long time now, has managed to stay alive. Now that I’m the main blogger here, however, I find myself somewhat conflicted with following that vision, which I’ve always seen being focussed on the tech and business space (with some other content interjected).

My background is a-similar to Jeremy, because I don’t have the tech-education and other experiences that he has enjoyed. Rather I am an international citizen, with a passion for innovation and business, as well as plenty of other stuff, and I am able put a few words together about these topics. That said, my work and interests also take me out of the tech-space much of the time, which makes writing about tech more of a hypothetical exercise than anything else.

So I ask those of you that read this blog what you would prefer from my part. Would you prefer that I continue as I have, writing about anything that comes to mind, with the occasional tech-component? Or would you prefer less updates from me on Tech IT Easy (in which case, I will re-open my personal blog) and the occasional blogpost about tech and/or business?

Please answer the following poll to give me an insight, thanks!

[polldaddy poll=1120707]

Vincent

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Probably not a mainstream user

Now, my list is not scientific at all, and is, as usual, meant to be the start of a conversation. What I would do to make it scientific however, is as follows:

1. Talk to experts (hello there, experts )
2. Based on expert-input, design a survey that measures preferences per demographic (gender, age, spending-behaviour, etc.).
3. Advertise that survey on an industry-specific website (Alternatively: use survey to interview people face-to-face during an industry-specific event. Works well as a combo, the first being quantitative, the second qualitative.)
4. Process data into user-achetypes (and expected ratios).

In web-apps, by which I mean a web-utitlity like Facebook of Netvibes, I’m curious as to both the archetypes and, later on, how to deal with them. Generally, you of course have the early adopter and the mainstream one, which, I know, should be catered too differently.

Following is a list of the ones that I would expect to play a role.

• The money-maker: This is typically the most pragmatic of the group, cares about results, speed, and task-specific information, but not so much about elegance and useless information.
• The (early) geek: This, at the risk of generalising, is very much the Digg-, Techcrunch-, and Engadget-audience, by which I mean the typical commentator on those sites. They ask for feature, after feature, after feature, and often ask for too many of them. I call them “early” geeks, because I expect them to be rather young.
• The newbie: This is not the loudest of users, and tend to accept that which they get (as long as the quality is ok). I’m thinking people that use PCs with Vista-home pre-installed. I think that these are also pretty hard to reach with niche-apps.
• The specialist geek: I’m thinking photographers or writers, who have very specific demands of what an app should do and also a certain aesthetic demand. This would be more the Macbook Pro / Photoshop audience. Whether these are a large segment in the web-apps category, I’m not sure. I would expect that these apps don’t really meet with their approval, most of all because they are often free.

What do you think? Were there any archetypes that I missed or is the reality much simpler? (How) do you find out what the user-archetypes for your apps are?

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