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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If that phrasing sounds a little weird, let me explain. Over these last three days, I’ve been watching Dharmesh Shah’s really great presentation on what he knows about startups, in which he talks, amongst other topics, about the attention economy vs. the wallet economy. If you haven’t already, you should really check it out!

The attention economy is based on eyeballs, on non-paying visitors to your site or users of your app that, through some magical reasoning, will translate into clicks on advertising, eventually leading to income to you the entrepreneur. I call that magical because no one I know of actually clicks on adverts.

The wallet economy is based on eyeballs with little hands reaching out of it that hold cash with which they pay you. I serve product A, it costs $20, you pay, I just gained $20 (minus cost of goods sold). The feedback is instantaneous and you don’t have to wait for X000 customers to land on your site and 0.000X% of them clicking on adverts.

This is pretty much the way the world has always worked, with the exception of newspapers and, arguably, the internet is one big newspaper (seriously lacking in editors).

It’s very easy to go the attention route, because it’s very easy to build soft-/webware in the first place. When you start a business in the real world, you make real investments, usually with the help of external funding like banks, that want to see a real return on their money. When you start a “digital” startup, you need a PC, you need to know some code, you need to spend $20 on a domain and $10-50 per month on hosting. The pressure isn’t there to really push for every dollar of income, because you aren’t feeling the banks et al. pushing down on your back. As a matter of fact, you can just set up a service, and go pursue another career, waiting for it to magically attract enough eyeballs to make you millions.

It’s nice, in theory, but it’s not what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurship is like the film “There will be blood.” Life is tough, you have to fight for every drop of oil, people hate you and you will probably end up killing (=divorcing) a member of your family in the process.

And that kind of work deserves the instant gratification that cash for your product provides.

The end. Have a nice weekend, y’all!

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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