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

If you are new to Twitter then it’s easy to get confused with so many twitter applications out there. Further, if you are a business user than you may have no time to do research on the applications. We really can’t deny the fact that businesses are testing out Twitter as part of their steps into the social media landscape.  You can say it’s a stupid application, that no business gets done there, but there are too many of us (including me) that can disagree and point out business value. I used many of the tools available in internet to manage my old twitter account.

With this idea behind I am trying to categorize the tools which may be helpful for our readers to use according to their needs. Here are some twitter tools  along with the snapshots which impressed me and according to me will be easy to use even for a newbie to  promote his/her business .

1. Buzzom Premium http://premium.buzzom.com/

Buzzom Premium is very newly launched application which allows you to focus in your twitter growth. It has many functions to choose from but more essentially its spam filter, scheduler and monitor. These are the three basic functions over which the application is build.

Direct Message is full of SPAM and it is almost unusable now. Thanks to various gaming applications and welcome or thank you messages. I like Buzzom SPAM filtering for DM. It actually makes this feature usable.

Buzzom also provides a great way to visualize your Twitter growth and network’s activity such as tweets, Retweets etc. The service also has the auto grow and follow system to increase your network’s size. Scheduler allows you to schedule tweets at certain time and control it by specifying its repeat cycle for future tweets.

2. Twonvert http://www.twonvert.com/

Twitter is all about 140 characters of words. People are already got use to expressing themselves in 140 characters with shorthand notation and some ingenuity. But that takes time and when you are in hurry, its more frustrating. With Twonvert you can easily convert your tweets into SMS shorthand language and allows you to say more with less characters!

3. Wefollow http://wefollow.com/

WeFollow is the directory of all the people in the Twitter, who have added themselves to the list. It provides an easy way for you to find relevant people in twitter and connect with them. You can find all short of people from celebrity to technologist in the list. WeFollow.com helps you use your time efficiently by making your people search easy and fast.

4. Twitscoop http://www.twitscoop.com/

Twitscoop is the service which lets you search the real-time trend in the twitter. Twitscoop uses the dynamic tag cloud to show the most talked topic in an interactive way. You can also search for related keyword and finds its popularity in the Twitter network.

Overall, it allows users to “Mine the thought stream” provided by Twitter. Twitscoop’s algorithm cuts every English non-spam tweets into pieces (“tags”), and ranks them by how frequently they are used versus normal usage. Twitscoop can essentially be described as your real-time web’s monitor.

5. Twittercal http://twittercal.com/

Managing your calendar is very tedious. You may have to enter new task on the go and may not have access to web version of Google calendar. Now you can do that easily via Twitter, you just have to send a small tweet and it gets added to your Google Calendar.

It’s a free service that connects your Twitter account to your Google Calendar. Add events in a snap from your favorite Twitter client. Follow the 5 steps procedure to get started.

6. Socialtoo http://www.socialtoo.com/

Socialtoo is a paid service that lets you manage your twitter account by autofollow and unfollow tool. It also provides you basic statistics about your followers count and tweet count. It helps you manage your account and reduce the spam in your network.

It has interesting features like social survey that allows you to create survey that will allow you to understand your network much better.

7. StrawPoll http://strawpollnow.com/

Can you measure the sentiment of your network? Ets say you have 1000 people in your network, getting everyone’s opinion one to one is difficult. If you just want to measure if your network is Pro Apple or Pro Google, what do you do? Well Strawpoll is the tool you are looking for.

StrawPoll is the coolest way to follow the opinions of people onTwitter. It allows you to create poll and communicate with your network and understand their opinion.

8. TweetDeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/

Tweetdeck is the most popular desktop application for Twitter developer in Adobeair. It is very popular for its interface. It provides you a very easy way to maintain your daily twitter activities. Tweetdeck provides easy way to group your friends into different tabs and clean up the twitter stream. You can also search in the Tweetdeck and open a dedicated tab for the keyword; this allows you to track them easily. Recently, TweetDeck also has added TweetDeck Directory which is similar to WeFollow.

9. Stocktwits http://stocktwits.com/

StockTwits is an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments. Users can eavesdrop on traders and investors, or contribute to the conversation and build their reputation as savvy market wizards. The service takes financial related data and structures it by stock, user, reputation, etc.

User can add a set of specific stocks, save them to their own portfolio and limit the conversation around it or focus only on their favorite and trusted sources. Watch the whole stream or create your own filters. User can follow the best on the site, the best only in your areas of interest and in turn share your best actionable ideas. This is the best Twitter related financial site on the web does this in real-time.

10. TwitterSearch http://search.twitter.com/

TwitterSearch is the basic framework of the entire search engine that is present. It provides an easiest way to find out tweets related to keywords. It also has an advanced feature that lets you customize your query to find relevant tweets. It is small but powerful tool.  Once you get hang of it, it can be your most powerful tool of all. Beside search, it was shows the trending topic which can be useful to get hold of the perspective of twitter.

To Actually understand how to use twitter to promote your business here is a link to an awesome article by Chris Brogan.

P.S : All the rankings and stats are based on my personal opinions and experiences while using them.