B2B Buzz - New Community for Small Businesses from Hoovers Online
(Via MediaPost) Hoovers and several business cosponsors have launched a new “social community” for small business users called B2B Buzz. The site’s focus is primarily content:
The voice of the social community will guide the direction for a portal and business consortium that Hoover’s and contributors Outsell, Selling Power, and Shore Communications plan to launch Tuesday. For the first six months the group will focus on building and sharing its collective expertise on marketing and sales, along with a variety of business topics for entrepreneurs.
24% of US Adults are Active App Users (figure from PEW report linked above)
Interesting research from the PEW Research Center and Nielsen on The Rise of Apps Culture released earlier this month.
Key insights:
Of the 82% of adults today who are cell phone users, 43% have software applications or “apps” on their phones. When taken as a portion of the entire U.S. adult population, that equates to 35% who have cell phones with apps. . . . Of those who have apps on their phones, only about two-thirds of this group (68%) actually use that software. Overall, that means that 24% of U.S. adults are active apps users.
So nearly 1 in 4 U.S. adults report that they are actively using apps, which the report authors seem to think is low, noting that:
Broadly, results indicate that while apps are popular among a young, tech-hungry segment of the adult cell phone using population, a notable number of adult cell phone users are not part of apps culture. Many adults who have apps on their phones, particularly older adults, do not use them, and one in ten adults with a cell phone (11%) are not even sure if their phone is equipped with apps. Moreover, apps use ranks fairly low when compared with the use of other cell phone functions such as taking pictures and texting.
I guess this is a classic glass-half-full versus glass-half-empty scenario. Is it discouraging that only 1 in 4 US adults participates in “apps culture,” or is it encouraging that 82% of US adults are cell phone users, and nearly 1 in 4 are actively using applications on those phones?
Further, the data shows that age is the strongest predictor of app usage:
While 79% of 18-29 year-olds who have apps on their phones say they use them, that figure drops to 67% among 30-49 year-olds and just 50% among adults age 50 and older.
There’s lots more useful stuff in the report, which is available freely: download it and check it out.
Photo by Adam Fagen of Display at the Smithsonian Museum of American History - http://www.flickr.com/photos/afagen/3155132290/
Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker this week: “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” is a really compelling read, and a nice antidote to technological determinism in our understanding of social meda (the idea that the new technologies shape behavior and determine outcomes rather than interacting with behavior and both shaping and being shaped by the interaction) but ultimately I think he gets it wrong. Gladwell represents networks of weak ties as an absence of organization incapable of achieving meaningful change, and mistakes what has been done via Twitter and Facebook for all that social media and free/open source approaches could be capable of. Continue reading →
When I got the above email from Sears inviting me into a new social shopping experience, I hoped that they’d found a way to combine MySears and Sears.com together more contextually and pervasively, letting me move easily between the “get advice before you buy” approach of MySears.com (with its action verbs being join, explore, and connect) and the shopping focused Sears.com.
They haven’t, but what they have done is introduce more social functionality into the shop. Visit sears.com and in the utility navigation right underneath the multi-brand bar (Sears, Kmart, Crafstman, Kenmore, Lands End, etc) you should see an option which toggles between “visit our social site” and “leave our social site.” Clicking on “visit our social site” and you’re greated with this splash screen explaining the new experience: Continue reading →
Photo by Alun Salt - http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/253596595/
Last week Forrester Research published an update to their popular (and useful) Social Technographics report which showed that- depending on which pronouncements you read- seemed to indicate that online social activity had reached a plateau, or was even shrinking. Just a quick sample:
PCWorld said: “This year, a smaller percentage of U.S. Internet users are contributing to social media sites” and argued that “companies need to find ways to re-engage those U.S. Internet users who have stopped participating on their social media sites”
CNN reported that “the report . . . says people joining online social networks aren’t uploading videos, posting status updates and engaging in conversations like those before them”
Raymond Nuez at the Huffington Post went so far as to title his piece “Where have all the content creators gone?”
ReadWriteWeb summarized it as “Social networking users are creating less content” and followed Forrester’s Jacqueline Anderson in suggesting that this is cause for concern because (their subhead) “Fewer Creators Mean Fewer Ideas”
Arguably all the fuss has its origin in a blog post on Forrester’s site announcing the new report, which notes:
many groups in the US market plateaued. Creators, the group that is actually adding content to the Internet, are one example of this lack of growth.
(Though she does note they still represent 41 million US online adults). She goes on to conclude:
The story behind the data is pretty clear. The initial wave of consumers using social technologies in the US has halted. Companies will now need to devise strategies to extend social applications past the early adopters.
Looking at the numbers in the actual report, though, shows a much more muted story. Yes, the percentage of US Online Adults identified as creators did change from 24% to 23% between the 2009 survey and the 2010 survey. This is the core data point folks latched on to (this plus a change in critics from 37% to 33%, and a rise of inactives from 18% to 19%). But does this mean we’re all fresh out of new ideas? Nothing new being created on the web? No more activity from “the group that is actually adding content to the internet” (as opposed to merely commenting, repeating, critiquing, consuming, and lurking around)?
