Social Media Demographics and Technographics 2009 Update

As you've seen in earlier blog posts, I'm a big fan of the smart people at Forrester Research and the frameworks they create to systematically evaluate and understand markets and trends.  About a year ago I wrote about "Social Media Demographics and Technographics" and pointed to Forrester's book "Groundswell" and their initial attempt to meaningfully map social media users and adoption.

As it turns out, their initial framework has stood the test of a chaotic year with one addition which I'll mention later.  But first, I thought it would be fun to see how technographic adoption for my own demographic has shifted during this year of explosive social media adoption.

Here's the data from 2008 for men my age in the U.S. and the ways in which they participate in social media:



Here's the 2009 data for the same group:

Are there any surprises?  Not really.  The biggest leaps are in the "Creators", about a third more men, and in the joiners, about 50%  more.  About a fifth of this segment doesn't participate vs. a quarter a year earlier.

The indexes vs. all adults indicate that these men have actually not grown in social media usage as much as women and younger male demographics, again as we might expect.

You can use this Forrester tool right here to access data for other demographics.  Remember, the rungs are not mutually exclusive segments-most people participate in multiple ways.




Forrester also realized with the advent of Twitter and increased use of social status updates that there was a missing rung on the ladder.  So they've added a rung going forward called "Conversationalists".  Here's their new technographic ladder:

Click on the ladder to go to Forrester and find more great Groundswell information.