Social Media Optimization

Forrester released The Broad Reach of Social Technologies today.  It's a very impressive, consolidated look at 3 years of behavior on the web.  Forrester's take away is that the growth of social networks, especially with consumers, ages 35 and up, has skyrocketed from 24% in 2007, to 34% in 2008, to a projection of 50% in 2009.

That's an impressive story, though I'd challenge that this means all companies should be dumping all their marketing resources in Social Media services.  Having a presence is important, but the intent of consumers in social networks, such as Facebook, is still not primarily to research and do business.

More importantly, Spectator activities are up significantly:

• Read customer ratings/reviews of products or services up from 25% to 48%.
• Watch video from other users up from 29% to 55%.
• Read blogs up from 25% to 39%.

Other activities like contributing and reading forums, wikis and discussion groups are flat or down year over year.


This data coincides with the Hype Cycle, and provides us with incredible insight that the demand for companies to have a corporate blog are on the rise.  If you've not but together a social media strategy yet, find yourself a business blog consulting firm (we'd be happy to be your blog coach) and get an effective strategy in place that will grow your business.

Consumers are researching the web, looking to do business with companies like you.  Are you there yet?