Understanding the composition of social networks, by country

A friend of ours, James Thomson (of Whisky.co.uk - talk about a cool URL..) provided a good link to the Groundswell section Forrester's research into social networking and in particular the user profies. I think this is very fascinating, and of interest to just about all who read our blog. What does it reveal? The research gives us six categories of people and how they relate to social networking. There are the Creators, the Critics, the Collectors, the Joiners, and the Spectators. And then the Inactives.

So for example in the USA, Forrester tells us 44% of the people are inactives, etc. But the more intersting part is to contrast the ratio of Creators to Critics. In the USA these are rougly equal (more critics than creators); in Europe there are twice as many Critics than Creators. But in South Korea there are 3 Creators for every 2 Critics. Perhaps this helps explain why in an information age, a collaborative age, a Connected Age as we say in our book Communities Dominate Brands, the South Koreans have produced so many innovations, and why they achieve so rapid adoption and growth in Korea.

But yes, the tool is quite interesting, please hop over to Forrester and see it for yourself. You have to click on the orange colour box on the right-hand side, which says "Build Profile Now". Then select your country.

Comments

[Tommi Holmgren]

Amazing link! Thanks for sharing.

I think this really shows (or at least emphasizes) the difference of US and EU in social media adoption. In age group of 25-34 creators of in US is 30% and in EU it's 11%. South Korea certainly is in it's own league... Does it have something to do with the age pyramid in South Korea? I would guess that there's a large population of rather young people compared to older people. Like the opposite of Finland. :)

Tomi, you might know the answer: are the South Koreans mainly/solely contributing in their local social networks (ie Cyworld and stuff) or do they also visit English sites?

And one more observation: the site is one good example of how to promote a book! I was ready to buy...

[Alan Moore]

Dear Tommi,

In terms of your pyramid - South Korea is networked by broadband in a way that is quite amazing. enabled by a vision of the digital and networked world.

The US is the mother to the DNA of the web - though we did have Tim Berners Lee and so much great thinking abut social networks, communities, new business models comes out of the US more naturally.

Here in Europe we stymied adoption of the internet until very recently for a whole variety of reasons in the same way that mobile operators don't realise the very real and very valuable assets they possess in raw but very rich data.

And please recommend our book to a friend

Thanks for dropping by

Alan