Social Internet Growth and Adoption

I like to take generic polls or ask random people about new technologies to gauge where adoption is in the real-world since those of us that work in the industry can create real big niches and echo chambers.

A few recent observations include the following

• Last week I had the chance to speak to the first year MBA students at the Purdue Krannert School of Management. I had the opportunity to speak about careers in marketing and focused on my experiences in business to business marketing and product management. I also asked questions to the students in order to better focus the discussion and my examples. The total sample size was about a couple hundred people and it was interesting to note the social internet tools being used by this educated and connected group.
  • About 50% are Facebook users
  • About 20% are using Flickr or other photo service
  • About 10% are using LinkedIn, Plaxo or similar service for networking
  • No one admitted to using Twitter or a similar stand-alone micro-blogging service
• A few weeks ago I spent a couple days at the Defrag Conference where just from watching the audience one would guess 99% are using Twitter or a similar stand-alone micro-blogging service. In fact a big hit at the conference was the group Twitter stream (http://www.twitter.com/defrag08) that was set up by EventVue, the community software provider used by the conference, using the Gnip Platform. At times there were dozens of people live commenting on the sessions they were attending and the conversations among participants rivaled the actual presenter.
• While I was home for Thanksgiving I ended up trying to explain to my Mom what it is that Gnip does. Given I started a few months ago this is the first time I had seen in person and we eventually had the “so what does the new company do that you work at”. I really like these conversations with my Mom as it reminds me that the rest of the world knows very little about the software and technology industries — other then somehow Microsoft is bad and Apple is good, but why is not clear. Anyway, she got the idea that Gnip makes it easy to integrate data from sources across the Internet and several of my examples. Twitter really through her for a loop — she said “why would I want to post random thoughts and why would anyone want to read those?” and my favorite “how do you learn to get a meaningful thought in 140 characters?.

What does all this mean. I read a lot of reports from all kind of analysts on the adoption growth rates for social media as I am sure some of the people who bother reading my blog do as well. To me it seems that we probably have farther to go for more general adoption of the new social internet tools then we like to admit in the industry, which I usually attribute to the Echo Chamber issue. That said I remain very confident that many of the capabilities and tools that are available today will reach mainstream adoption like earlier communication and collaboration tools have over the years — think email, sms and instant messaging. These all several years or even a good decade or two in order to become mature and reach the mainstream. Being just a couple years into the evolution of the social internet we are very much only on the front to middle edge of early adopters.