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New study by Rubicon Consulting on online communities

I read “Study: Influencers are Alive and Well on Social Media Sites” in the New York Times today, which led me to the underlying study by Rubicon Consulting, “Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril.”

I’ve only just started reading the article, but I didn’t want to loose the link and I wanted to make sure anyone reading this blog could find it also.  The report appears to be a general survey on web usage.  They studied over 3000 Internet users in the US to see what online communities they used and the impact those communities had.

Key conclusions include:

  • “You should think of an online discussion as theatre”
  • “You’ve mistaken your fellow actors for the audience. Take care of the active participants in a community and the audience will watch and learn”
  • “If you needed more incentive to work with the Internet, it turns out that the web has also become the number two source of product support information for web users”

and a set of interesting data:

  • “About a quarter of web users say they have dated someone they first met online”
  • “Although Twitter and SecondLife get a lot of press, their audiences are very narrow when you compare them to major social sites like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn”
  • “Yahoo is the second most valued website in the minds of US web users, after Google. It’s ahead of major web properties like YouTube and Wikipedia”
  • “The major social networks are much more satisfying and useful to teens than they are to adults. In fact, satisfaction with the social sites peaks at age 14 and declines steadily with age”
  • “Democrats are more active online than Republicans, and say the web has a greater influence on their behavior, including voting”
  • “Young people dominate online conversations, with people 22 and under producing about half of all user-generated content and comments. So if you sometimes feel like you’re dealing with kids online, it may be because you are”

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One Comment

  1. purplehayz (purplehayz)
    12:50 pm on October 25th, 2008

    New blog post: New study by Rubicon Consulting on online communities https://www.alephnaught.com/Blog/?p=749

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