89% of Your Customers Don't Blog

Far be it from me to be a pessimist; I think I'm more of a glass-half full kind of strategist, or at least that I have idealist/humanist leanings. That said, I can say that after checking out Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li's Harnessing The Power of Social Applications from the Sloan Review, that I need to give some of my readers a swift reality check. I'm in the midst of writing a social media strategy for four fairly well-known consumer packaged goods brand, and while I don't want to scare the shit out of them, I want them to leave my workshop equipped with solid tools, solid strategy and a realistic mindframe to execute from.

So, based on the aggregation of the Forrester studies from 2007, based on the United States, here are the key take-aways that I have, about our social media use, on average:

• 75% of your customers don't read blogs
• 89% of your customers don't write a blog, either
• 71% of your customers don't watch user-generated content
• 75% of your customers don't visit social networking sites (e.g. MySpace, Facebook)
• 82% of your customers don't participate in discussion forums
• 75% of your customers don't read online ratings or reviews
• 89% of your customers don't post online ratings or reviews
• 92% of your customers don't use RSS

 

These percentages are based on a metric of one-monthly usage. Keep in mind that these are broad-stroke averages, and I'm not attempting to belittle the importance of social media here. I'm just trying to set a realistic baseline, so that my clients and readers know who they're trying to engage with, when working with social media tools. So, for example, I'm working with a tea company that has about 500,000 unique customers in any given year, they can assume that the amount of current/prospective customers they'll be engaging with, in social media, will be about 100,000, give or take a bit.

And that's still a shitload of people. Better take 'em seriously.

I'll be at the Social Network Applications Platform Summit 2.0 tomorrow as well; if you'd like to record a podcast for Metzmash or LaunchSquad's Exclamation blog, come up and talk to me.

Comments

[jacob morgan]

Hey Adam,

Interesting stats, I read the Forrester report as well. You're absolutely right though, the 20% of people that DO BLOg (etc.) are probably the most important people to engage in conversations with. The idea is that eventually they will do a lot of the marketing for the brand.

[Jason Falls]

Fantastic stats and great information to pass along to clients. I'd guess most inside the bubble-ers will be surprised by the numbers, and while I think they're probably a little lower than your one-month, broad estimate, they certainly illustrate a ceiling for expectations we should put out there. Nice work, dude! And thanks for the knowledge.

[Mark Johnson]

Excellent stats and they *should* make marketers think before jumping onto the social media bandwagon. Why are these 11% valuable? What kind of marketing value are they expected to add? (And, I think that 11% of customer blogging is an incredibly high number!)

[Rajiv Doshi]

Thanks Adam for sharing this data, because I had not read the report yet. I think this is really important to understand because it sets the right expectations for any company's social media strategy.

[Jason]

Nice stats. Thanks.