Adults Have Already Embraced Social Media
If you are still questioning whether social media is a technology category worth embracing yourself as a teacher or staff member, or that you must be learning about it yourselves in order to understand it intuitively and be able to engage your students, then you'll be interested in the just published Forrester Research third annual Social Technographics Profile called, The Broad Reach of Social Technologies:
Social technologies continue to grow substantially in 2009. Now more than four in five US online adults use social media at least once a month, and half participate in social networks like Facebook. While young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of social applications, the most rapid growth occurred among consumers 35 and older. This means the time to build social marketing applications is now. Interactive marketers should influence social network chatter, master social communication, and develop social assets — even if their customers are older.
While this $499 report is invaluable, there is enough solid data in Forrester's book Groundswell -- coupled with the ongoing blogging and analysis put forth by the analysts following the social media category -- that you can glean enough information to make a decision on moving forward or not.
When you see the number of US online adults participating socially, I think you'll be surprised.
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Looking at the data by age, Forrester sees:
- Participation among those under 35 is nearly universal (less than 10% Inactives)
- Of those 55 and over, about two-thirds are participating
- Europeans continue to adopt these technologies more slowly than in the US, with about 40% Inactives in the countries where Forrester does surveys
- The Netherlands and Sweden have the most participation, Italy has the most Creators, and social networks are most popular in the UK
- Asian social participation is typically as high as or higher than in the US. For example South Korea has only 9% Inactives and 48% Joiners, as a result of the popular CyWorld social network site
- To dig in to the data more, look at this tool here.
Bottom line? You need to be actively engaged with social media. Your students are. Your parents are and it's likely your colleagues, peers and just about everyone else is too.
It's also interesting how engaged Asia Pacific countries are with social media. Long term competitive concerns (outlined eloquently by Thomas Friedman in his books "The World is Flat" and "Hot, Flat and Crowded," means that any student competing in a global economy must be fluent, and have mastered, the use of social media technologies and the media competency and literacy that goes with its use.
What will you be doing this school year with social media, either for yourself, your district, school or students?
