This spring I had the chance to speak to a lot of groups about viral marketing, word of mouth and social networks. Somewhere along the last few weeks, many of my assumptions about what demographics are using social networks were corrected.
Intuitively it seems that the younger someone is, the more likely she is to use social networks. Anecdotally, I found the "age/likeliness to use social networks" graph to be more of a bell curve than a ski run.
When I talk about Digg and del.icio.us to groups of marketers, public relations practitioners and business minded folks, they nod their heads and have a story or two about how they are using/have tried to use these tools for marketing or networking.
At the same time, when speaking to groups of college students, my request for a show of hands as to who uses Digg, or even MySpace, is met with a sparse showing.
Meanwhile, our friends at eMarketer.com published an article showing just how much baby boomers rely on word of mouth to make decisions. According to eMarketer, boomers use WOM about 90 times a year in making purchasing decisions. And 46% of respondents between the ages of 42-50 rely on online WOM.
Interesting post...not quite the findings I would have expected. Thanks for a relevant post with good information!
Posted by: Yvonne Rayburn | March 26, 2007 at 09:33 AM