Global Web Index

It’s probably an understatement to say that Twitter together with Facebook is one of the most used buzzwords by online marketers these times. All kinds of firms, large or small around the world are now using Twitter to engage customers. Will it give an advantage over competitors? Will it make me look trendy to the eyes of my customers? And if I don’t use it, will I lose relevancy in my category against competitors?

In this post I’ll use the Global Web Index data to trace some basic profiling of Twitter users in order to better understand its scope in a marketing campaign.

How big is Twitter? (Really)

First of all let’s take a look at the actual popularity of Twitter around the globe. The chart below shows actual Twitter versus Facebook users (at least monthly) for each country. This datum is a much more accurate reflection of usage than the simple user count. The fact is that most of the people who sign up, not only post rarely, many of them never come back.

So who does use Twitter?

Let’s start with a basic gender segmentation. I select frequency of using Twitter and split the result by gender.
First of all we see there’s a slight prevalence of males among frequent users but probably not as much as you’d expect from a technology yet to go mainstream.

Young educated males

The mean age for daily Twitter users is just above 30 showing an inverse correlation with frequency of use. Education on the contrary is directly correlated with Twitter usage (being 30 = College and 40 = University.) In English, Twitterers are far more educated than the average.

This is reflected strongly in the type of frequent users. The blue fields in the left chart represent management positions while yellow and orange are for team members and support level employees.

The striking fact here is that half of daily and weekly Twitter users hold a position of responsibility in their job while non users are more likely to be junior staff. This might be a clue in favour of the use of Twitter in B2B communication.

Twitterers are NOT mainstream consumers

Digging more into the job fields we find a big delusion because a very big slice of daily twitterers work in IT or in marketing. So once again, the medium is the message. People working in IT are likely to use IT based communication tool and marketers are probably talking to themselves more than they are talking to customers.

At this point we have a fairly good set of information to draw some conclusions.

Regular Twitter users are educated, tend to be in their 30s and holding a position of responsibility all of which means that Twitter is good for engaging decision makers and liasing with people in business to business space.

Marketing professionals may use Twitter to communicate with their colleagues, to be updated on the hot topics while the use of Twitter to engage mainstream, FMCG customers appears to be less useful.

We’re delighted to announce the launch of our mini tool that provides anyone with the free of charge chance to view and play with the GlobalWebIndex data, and more importantly to start developing unique insights on social media.

With the LITE version you can get a snapshot of what motivates your audience, what they do online, and how they feel about brands in social media.

This data has been extracted from the GlobalWebIndex Wave 2 dataset (January 2010)and it is NOT dummy for demonstration purposes only.

Currently, the GlobalWebIndex clients have access to Wave 3 (July 2010), hence, we can publicise some subscription only data.

Of course, Global Web Index LITE is only a very small percentage of the full set of the Global Web Index data. If you find this interesting and you can see the value behind the data and the online tool in your business, get in touch and we’ll talk you through the main analysis platform, how our clients prefer to use it to build global web and social media strategies and how it is being used to drive business revenue.

Feel free to use the data, embed it and share the tool online and don’t be shy to tell us what you think: globalwebindex@trendstream.net

If you are new to the research and want to find out more about how we do it, please visit: http://globalwebindex.net/find-out-more

To stay in touch @globalwebindex or to register interest in a demonstration http://globalwebindex.net/demo

How it works

You can select country, gender, age bands and an attitudinal outlook (if you want). The attitudes we predefined for demonstration purposes  are based on the people who agree with the following questions:

• Risk taker: “I like to take risks”
• Informers: “I regularly inform friends and family on new products and services”
• Positives: “I feel positive about the global economy”
• Strivers: “I’m always striving to achieve more in life”
• Premium Lovers: “I tend to buy the premium version of the product
• Internationals: “It is important to stay in touch with what is going on in the world”
• Thrill seeker: “I like to pursue a life of challenge, novelty and change”

Once you define your audience you can analyse them against 3 key areas and against the country average:

• Motivations for getting online: What do online consumers consider to be “very motivating”. This question covers all reasons for getting online, but look out for social motivations, such as “staying in touch with friends”, “sharing content” or “promoting myself”
• Social media behaviour: What online consumers have done in the last month online. There are also non social behaviours in there for comparison. In the main research we also cover lapsed usage and non involvement
• Brands in social media: Which kind of social marketing communications “improve the opinion of a brand” in the eyes of consumers. Again there are non social executions for comparison

Remember this is a very small portion of the research, but it still provides you with a unique global perspective on social media trends and impact.

Please get in touch to find out more on the full research and the subscription tool that can provide you access to a globally unique dataset and insights.

In the July-August Issue of the Harvard Business Review appeared a story by associate professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski with an interesting infographic by designer Tommy McCall. The topic: different trends in social media adoption around the world.

Professor Piskorski is currently Assistant professor of business strategy at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and he’s been Assistant Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
He has published papers about the use of power in organizational behaviour and he’s been mentioned on The New York Times with an article about social networks Friendster and Myspace.
On his page at the Harvard Business School  we can find many cases about understanding business and users of social networks.

Today we are honoured to be cited in his latest work which main focus is a cross-countries study on the use of social networks.
Professor Piskorski found a clear divide between East and West of the world usage of social networks.
Surprisingly, Asians appear to be much more engaged in the social web than western users.
“Chinese and Indian users, for example, are three times as likely to microblog, or tweet, as American users. They’re also twice as likely to share videos.”

Another interesting point is about the emerging BRIC countries, where users are just approaching the social sphere and hence they face an already developed panorama of social tools while western users had the time to settle their social behaviour gradually over the past years.
This means that emerging countries are more likely to adopt a balanced use of all available social services, contrary to western users which tend to focus on the more “traditional” and established services.

The original article is at http://hbr.org/2010/07/vision-statement-mapping-the-social-internet/ar/1

Tom Smith was in the  IAB Interact Congress in Barcelona yesterday where he talked about  the challenges and opportunities of brands in the current social media world.

A snapshot of the 2010 global social media, an overview of data showing what consumers want from brands in this environment, as well as best in class examples and opportunities were the main areas covered in his presentation.

On the day he received an excellent feedback for the insights and thoughts but we are also interested for your comments!

Let us know what you think

On the day that iPad rolled out its global launch, we thought it would be apt to look at the levels of consumer interest in e-readers.

In the latest wave of our global survey we introduced a question about the potential interest in innovative devices. The following chart shows the breakdown of the answers by countries related to the e-readers category.

Basically if the price is right there is massive demand in all markets.

Interestingly the levels of interest are similar across all markets and broadly in line with the US. At around 35%. This shows a potential market of millions, but not a PC or mobile scale market. Considering that very few people have experienced the device in the first place it is surprising that about one third of the sample shows a strong interest in it.

Unexpectedly, the interest in e-readers is almost evenly spread across all age groups (with Germany being the exception). This goes against the common knowledge that only sees young people as early adopters of technological gadgets. Instead, our research shows that almost all age groups are equally appealed to e-readers and this should be kept into consideration when developing content and applications for the e-reader market.

The first of a series short reports utilising our data to highlight  key trends and insights. We created this series to demonstrate the power of the Global Web Index but this is only a small proportion of the research. Anyone  wanting a deeper dive to the interesting world of social media and technology can access the data at a subscription basis.

The Key Facts In This Report (feel free to share and use) are:

1. Globally, the Internet is still primarily a task based tool serving functional needs. People use it to make more informed purchase decisions, find news, find products, entertain and educate themselves
2. Looking specifically into social drivers, the more involved motivations such as creating content or publishing opinions are still niche
3. Fast growing internet markets are inherently more social and involved, sharing content and opinions across all social platforms such as blogging, micro-blogging and uploading video. This trend is reflected across all age groups
4. Content is increasingly more important motivation for online usage

With the world-cup just round the corner, we looked at the potential for online sports rights.

Our research shows that online rights are massively undervalued.

We strongly believe that many people would choose to watch football online rather than through a TV, however in the vast majority of cases there is no legitimate way of watching live online. This is a major market, that is being completely neglected. This is particularly the case in China, where watching full length programming online is the norm. Think of the potential for streaming EPL (English Premiership League) in China alone. Priced correctly, per stream and by subscription, there is a potential for millions of paying viewers. Integrate this with a community, live chat, peer to peer gaming and merchandise stores and the potential is even bigger.

The following release was sent to the press yesterday. If you have any views on this let us know!

With kick off of the football World Cup less than a month away, the latest research from the Global Web Index, a collaboration between online market research provider Lightspeed Research and Trendstream, demonstrates the massive potential for generating revenue from online sports rights.The survey of 16,000 internet users includes people in many of the countries who will be taking part in the tournament in South Africa including the USA, England, Mexico and South Korea.

Watched online in the last month Source: Global Web Index Wave 2

Massive potential for streaming online

This year’s football World Cup will be the first where mass market online video streaming is a reality across the globe. Typically online rights are bundled with the TV deal as an ‘add on’, but the Global Web Index demonstrates that these rights are seriously undervalued, with FIFA potentially missing out on millions in revenue. The research shows there is already massive take-up of sports highlights and full length programming online (Chart 1). The Chinese lead the way where thanks to video platforms such as Youku and Tudou that carry full length programming as standard, 35% had watched full length programmers online in the last month and 27% had watched sports highlights. Other countries are not far behind.

Won’t pay, will pay

More crucially there is huge, untapped potential for monetizing streamed sport content. When asked what method of accessing live sports streams, there are very interesting differences in behaviour by country (Chart 2). Sports fans in India, South Korea, China, Mexico and Italy are most likely to choose to pay for their fix. Indians are most likely to pay to enjoy streamed sports without advertising (37%) followed by South Koreans (32%). In direct comparison, those living in the US and European markets in the study – prefer free access, with ads. However there is still a very large interest in paying, and one that if monetized could be far more lucrative than the advertising revenue. It is a similar picture for watching clips of sporting highlights.

“This research shows that online football rights for the 2010 World Cup are massively undervalued” said Tom Smith Director of Global Web Index. “There is proven appetite for streaming all sports online and more importantly, consumers are increasingly paying for it. There’s a whole new generation of younger consumers, as well as specific markets like China and South Korea where paying for sports online is quickly becoming the norm. This research shows that the days when online sports rights are thrown in as a sweetener with the TV rights may be about to be shown the red card. “

Would consider paying for online access. Source: Global Web Index Wave 2

Preferred form of payment. Global sample. Source: Global Web Index Wave 2

Last week we headed over to Hong Kong for the second in a series of FutureWeb Events, this time hosted in partnership with Microsoft Advertising.

The night was a great success, with three presentations exploring the picture in Asia and what the rise in social involvement means for the changing marketing communications landscape.

A number of clear trends emerged:

1. Asia is leading the way in consumer publishing and sharing in external open environments. This is clearly the case with blogging, with China, South Korea, India and Japan all making up the leading markets. Asian consumers are also starting to dominate in other platforms, such as Social Networking usage where India now leads Brazil in active involvement.

2. Thanks to their massive internet populations, Asia dominates the social ecosystem in certain platforms. China is the most obvious example; we estimate that there are around 88m bloggers in China out of a global population of 240m

3. Forget the hype, Twitter and microblogging in general are still niche activities in Asia, although micro-blogging is growing in China thanks to a number of local players. As with elsewhere in the world, the users most likely to use Twitter work in IT or Advertising and Marketing! Also traditional platforms like forums or message boards are still the most active social platforms, even succeeding social networks in active usage.

4. Asian web users are extremely open to brand involvement online, both through advertising channels and also social media activities. They are also actively talking about brands.

That is just a few hi-lights, please find the full presentations below:

Presentation 1: Global Social Media Trends – Asia Impact. Tom Smith, Trendstream

Presentation 2: What does it mean for your brand. Jenny Armshaw-Heak, Lightspeed Research

Following the success of our London launch we are delighted to announce our launch event in Asia in partnership with Microsoft Advertising.

Three presentations will highlight key trends from wave 2 of the data around the rise of social media in Asia, the impact for brands, and the future of digital.

The event is free of charge but you will need to register here http://advertising.microsoft.com/asia/GWI

Future Web Asia Invitation

Social Web Involvment - Infographic #001

As part of a new series of infographics we have created a global map of social web involvement. We wanted to provide a clear visualisation of the way in which the world adopts social technologies differently. The map visualises the number of active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo uploaders and microbloggers. The length of the curve represents the penetration and the size represents the universe size. We have also included the actual numbers so you can use and apply the universe estimates.

To download the full size version fit for print, click here

An interactive version is coming soon that will allow you to create an audience segment and understand their web involvement by country.

Just a few of the big trends that are evident:

• The social web is mass market: Hundreds of millions of web users are creating and sharing content every month
• The massive impact of China: The vast Internet population coupled with hugely socially active set of web users, makes for a massive volume of content creators. However due to the inward looking nature of Chinas internet economy combined with the language mean that this volume of content does not impact the broader Internet
• Low engagement in Japan: We also associate Japan with technology innovation, and actual while you might not think it, the low engagement is indicative of progress. Why? Our map shows PC activity and we know from this research that a huge number of Japanese users are bypassing PC altogether and using mobile devices to access social platforms and create and share content. Just over 34% of social network users only accessed through mobile in the month of the research, this is compared to 3% in the UK, a staggering indication of where the future is heading.
• The low level of microblog engagement: Despite the Twitter hype, microblogging is still not a mass social activity and nowhere near the size and scale of blogging.

We also have a nice wall chart version, with a 2010 calendar. For your copy send us an email to: globalwebindex@trendstream.net

On the 23^rd of October I presented to the IAB Europe Social Media Research Showcase, sharing insights from Wave 1 of the Global Web Index. The presentation focused on Social Media involvement across Europe, motivations to get online, the impact of social media and the evolution needed from companies and brands. The presentation can be found below, and for subscribers in the client portal (where you can download it and reuse the slides).

Iab Social Media Research October 22nd 2010

View more documents from Tom Smith.

As well as looking at the current picture through the data, the presentation looked at three big future trends that make involvement today a must to evolve for a tomorrow where the social ecosystem impacts every purchase decision made:

The first big trend is that the passive impact of social media is bigger than the active one. By passive we mean the exposure and aggregation of opinions, reviews, ratings and recommendations to impact every web user, regardless of their personal social media involvement. In the short term this is through search; already in 2009, 85% have “searched last month” for information about specific products and 49% for “product recommendations”.  Increasingly these searches are dominated by consumer generated reviews or recommendations. Just try searching for a brand or specific product and you can see this impact. As the volume of consumer content continues to outpace professional, this trend will only increase.

Ultimately this means that consumers will increasingly define the first perception of a brand. In the future this will be dictated by social data being overlaid onto mobile devices through Social Augmented Reality, meaning every consumer getting geo relevant recommendations from their immediate network, distant network and people like them. Social will impact every decision we make.

The next big trends is that we increasingly consume content and information based on the consumer network of recommendation and consumer meta data rather than a professionally dictated decision. A consumer recommendation was the top ranked factor for consumers choosing music or videos. For news it was narrowly behind ‘professional’, ‘from a site I know’ and unsurprisingly along way behind ‘it’s recent’.

The future of content will not necessarily be ‘consumer’ created or ‘professionally’ created; it will however be dictated and controlled by the social environment. Take for example your current television service; the likelihood is that you access it via an Electronic Programme Guide. In ten years this EPG will have recommendations from consumers, top viewed programmes and programming tagged with key words. Viewing will be unpredictable and consumer driven. This will also happen with e-readers in the next 10-20 years, meaning that the “social” will eventually impact all aspects of media.

The last big trend we explored was how our digital networks are much now bigger than our face to face ones, for example in the US, the average face to face network is 21.4 and a Social Network one is 49.3. This changes the nature of our social groups and influences to include people we would have lost touch with, distant friends and people complete unknown to us in real life. This is a first in human history and has a significant impact by familiarising us with strangers and broad networks. This is important as we begin to build trust with other consumers and make big decisions based on what they say and we place less emphasis on what the traditional pillars of society say.

Our inaugural Future Web event explored key trends in Social Media usage, users, and the role for brands from the first wave of data. We had a very lively and engaged audience and excellent presentations from two of our launch clients, Microsoft Advertising and Mediaedge:cia, plus plenty of debate on the merits of brands getting on to Twitter.

The three trend presentations from last night can be found below, so feel free to circulate. The first from the founder of Trendstream and project leader, Tom Smith, looked at the main trends in Social Media behaviour, reasons behind them, and some big impacts on communications, our influences and content. The second from Julian Smith, Group Director Analytics and Insight, at Mediaedge:cia, explored the Active Participants, people who are actively creating content online and influencing large numbers of consumers on and offline.  The third presentation from Anita Caras, Head of Research EMEA at Microsoft Advertising explored the new role for brands, how brands should act in Social Media, and in-particular the need for brands to give consumers more than just static advertising.

Global Web Index Future Web 23rd Of September Final

View more documents from Tom Smith.

Who are the Active Participants

View more documents from Tom Smith.

Future Web, Global Web Index 23rd September 2009. The New Role For Brands

View more documents from Tom Smith.

The night was a great success and we plan to do another one soon. If you found the research interesting and you would like to trial the system so you can take a firsthand look at the data, please get in touch with the team at globalwebindex@trendstream.net to arrange a demonstration.

Our first event was macro focused, however we also collect brand data for a large number of consumer and web brands. This allows us to identify advocates online, establish the digital life of customers and non customers and quantify the role for your brand in social media and online advertising. To see examples of how this data can define the role for your brand in social media and drive your business online please get in touch.

We have data globally on the following brands. If your brand is not here, contact the team to add it to the next wave of the survey, but be quick as the next round of research closes for additions by October the 16th.

Beverage

Coca-cola

Pepsi

Red Bull

Evian

Alcoholic Beverage

MillerCoors

Smirnoff

Guinness

Bacardi

Budweiser

Asahi

Corona

Stella Artois

Jack Daniels

Absolut

Heineken

Carlsberg

Technology

Haier

Canon

Sony

Panasonic

Lenovo

IBM

Apple

Phillips

Toshiba

Microsoft

HP

Intel

Dell

Fashion / Retail

Home Depot

IKEA

Levis

Gap

Nike

Adidas

Puma

Reebok

Li Ning

Finance

HSBC

ING

Bank of America

Bank of China

China Construction Bank

MasterCard

American Express

Visa

Casual Dining

KFC

Pizza Hut

Burger King

McDonalds

Starbucks

Wendy’s

Subway

Domino’s Pizza

Hungry Jacks

Automobiles

Renault

Nissan

Toyota

Chrysler

Vauxhall

Opel

GM

Holden

Ford

Peugeot

Hyundai

Honda

Audi

Kia

BMW

Land Rover

VW

Jaguar

Citroen

Mercedes

Fiat

Seat

Mobile

Samsung

Motorola

Sony Ericsson

Nokia

Blackberry

iPhone

LG

HTC

Gaming

Xbox

Wii

PS3

PSP

DS

Web

MSN

Bing

Windows Live

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo

AOL Search

AOL

Windows Live Hotmail

BBC.co.uk / BBC.com

Bebo

Hi5

LinkedIn

Twitter

Ask.com

MSN Hotmail

Baidu

Google

Yahoo search

Gmail

YouTube

Itunes

Imageshack

Monster

Google maps

Facebook

Netlog

Cyworld

Viadeo

Yahoo Video

Flickr

Tudou

Blogger.com

Google Earth

MySpace

Skyrock

Tripadvisor

Windows Live Spaces

Google Video

Photobucket

Amazon

Microsoft office online

Multimap

Friendster

Orkut

Mixi

QQ

Fotolog

Ebay

Picasa

Windows Live Earth

Wikipedia

Windows Live Messenger

Windows Live maps

AIM

Google Talk

Yahoo Messenger

Skype

Rakuten

Tuenti

Yandex

libero

Orange

studivz

Sonico

vkontakte

Odnoklassniki

rambler

Naver

Daum

iPlayer

Hulu

As part of our launch, we are hosting an event on the 23rd of September to hi-light some of the key trends that come out of the research.

This event will give you a unique and very recent persepective of the web in 2009. We will present key insights around some of the big trends, including, the real-time web, social network platformisation and active participants. Full details below on the flyer.

The event is free, you just need to RSVP: gwi@lightspeedresearch.com

Future Web Invitation

As we prepare to open the Global Web Index platform to launch subscribers, we thought we would take the opportunity to share some screen shots of how it looks and how the subscriber can get the most out of the data set regardless of familiarity with research.

Analysis:

Trend presentations are published constantly through the year covering all aspects of the data, providing unique insights and thinking. You can search by tags, download to PowerPoint or Excel and share with your team. These presentations will tackle many interesting areas that come out of the data, including topics such as content creation segmentation, understanding the relationship between traditional media and social media and why Asia leads the way in content creation.

Trend documents

Data Tool:

We have teamed up with Confirmit to create an extremely user friendly data tool, which is as simple or detailed as you need it. You can customise charts, export the data into PPT or excel and you can filter them to provide the focus you need. If you want to go further you can run your own crosstabs so you can build complex audiences, or analyse the relationship between different aspects of behaviour. We will show you more of the data tool as we go live.

Data tool dropdown

Data Tool

The Global Web Index wa always about producing more than just data.

We designed it to be about driving insight, new perspectives, great thinking and developing an understanding of the impact. That is why there is a big focus on creating content around the research data.

Today we are releasing our first in a long line of insight reports called, Online Video: 2009 is Primetime.

This launch report shows you how video has become the quickest growing content delivery platform now comparable to TV. It also substantiates the ultra fragmented eco-system of video and also demonstrates how important consumer distribution will be in the future. We also give you rules for distributing video online and a perspective for the future.

As well as proving you with a good perspective on how big video online really is, it should demonstrate the kind of data and quality of insight that the Global Web Index will deliver. We try to make these reports visual, easy to read and actionable.  Please share this, download it and reuse the statistics.

Stay posted for the  global data releases this summer.

You can download it or view it in your browser:

Video Online 2009 is Primetime

Or find it on Slideshare:

As we near the launch we are releasing more preliminary data from the Global Web Index.

The following deck was presented to IAB Interact on June 12th. It ran through some US and UK data that covered the following topics:

• Motivations for going online: the number 1 reason is to research purchases, a demonstration that the web is an inherently commercial place. Motivations around connecting with people and creating and sharing content are driving social media usage.
• Social Media access points in the UK: Video leads passive consumption and Forums, while not trendy are the mass market home of community. It also shows that the leading way to share content is photos and hi-lights that regardless of the hype Twitter is still very niche.
• In-depth look at the video sharing market in the US: Consumers are transforming content and creating a rival to the traditional TV infrastructure.
• The impacts of Social Media: Network sizes are exploding and we trust opinions from total strangers above any kind of professional source of information (a quite staggering piece of information).
• The role for brands: Consumers value feedback and listening.

We hope this data demonstrates how interesting and useful the data from the Global Web Index will be.

To find out more or if you have any questions, please email me tom@trendstream.net.