A huge study by Universal-McCaan was released about a week ago, but just seems to be hitting the blogosphere now for some reason. In a nutshell, there are bazzillions of us online now, and a significant portion of us are creating (as opposed to just consuming) content. The details are captured in this presentation:
There's been a fair amount of ooing and aaing about the the staggering numbers of content creators (bloggers, photo uploaders, Twitterers, etc.), but to anyone who makes a living on the Interwebs, these numbers really aren't that surprising. I think the Universal-McCaan study is having an impact primarily because it's a credible source delivering the news to those who aren't in the ecosystem yet, and who may still be thinking that it's just for kids, geeks, just a fad, etc.
The net effect ('Net effet?) is that product and service providers of all sizes are slowly losing control over what's being said about their offerings. People are much more interested in what other people have to say about them than what brands have to say about themselves. Like I said, not really news to the "active Internet users" that constituted the 17,000-member study sample, but probably big news to lots of other people.
Some noteworthy items from a ChoiceBot perspective:
-Slide 12: 28% of bloggers write about "Opinions on products and brands", 14% use widgets.
-Slide 17: "Active" Internet users create some kind of product-related message or content 25 to 44 times per month (!!!)
-Slide 38: Product and service providers have to be transparent now. To me, this says that product flaws and weaknesses are harder to gloss over now with big ad spending.
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