The Data Heads

I’ve tabulated the Web 2.0 Survey results, and I’m surprised by what I learned. (Isn’t that often the case when you go to the data?)

I modeled this survey on one I found in blog that serves a niche in the banking industry. I figured their survey would provide a good benchmark. It did.

The results? It looks like we’re behind the adoption curve. Compared to the banking industry where 65% of respondents read professional blogs on a daily basis, only 9% of all of our responsdents do so, and only 5% of GainSeeker users.  On a daily basis, our most popular activities are instant messaging, using an RSS Reader (which is curious, since we’re not following blogs every day), updating our Facebook profile, and using wikies.   We just don’t care about photo sharing, MySpace or FriendFeed.

If we add in our total use (daily, weekly and monthly) and what we’re curious about, videos jump to the top (95%), followed by instant messaging (65%), reading personal blogs (58%) and using LInkedIn (56%). Reading Professional blogs still garners interest from less than half the respondents (49%). Writing blogs in any form, and social bookmarking rank way at the bottom, and Twitter holds interest for less than 25%.

(Click to open full size in new window.)

Interestingly, when we segment GainSeeker Users from the rest of the respondents, they are even slower to adopt the new technology. Only 6% use some form of Web 2.0 on a daily basis (compared to 8% from the total population in our survey). More significantly, only 14% use any form of Web 2.0 compared to 31% of the general population.

Here is how GainSeeker user’s stack up their actual and potential use.

Another piece of very useful information comes from the question “How likely are you to use one of these ways to learn about GainSeeker Suite?” Not surprisingly, given the preference for watching on-line videos, we need to start making more videos. Customers also like white papers, online seminars, live users conferences and an email newsletter. They are not very interested in reading blogs or getting a print newsletter.

So my take-homes:

Given that 30% of our customers are on IM, I just set up an AIM account. You can contact me using my email address: ejmiller at hertzler dot com.  We should make publishing videos a higher priority. We’ve done a little already.  For example, here is a video about OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and Dashboards that I put together back in February. It looks like we should start shooting some more, and institute an email newsletter to promote the videos and our existing (and new white papers). We should also consider some on-line seminars. I think we could also get more mileage out of LinkedIn. It looks like there is an interest in using it, but few people seem to know what to do with it.

This captures a snapshot of our use of Web 2.0. I wonder what it will look like a year from now? What do you think? Or is there another way you’d like to look a the data? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, or leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.

If you’re on our mailing list you’ll get an email from me later today that invites you take a survey about your use of social media. If you’re not on our mailing list, consider this your invitation to take the survey now.  Here is what I wrote to my customers:

In the last few years social media has exploded on the web. Perhaps you already are Linked-In and Twittering - or maybe you’re on Facebook, and bookmarking websites with Delicious.

For the last several months I’ve been dabbling in blogs and twitter.  I can see some great potential for how we communicate with and support our customers, and how we might help our customers connect with each other. Together we can solve more problems and make the world - at least our little corners of it - a better place.

But I need a reality check. Being a data guy, I’d like to get some hard data about what you’re doing with social media today. I invite you click on this link and take a short survey. I’ll use this data to see if we can create better ways to share and discuss information among our customers. Here is the survey.

Once you’ve completed the survey, I invite you to join one or more of my networks. If you’re already on Linked-In, please review my profile and join my personal network using my email address (ejmiller at hertzler dot com). You can also sign up to follow me on twitter. Finally, you can subscribe to my blog in a reader through Feedburner.

Of course I’ll publish the results in my blog, so you can stay tuned there.

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts.

Interested in the survey and the results? Use the ShareThis button below to mark this page, or leave a comment, tweet me, schedule a conversation, or call 800-958-2709.