Image source: adactio/flickr
Starting out down this road, our guiding question was, “what can we create that will facilitate connections between people in Cedar Rapids, preferably through local news.” To encourage participation and connections between users, we have to think about what will compel people to contribute, not just consume. We are looking to the lessons learned by successful social networking sites to guide us through our research and development.
For the sake of our sanity, and in the interest of completing something by the end of our quarter, we narrowed our focus and chose a specific subset of people in Cedar Rapids to keep in mind while developing our product.
We thought it would be a good idea to aim for Gazette readers who are relatively tech savvy and use the Internet regularly — one less hurdle to overcome in getting people to use what we create. It looks like this hurdle is getting smaller.
According to research by Forrester Research Inc.,
“Looking at the US data, the big news in 2008 is that, not unexpectedly, social technology participation has grown rapidly. Inactives — people untouched by social technologies — have shriveled from 44% down to 25% of the online population. Spectators — those who read, watch, or consumer social content — have ballooned from 48% to 69%. If you think social technology is about to become a universal phenomenon, we just handed you a nice little bundle of evidence.”
We chose to focus on connecting 20-34 years olds because research indicates they are more comfortable communicating online and more likely to read news online than pick up a newspaper.
It is encouraging to see research that suggests what we develop will be useful to more and more people if we incorporate social networking tools to break down the barriers that are keeping readers from contributing.
It is not only that more young people are using social networking tools, but that ,“Social activity is way up among 35-to-44 year-olds, especially when it comes to joining social networks and reading and reacting to content.”
Go to groundswell.com for more information and to learn more about the classifications used in the graphs and to see and illustration of the Social Technographics Ladder that breaks down different groups and methods of online participation.
