I've spent the last year living and working in Vancouver, Canada — speaking with many Canadian interactive marketers and agencies, and collecting survey data on Canadian consumers — so I'm pleased to say that yesterday we released a new report, Canadian Social Technographics Revealed, and added our latest Canadian data to our free Social Technographics Profile Tool.

In researching this report, I learned that:

• Canadians are the most active social networkers in any market we survey. In our Social Technographics Ladder, we refer to those who regularly use social networks as 'joiners.' And Canada boasts a higher percentage of joiners than any of the other 12 countries we regularly survey: 57% of Canadians told us they use social networks at least once each month. (The next strongest social networking market is the US, where 51% are joiners.) Canada also has more 'creators,' critics,' and 'spectators' than many other countries. [An edit to avoid confusion: while Canadians are the strongest adopters of social networks we've found in our surveys, they are not the strongest users of social media overall (which would include not just social networks but also blogs and other social platforms) -- that would be the South Koreans.]
• Many Canadian marketers have been using social media for years. With all those socially engaged consumers, it's no surprise Canadian marketers have been pretty aggressive in adopting social media too. The report includes several great examples of marketers successfully using social media, and I found that some of the most innovative marketers (like Vancity and Molson) have been leveraging social media for 3 or 4 years now.

One of my favorite examples of social media marketing in Canada comes from the political realm. NDP leader Jack Layton recognized that his followers were among the most socially engaged in Canada, as you'll see below. So he used Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to energize NDP voters before the 2008 federal election — and that helped the party gain 31% more seats in Ottawa than they'd had in the previous government.

Go and have a play with our Social Technographics Profile Tool and you can find free cuts of this data by age and gender. (Clients can also ask us to cut the data by other factors, like where people bank, which mobile carrier they use, or what province they live in.)

And if you've got any other great examples of social media marketing in Canada, let us know in the comments below.

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The much-praised reputation mechanism that is supposed to ensure that bloggers remain true, honest and factually-correct is, in fact, just the rule of the mob, where those who shout loudest and get the most inbound links are taken more seriously and visited!! It is the online equivalent of saying that The Times of India always tells the truth because four crores people read it, and Indian Express is intrinsically less trustworthy as it only sells 2 crores.

How blogging is changing journalism and whether blogging is actually journalism? I am not denying the significance of blogging, or the value that comes from having the unmediated opinions and experiences of millions of people available online. Blogging left the geeks behind long ago, and the wide availability of easy to use tools like India City Pages, Blogger, WordPress, b2evolution, Movable Type and Grey Matter has allowed anyone with an interest and some time to create their own online journal.

I just do not subscribe to the view that this challenges mainstream journalism, even if it does mean that sloppy reporting and analysis based on incorrect assertions are more likely to be challenged by the online community.

On Google’s Blogging Plans? Some think that Google was simply helping out an innovator in hard times. Others see it as the start of an attempt by this most successful of search engines to own the blogospace all the blogs. Another theory has it that Google will use the content from the blogs it now owns to fine tune its news service by using the bloggers as an early warning system on breaking stories. The Indian equivalent of it is IndiaCityPages.com!

Author is the Lead Web Consultant with Solution Point.

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And the trend is growing. For consumers, UGC creates opportunities that were inconceivable 10 years ago, when self-expression consisted of letters to the editor, town hall meetings and call-in shows. Now-a-days, whenever people get fired up about anything, they take to the Web – to create, read, listen to or view what other people have to say.

Contrary to common wisdom, and looking at the realities of Web – content owners, marketers, site publishers, entrepreneurs and everyday opportunists are realizing that there is no easy road to make millions in user-generated content business either, and finding lucrative niches will require patience, risk-taking, creativity and a long-term commitment. Moreover, UGC on social networks is such a powerful consumer activity and at the same it is incredibly challenging as a marketing medium. If you are promoting an offline business in the online world, you will need to have the option for users to generate content on your site, otherwise you will be seen as rather abnormal and certainly behind the times.

If you do not know where to start, create a blog and allow people to comment (Need Help? Hire Professionals like Solution Point). Do something to allow your users to generate content for your site. UGC sites like Real Estate Times still pull attention away from traditional media, such as newspapers, magazines, television and radio – and putting increased financial pressure on them at a time when they can least afford it.

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Among the most popular ones in India are Real Estate Times (for real estate) and India City Pages (for India specific information). Coming up are social networks for jobs and career, politics, insurance, health care, education and many others with common technology platform and niche user-base.

There are several reasons for the more targeted approach to social networking and the major one is now users prefer to connect with people with whom they share common interests, such as hobbies or professional associations, other than knowing somebody who knows somebody who is listed as a MySpace friend. The sites that commend the highest figures per ad impression are typically those that can tell the advertiser something about their audiences’ likely spending habits. Sites focused on shared interests allow advertisers to better target their messages.

For example, if a company wants to market Rs. 2 crores worth golf villas, would it seem more worthwhile to entice the eyes of millions of heavily under-financed, under-graduates on Facebook or MySpace? Or would it be better to seek clicks from a smaller supply of people, such as Real Estate Times, the total membership of which may be low, but many of them are likely to be far more interested – and able – to make such a luxurious expense? Moreover, such niche networks are managed by REAL professionals – as the lesser mortals prefer something very general, which are TOO easy to build and manage.

Our new media trend analysis and consumer insight studies show that marketers are now willing to look at the general demographic of a membership site or portal before purchasing ad spots, don’t be surprised to see even more niches getting social networked! With global downturn and squeezing ad budgets, media planners can go any length to put their bucks right on target, avoid gimmicks and noise.

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Click here to submit your web story. The system will take it and format it nicely for us to review, comment on, and possibly publish and distribute to all users and subscribers worldwide. Our news stories and reports are also syndicated by many other technology magazines, internet blogs, media websites, etc. Please stick to the basic guidelines as below before submitting. We receive a lot of submissions so not everyone will get posted. Thank you!

We do not want to post press releases or just promo of your web links! We get way too many of these, and that’s not what we’re here for. A press release or your company profile are practically unverifiable content for us, and we want something BIG we can dig into. We consider only full length feature articles, web reviews and reports, editorials, real experiences, case studies, etc. related to Search Marketing, New Media Strategy Development, and Online Business Marketplace.

You can provide interesting links and commentary on longer articles about SEO or SEM written elsewhere. If you just send in a little blurb saying “I like seo.com and think they are great” we will not publish it. Find an article about that site and topic, your comments and provide the link, and we’re more likely to find it worth publishing. We will publish news that is new and recent, authentic and unique. Keep these things in mind, and we look forward to your submissions.

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Publish & manage your own free blogs about Any Topic or News Stories, Technology, Jobs & Career, Real Estate & Finance etc.

So what do you need to get started blogging? A computer and an Internet connection, for starters. There are several websites devoted to the art of blogging. Some Indian sites include India City Pages, Real Estate Times, etc. Social networking services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. also provide free blogs to communicate.

Its wonderful that worldwide publishing is now available to anybody with a web site. There are a lot of great writers and great stories out there, and now we get to see what we would have missed if the Web do not exist. The Internet is still in the embryonic stages of standing on its own characteristics. Communication and content presentation strategies still mirror existing models, particularly newspaper and magazine publishing. Email, for example, is merely an extension of existing mail systems. As such, it is about bending a new medium to an existing process.

Blogging is using a new medium for what it is good for – connecting and interacting. Blogging is a first generation tool built on, and taking advantage of, the unique attributes of the Internet. It has been dismissed as a self-centered passing fad and as the new model of interactive journalism, communication, and learning. This article explores the the uses, benefits, implications, and art of blogging.

- If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. These tools spit out our varied content in the same format archives, permalinks, time stamps, and date headers.

- What online bloggers do is completely new – and cannot be replicated on any other medium. Its somewhere in between writing a column and talk radio. Its genuinely new. And it harnesses the webs real genius – its ability to empower anyone to do what only a few in the past could genuinely pull off. In that sense, blogging is the first journalistic model that actually harnesses rather than merely exploits the true democratic nature of the web. Its a new medium finally finding a unique voice.

- The best description regarding blogging is that its somewhere between “writing a column and talk radio”.

Blogging, as detailed above, is a format constant (archives, links, time stamps, chronological listing of thoughts and links), personalized, community-linked, social, interactive, democratic, new model innovation built on the unique attributes of the Internet.

Uses for blogging and social networking: As an emerging tool, blogging uses have still not been completely explored. Some current uses:

* Knowledge sharing and knowledge management – see Bottoms Up KM Development
* Country/Community Focus – see www.indiacitypages.com
* Interactive journalism – see www.realestatetimes.in
* Communication – see www.solutionpoint.in
* Self-expression – twitter.com/solutionpoint
* Learning – see www.jobspoint.in
* Self-marketing
* Campaigning/social reform – see www.indiacitypages.com
* Community building – see www.indiacitypages.com
* Experience tracking – See www.seotrends.in
* Storytelling – see www.indiacitypages.com

Most common uses for blogging are personal and, considering its origins as a personal web publishing forum, this makes sense. Emerging uses promise opportunities in corporations and education. Further application will also be realized as existing uses (communication, learning, knowledge management, interactive journalism, etc.) are adopted by various industries – notably entertainment, health care, government.

Benefits: Benefits of blogging are numerous (which explains its rapid growth!). An overriding benefit is the democratization of information. In classic models, knowledge flow was stopped and administered by news sources (paper, magazines, TV). Ideas in keeping with current zeitgeist or political agendas received top billing, while unpopular (though necessary for innovation and social transformation) ideas were ignored. Many of the benefits of blogging are listed above in Uses for Blogging other benefits include:

- Fostering the fringe – ideas are evaluated based on merit – not on source of origin.
- Filtering – ideas with merit are filtered through various blogs. Significant thoughts or posts receive multiple-links and spread viral-like across the blogosphere.
- Multiple perspectives – one-sided perspectives of newspapers are replaced by passionate debates exploring virtually every facet of an idea or concept.
- Barrier elimination – society is about barriers – actual or unspoken. For example, I dont run in the same circle as Bill Gates – a socio-economic barrier (at the absolute minimum!). In society, this generally means that I do not have the benefit of Mr. Gates wisdom blogging, however changes that. Opportunities now exist to hear regular thoughts from people like Ray Ozzie, Mitch Kapor, and Larry Lesig.
- Free flow – any idea can be expressed and accessed by any one. The process of blogging separates good ideas from poor ideas. The process itself has built in quality control – try that in traditional media!
- Real time – discussions and interactions happen right NOW. Waiting for tomorrows newspaper or radio program seems like an eternity compared to real time blogging.
- Links and connections – the complexity of an information heavy society requires specialization. Yet specialization is futile if a process is not created to link specialties. Blogging serves this purpose extremely well. Disparate fields of interest and thought are brought together (and dissected) in the machinations of bloggers.

Implications: As a disruptive technology, blogging is altering (or perhaps responding to?) many aspects of information/content creation and use. These changes are not without impact. What are some of the implications of a tool that functions at the same speed as the medium it serves? Heres a few:

* Content creation and consumption on the Internet has finally caught up with the Internet itself. Traditional suppliers of content (publishers, media, news organizations) will face substantial pressures to respond appropriately, or cease being relevant.
* Decentralization of content and distribution. This is a trend well underway on the Internet as a whole. Napster capitalized on it and blogging is the canary in a mine reacting to (and reflecting) it.
* The user is in control. The end user (or audience) of a service or product has acquired a central (rather than previous fringe) role. Disagree with a blogger? Tell him/her via comments links, and initiate a dialogue with not only the author, but other readers as well. Disagree with a newspaper columnist? Throw out the newspaper
* Conversation vs. lectureI have a mindI have an opinion. It counts. Just like yours.
* The pipe is more important than the content. By various estimates, bloggers number between 750,000 and 1 million. The ecosystem of blogging is more important than the content being generated. The content has a life (i.e. new technology becomes obsolete)but the process for content acquisition (blogging) stays continually fresh.
* Shared meaning and understandings. Knowledge is acquired and shaped as a social process – resulting in spiraling: I say something, you comment on it, I evaluate it, comment and present a new perspective, you take it to the next level and the process repeats until a concept has been thoroughly explored.
* Ideas are presented as the starting point for dialogue, not the ending point.

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There is a growing rush to join social networks all around both highly popular websites and small niche and local sites (like IndiaCityPages.com), online consumers are moving towards establishing connections in some form or another. Networking trends has brought millions of advertising money to these networks. The ultimate sign of success is when you make it out via one of these sites – but keep sailing if you think you have a shot at the next exit.

The big question is, how to build a user base, when users join social networks only when their friends are already using them. Mike Speiser, who founded talent competition social network Bix and sold it to Yahoo. He said everyone at the start-up to send a link to the site to everyone in their address books. Sure, there is no silver bullet for overnight success.
Social networks brings a sense of connection for people online. I remember one of the things I loved to do when Yahoo first came out was chat. I would go into chat rooms all the time, and it was new and it was fun. Although the need for human interaction online has always been there, however, the realization of that need did not take place until emergence of many other players. They did not provide the type of social networking that you and I do today but it did provide a way for people to reconnect, email and chat with each other. The evolution of online social networking has reached its realization with sites like Facebook and MySpace breeding millions of users.

Who are these millions? Why are they gathering on such networks? Well..

1. They lack time and are getting busier. Such networks allow them to do it at their time.
2. Lack of face-to-face networking lowers ambitions and allows people to be more open, maybe.
3. Sharing with people and learning from each other in a fast paced environment.
4. Social networks that are user generated provides an entirely new way to find content.

As eager as online advertisers are to tap into the rich source of information that people freely offer about themselves on sites like Facebook and MySpace.com, there are nevertheless growing concerns about the privacy issues raised by such tactics. Facebook is allowing advertisers set up their own profile pages at no charge and encouraging companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi to share information with Facebook about the actions of Facebook members on their sites. Ad Executives from consumer brand companies view ads on social networking sites as a priority in their ad spending. I heard they are now spending less on traditional broadcasting and print media!!

In business, appeal of social networking is limited largely to industries where workers are fairly isolated from their colleagues on a daily basis, like medicine, construction and sales. Online services are trying to promote a more personal type of business networking. Unlike relatively simple message boards that are open to all, these new sites for doctors and engineers have features such as profile pages showing professional credentials; personal blogs that function like a kind of online diary, links to friends online, invitations to real or online events, and instant-messaging.

Some social sites also charge a membership fee. For example, Reuters Group PLC is launching a new social-networking service (Reuters Space!), for fund managers, traders and analysts. They will be able to log on to create profiles with industry-relevant information like their asset class and instruments, check financial news feeds and ruminate about the industry on personal blogs. It also plans to allow companies to block certain features like blogging and to archive employees’ online activities for compliance purposes. No stopping here, though!

Sites like StumbleUpon.com, del.icio.us, newsvine.com and digg.com provide very unique content which, most likely, we would never find using Google. These reasons have brought the need for connecting online directly to the end user or consumer. The fact that many are now using social networks makes it clear why there is so much money being spent on social network advertising.

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To elaborate the point a bit more, as far as consumer adoption is concerned, the Internet has done very well; the advantage it has is its multi-dimensional character, which no other media has; they are all uni-dimensional, in the sense that they satisfy either the information or entertainment needs of people. The Internet, however, can do much more; it can be used as a transactional medium – you can buy online; do your bank transactions; communicate using tools like email, VoIP and messengers. And of course, it satisfies your information and learning needs – so the Internet is actually media plus. It would be wrong to classify it as a media property; it’s not just a media property; it’s much more than that.

It is the biggest revolution in our lifetimes; it substitutes for your shopping; it substitutes for your bank; it substitutes for your newspaper and much more. The world is still coming to grips with how the Internet will affect our lives? It already has, phenomenally, but I don’t think we have quite seen what all it can do. With its ability to take on digital sound and video – video on demand, pay-per-view films – and the ability to project them on large screens, it may also replace cinema halls one day!

It’s a big thing but we have not quite seen what all can it do for us. It’s really the strongest force in changing the patterns of consumer behavior that we have seen in last few years. While we are lesser mortals, even the founding fathers of the Internet will not be able tell you what all it can or will do for you.

Consumer will be the king: The Internet will virtually take over a part of our lives; well, for youngsters it already has! Gone are the days of visiting libraries for research, since students get access to everything right on their desktops thanks to Google search and other portals like that. In fact if we look back into our lives we would realize that how much we are able to do on the Internet today, from banking to shopping to communicating with friends, all of it. We can’t even imagine today what all it will substitute in our lives in the years to come if it hasn’t already.

Print and TV media are bound to get affected. They are all content-cum-distribution centric activities, but in the years to come, they will have to get increasingly divorced from the distribution part of their business. Therefore, if a newspaper were to look upon itself as a content business, and not as content married to a particular platform, then it will realize that it simply has to be in the Internet space; because the Internet has taken simple content delivery to content interaction to content manipulation which has elevated content efficiency to an exponential level, something which the Print and TV media cannot do.

So, when we say TV is merely a distribution technology that we are referring to; its video content has to be usable on the Internet, which allows one-is-to-one communication and interactivity (both these things are not possible on TV and Print media). It goes without saying that traditional video content has to undergo a phenomenal change on the Internet – and if content companies do not adapt to this change, they will die, because the Internet will become the number one content delivery platform. Another advantage with the Internet is that, unlike TV and print, it’s not a linear medium; content on the Internet can be presented in a form that enables it to be delivered individually to each person and allows that person to communicate back; so if you marry these things to content it can be customized to each individual’s requirement.

Companies like ours have to keep their ears to the ground and grow with the business; grow with consumer needs and find newer ways of either consuming that content or interacting with it or customizing it to cater to consumers needs. We need to be prepared as the consumer will get increasingly important and demanding and we have to grow with his needs, since we cannot predict them. The fact that he needs information is a given, but the how and in what manner he is going to consume it is a great unknown. If you think you have figured it out, you are dead because consumer patterns change, consumer behavior is the most unyielding reality in any business, as the consumer evolves in ways that you and I cannot predict. We have to learn each day and change ourselves, I think we are living in fascinating times in that sense.

What will happen when today 20 year old turns 40 in two decades? While the trend is that the younger generation forms a big chunk of Internet users, the older lot has also started moving in, more for the sake of convenience and conducting transactions. But still, conventional media forms an important part of the older generation’s lives. The question that needs answering – and I don’t think anybody has the answer to this – is what happens when the younger generation gets into the 35-40 bracket; will it stay as much with the Internet, to the virtual exclusion of all other media? Or will it start imbibing media in the more traditional manner? I think the answer to this is not known.

Also, it would be too facile to say that they won’t, because as kids their needs are different; their lives revolve around a small community, the outside world does not matter so much to them. But as you grow older, the outside world becomes important; it matters to your work; whatever is happening around the globe matters to you. What happens then?

Information is available everywhere; but do we need to customize this kind of general information? The information then gravitates towards the public domain, in the sense that it is less customized, it’s more uniform as millions of people are going to consume it. So though today’s younger generation will definitely stay on with the Internet even two decades later, the NATURE and CHARACTER of the information that they would want to consume is likely to become very similar to the kind of information that today’s older generation is imbibing. It may start approximating much more to what you and I call traditional media. So people who are doing an obituary of traditional media are doing it too fast.

Of course the delivery of this traditional information of 2030 will be on the Internet, but not all information may necessarily be as customized as some would like to believe. I keep grappling with this thought.

Original Writer and Copyright – Managing Director of TV18, India

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