Jon Peddie Research - a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm in the graphics industry.

The Social Web and its Implications

Posted by Webmaster on December 10th 2009 | Discuss
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“The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect – to help people work together – and not as a technical toy.” – Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web

Media is an “attention economy”; every product - book, television show, website, etc. - vies for attention, and tries to derive financial benefit from it – through advertising, subscription, increased sales, ancillary sales, new members, etc. And, users’ attention has become the scarce commodity. As Bruce Sterling puts it, “In the Information Economy everything is plentiful -- except attention.”

Social media is dramatically changing the fundamental forces of that economy: who pays attention to what, who influences such decisions, how that is tracked and measured, the speed of response, and how it’s monetized. If you think about it, the word “viral” hardly existed in our vocabulary before social media? Now it’s in constant use without the slightest reference to illness.

Just as an example, Google, the uncontested titan of attention monetization on the Web, with $4.2B profit in 2008 and ads on millions of websites, is seriously threatened by Facebook, with their 300M+ user (one of every four Internet users) who’s highly personal activity is outside its reach.

The Social Web is not just a fad; it is a fundamental shift in how humans communicate, interact, collaborate, create, inform themselves, prioritize, organize, buy, sell, and play. It is your customers, your friends, your family, your employees, your constituents, your shareholders, and, like it or not, you.

Social media is to the Web what electric motors were to electricity, the quantum leap in utility that took a magical new technology and transformed society. Rapid innovation is making a reality of what Berners-Lee called, in 2007, the Giant Global Graph (GGG), the "social graph" connecting everyone everywhere independent of platform or application.

This market study is designed to help you understand this transformation, how it affects you and the world around you, and most important, how to use the changes it brings. It covers a broad range of uses, behaviors, and applications; provides detailed statistics on many of them and the space overall, concisely describes and connects key concepts; and provides signposts for further investigation.