Who’s driving social media?

From Helen’s tweet, I find what could be an interesting blog from agency.com, Who’s driving social media,; it started last week, with their first post promoting a study that they have done about the Uploaders, those people who create content on the web without being paid to do it. Nothing in the study is earth shattering to anyone who has been in the space for a while, but it does provide another great set of data to be used when discussing the area.

• 8% of the UL online population are uploaders and creators. This is higher than the off-quoted 1% but includes blog writers, reviewers as well as media producers. They are 20% more likely to try out new things, 2x as likely to be opinion leaders for a category. They have a huge media diet – on the web at the a same time as watching TV (I’m guilty of that too much) and belong to 4x as many online social networks as the rest of the population.
• the good news for marketers is that they are often brand champions – they are interested and positive about brands and often recommend them. That is, if you provide them a reason to be so.
• when looking for products, they use 30% more sources of information – and use peer review sites 50% more

So how can a marketer interact with these people. Not by using the networks as a blast media home, but by building relationships.

One way is by treating Uploaders as a resource and not a target audience. We found that by asking
Uploaders to become brand advisors, to input on a brand’s marketing and product innovation, shifted
their propensity to recommend a brand positively by 19 points (measured using the Net Promoter
Score), which is relatively huge positive indicator of brand growth.

Hope to see more good stuff from them going forward.