I was talking to someone who tutors school children and he commented that it can be difficult because some parents mistakenly believe that they will see significant progress only sending their child to a tutor for one hour a week and doing nothing else.

The point he tries to make is that the real success will only come when the parents and child commit to spending the necessary time during the rest of the week studying and practicing and refining skills.

The conversation reminded me of issues companies have with their web analytics programs.  Too often, organizations install analytics, and after the initial excitement, the applications go the way of Squeaky the Penguin from Toy Story 2 (he gathers dust at the bottom of a toy box).

As with the tutoring, analytics applications by themselves aren’t a panacea.  Tools like Google Analytics, Omniture, and Hitbox provide useful data (just like a tutor provides valuable help), but companies will only realize the true benefits when they dedicate the time and resources to go beyond page views and visitor counts to unearth issues such products that are getting a significant number of views but few conversions, significant fallout during the check-out process, etc.  Whether it is learning Algebra or trying to improving your site conversion, dedicating the right amount of time and effort will pay dividends.

Forrester recently published a report titled ‘Social Technographics’ which examines the social computing (blogs, reviews, video creation, MySpace.com, etc.) behavior of adult Internet users.  Forrester categorizes users into six groups based on the social computing activities they perform:

• Creators-Publish web pages and blogs, upload video
• Critics – Comment on blogs, post rating and reviews
• Collectors – Use RSS, tag web page (del.icio.us)
• Joiners – Use social networking sites like MySpace.com
• Spectators – Read blogs, watch peer-generated video, listen to podcasts
• Inactives – No social computing activities

To some degree, Forrester envisions users progressing from one group to another like someone climbing the rungs of a ladder.  For example, an Inactive isn’t likely to jump into social computing first by uploading a video she created to YouTube.com.  Instead, she would probably dip her toe in the ‘user-generated content water’ by viewing a video on YouTube.com or reading a blog.  

According to Forrester, Creators comprise the smallest group of adult users, which isn’t surprising, as creating web pages, blogs, and video takes the most commitment and can be the most intimidating. 

Additionally, Forrester found that there were generational differences among the types of participation.  Creators and Joiners had the lowest average adult age (39 and 37 years old, respectively) and Inactives had the highest (50 years old).  Also, Inactives had the lowest percentage of broadband users (49% compared to the next lowest which was 68%).

While some of the specific findings of their survey is interesting, I think that the more important take-away from the Forrester report for marketers is the need to be thinking of how your customers, consumers, prospects, etc. are likely to participate in social computing, recognizing that not everyone is looking to or willing to engage in the same way. 

The key is to determine what types of social computing activities provide value to your community and how you can best offer a way for your users to participate, knowing that in order to attract groups like the Spectators, you need to develop a community of Creators and Critics.

More on that next time.