Wave 3 Study

In South Korea, Taiwan, and China, over 70 percent of all participants supposedly write a blog.  Social network participation has stalled in the U.S., but on the whole, penetration is up to 58 percent (an increase of 21 percent over 2007′s levels).  And Universal McCann says RSS consumption has risen from 15 to 38 percent worldwide.

Some of the data is a little hard to swallow; as David Scott Lewis writes, "These numbers border on the fantastical."  Still, even if the 17,000 respondents weren’t quite representative of the average, it seems likely that growth of some sort is taking place.

The next Wave study is scheduled for late this year; it should be interesting to see what sort of stats it provides.

As for the current Universal McCann report, the company concluded, "Social media is established everywhere there is an internet connection and it has to be considered for all advertisers, marketers and content producers as a core part of their communications.  Social media has impacted every part of the internet and transformed the role it plays in our lives."

The agency said that China had passed the U.S. in the number of people starting their own blogs, with 43 million compared to 26.4 million in the U.S. Online social network membership in countries including Brazil, Russia, Taiwan and Mexico is growing at 70 percent annually, compared with less than 49 percent in the U.S.

"We tend to think of ourselves (in the US) as leaders, but we’re just catching up with the rest of the world," said Graeme Hutton, senior vice president at Universal McCann. "The markets that are leading don’t have the same panoply of media, so they leapfrog ahead."

In the U.S., the fastest growing user-generated content categories since the beginning of 2008 were watching online video, downloading podcasts, and subscribing to an RSS feed.

Hutton said that other new media like social networks were not a great medium for traditional ads. Currently, he said, " it’s really about promotions, sponsorships, and bringing in different forms of participation rather than trying to do classic advertising."

Even if user-generated content is not a main marketing strategy, its popularity will keep marketers interested.