Jessi Hempel of BusinessWeek writes in the introduction to this graphic:
Blogs. Podcasts. Video-sharing sites. Social networks. Here’s a word of advice for companies scrambling to become a part of these conversations. It’s not enough to build a hub in Second Life or create a profile on MySpace.com. It’s time to shift your focus away from trying out every high-tech platform that comes across your inbox. Instead, home in on your customers. Almost every demographic group you can think of is engrossed in the Web these days, and users are getting smarter about their tools. It won’t take long to find the consumers who care about what you’re doing—and tune in to what they’re doing.
The penetration of these online activities skews much as I’d expect across generational cohorts. Without any background on the underlying data that’s being displayed in the charts or how it was gathered, I’d hesitate to draw any sweeping conclusions. But I think the user groups outlined above (creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives) are useful categorizations when thinking about how social groups interact online.
