Twitter was founded in 2006 and there was still not much buzz in 2007 among the general population. Now its among the top 50 websites for traffic. How things have changed!

Beyond merely tracking adoption and usage, we've now moved to behavioural profiling of social network users. We've found that although the numbers in absolute terms continue to climb spectacularly  (68% Facebook membership among the online population in Sept 2009), there is a divide between casual users (who are behaviorally much like non-users) and active users of social networks. Marketers need to know what the active users are doing not the casual ones. Simple aggregation by membership leads to some very misleading interpretations.

Some of the findings: co-creation and conscious content generation is the realm of a small active minority of active users. They do in fact create content in the process of being online (posting pictures, writing on walls, etc) but this is not viewed as creation, they are mostly consumers of social media. Even the active social networkers, are not the prolific content producers we hear so much about. They do what all online Canada does, but they do more of it. More online banking, more research, and more play. But blogging is rare.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will be culling the content of the current wave and we are also preparing a two year overview. Snippets will be released from time to time gratis via this blog, or conventional news releases, but the meat of this study will be packaged up as part of "The Bridge" an on-going syndicated study of social media in Canada. However now, on our two year anniversary, we will be releasing a number of smaller adhoc studies based on "The Bridge" but are not subscription based. Rather these are one time offerings designed for people wanting either an overview, or a snapshot in time right now, but not having the need for continuous syndicated reports.

Cheers.