Are you a couch potato?

You can rest assured that if you are reading this you are not!  According to Rebecca Jennings, Senior Analyst at Forrester, and keynoting at InternetWorld in London today, 50-60 per cent of the population are passive consumers of social media.  For the other three classifications, she advises the following strategies to bridge the ‘community gap.’

• Offer content for the ‘Collectors’  – those who link, RSS, and tag (20-25 per cent)
• Engage in dialogue with the ‘Critics’  – create fora to enable response (18-20 per cent)
• Provide a platform for collaborating with the ‘Creators’ – feed their creativity (5-7 per cent)

Interestingly, she describes the resulting ‘Three Rules of Social Computing’ as:

1. Content Contact is king
2. The medium response is the message
3. We They call the shots

Other keynotes included Bob Young, CEO and Founder of open-source pioneer Red Hat, who as part of his commentary on his fascinating new DIY publishing offering, Lulu.com, said that “we have still not invented the great applications for the internet”, and that the successful web 3.0 companies will be those who enable their customers to monetize their content.  Perhaps given his open-source heritage and commitment to Lulu.com customers that they retain copyright and keep 80 per cent of any royalties from books and other media printed (Lulu.com taking the other 20 per per cent plus costs), we are less likely to respond “well he would say that, wouldn’t he.”

If you have the chance, its worth popping in to Earls Court 2 today or tomorrow, if you are lucky enought to be in sunny London.  As an ex-technology sector PR, my surprising finding has been that it feels like a marketing conference, rather than a technology conference.  Other than some oblique references to Ajax in one presentation, the buzz is all about social media, understanding the phenomenon, and responding to the opportunities. A market maturing, perhaps …