Social Media hype cycle: we're only starting to enter the market sweet spot
In his blog post The Best is Yet to Come in Social Media, Esteban Kolsky presents the hype cycle for social technologies and combines this with the adoption cycle of the same technologies. The picture indicates that the adoption of social media is in the 20-30% range.
How can this be? Isn't everyone already tired of the social hype? With 800 million users on Facebook already, isn't everyone already well aware of what social media by now? According to Kolsky, that is not the right question to ask if we are interested in the adoption rate of social media for business use:
"Knowing about it and knowing how to use it for business are different things (heck, even knowing you CAN use it for business are different things). While there is a tad more than 10% of the world on Facebook, the volume of traffic in there that is used for business is below 1% (cannot find the actual stat, but it was well below 1% last time I saw the report about two months ago — even if it tripled in usage, still below 2% and still quite insignificant). Twitter is different, but also — the volume of tweet used for business is minimal. In addition, the number of businesses using it for business is very small, but heavily biased in favor of mega-large-humongous organizations which tend to bias our perception when we see it in the news."
The hype may be falling down, but perhaps all this social media fatigue discussion is a signal that we're only starting to enter the phase where the hard work of social technology adoption truly goes mainstream.
