“Statistics are like a drunk with a lampost: used more for support than illumination.” Sir Winston Churchill
Working through publicly available statistics for my series on social media in Germany, I ran into some significant methodological issues. While I’m really grateful for the data we have, all the reports I have seen raised questions.
One issue is [...]
Series on Germany, post #4
While Germans have been laggards with many social media platforms, they adopted Wikipedia very early on. As many will know, Wikipedia was founded in 2001 and has since then become the 6th most popular website worldwide. Despite organizational issues and a flattening number of editors, Wikipedia is still one of the [...]
Series on Germany, post #3
Social networks have become a better indicator for social media activities than any other particular tool, since users increasingly tend to aggregate many of their activities such as blogging or video sharing on their social network. That’s one of the more important insights in Universal McCann’s latest report.
According to their latest [...]
Series on Germany, post #2
When it comes to social media, adoption rates on almost any platform in Germany have long been much lower than in other countries. That suddenly changed between 2007 and 2008.
Universal McCann’s Social Media Tracker reported that between June 2007 and March 2008 the percentage of active internet users in Germany [...]
Series on Germany, post #1
This is the first in a series of posts on the use of the internet and social media in Germany. There is currently a lot of talk on social media in Germany, but it is rarely validated by facts. So, I pulled together publicly available data from various sources. I can [...]
[Prologue: After a colourful intermezzo moving my family from New York to Germany [in German only, sorry!], I’m back in the game with a long post!]
Driven by waves of change in society, technology and business, new publics are emerging and forming new spheres of influence in the world of online relationships. Corporate communicators have to [...]
Two years ago, media agency Universal McCann started the most extensive global survey on social media I am aware of. Since then they went through three waves, each time significantly broadening their data base:
Wave 1 – September 2006 – 7,500 Internet users – 15 countries
Wave 2 – June 2007 – 10,000 Internet users – [...]