Serendipity35

Julie Smith at ShareThis sent me a link (well, she shared it via Facebook) for a study they commissioned from Forrester Consulting to discover the differences in how and why adults and young people share online. ShareThis is the service that lets people easily share things they find online through a set of links on a web page using email or social networks. We have it installed on Serendipity35 at the bottom of each post.

Are you a Power Sharer? They define those people as individuals that share content at least weekly and share with 11 or more people through at least one channel. Adult Power Sharers are only 35% of the online population, while Youth Power Sharers make up 62% of the youth population online.

My caveat is that what they want to discover - what different segments share online, how and when, the obstacles to sharing etc. - is interesting to me as an educational technologist, but they want to know these things as advertisers, publishers and marketers. Tools and sites like Digg, Delicious, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook along with messaging and that 1.0 standard, email, is not only important to online communities of learners, but to those trying to reach them for commercial purposes.

The study, "The Ins and Outs of Online Sharing" showed that adults (69%) still rely on email to share content and information. That's tough for marketers to track though. Our students are more versatile. Emails are 56% of their shared content received, but half use instant messaging. And videos from YouTube, and wikis and posts on social networks (30%) and cell phone texting (41%) connects them too.

Men seem more likely to share product recommendations and video than women and adult males (77%) and 74% of younger males shared news and web links. Women are more likely to share products or ideas they like via direct sharing methods (60%) like a send-to-a-friend feature and more likely to share directly, especially with a cell phone text message.

One-click sharing features are like forwarding email. It's so easy to pass on something, that we do. Even if it's not really worth passing on.

Harnessing this sharing in an educational setting and using the research for learning is probably worth some of our time.

About the Research: Forrester Consulting conducted an online survey in spring 2008 of 2014 US online adults and youth to understand what content they shared, through which channels they shared, and how frequently they shared content.

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