In the space of an hour, without specifically searching for this information, two blog posts arrived on my screen from technology commentators whose work and insights I respect and enjoy. But they also amused me for reasons that will become obvious, if you read further.
Sean Moffitt (avid Canadian community builder, owner of agent wildfire and exponent of the power of influence) declared proudly on December 9th that Canada is # 1 when it comes to Social Networking and gave 10 reasons why (# 4 being the darkness and poor weather!).
Some 40 odd days later, Ross Dawson (Australian author of Living Networks and another interesting observor/analyst of technology and its impact) also crowed Australians Are # 1 Globally in the Usage of Social media: Why?
My first reaction was to determine how each could claim to be social media's "top dog" and, as you might expect, each used different data sources (Dawson - Nielsen and Moffat - Forrester) and neither claim was based on the same measure (Nielsen were measuring time spent on line and the graph presented by Dawson excluded Canada completely) while Forrester were measuring the % of browsers who went on social networks at least once a month and Moffat's summary of their data failed to mention Australia.
It's not my intent to undermine the work of these gentlemen - far from it. While occupying very different parts of the globe, they generate very useful commentaries on a regular basis and I encourage my readers to include them on their source lists.
It was just a strange and contradictory juxtaposition that made me wonder why being # 1 on this score is something to be so proud of or even to aspire to. We'll have to wait for the really interesting data - what are Canadians and Australians doing online and how might that differ between countries/cultures???
If Sean and Ross don't already know each other, I hope this post will make the introduction as a cross country/culture analysis on technique and focus would be quite revealing.....
