Earlier this month Cone released the results of their study on how consumers are using new media tools.  Cone conducted an online survey of 1050 adults and defined “new media” as:

“Dialog among individuals or groups by way of technology-facilitated channels such as social networks (e.g. Facebook); blogs; microblogs (e.g twitter); online games; mobile devices; photo-; audio-, and video-sharing sites (e.g. Youtube, iTunes, Flickr); message boards; etc.”

The first thing that Cone found is that at least in America, we’re seeing a rapid increase in new media technology usage which you can see in the graph below.

I found it interesting that the largest jump is not only in overall usage but in the frequency of activity. When compared to 2009 we see a whopping 35% increase in users that use new technologies at least twice a week.  As the activity increases, so does the potential for social customer engagement, but the risk of brands doing something “stupid” during one of these interactions also goes up.

This is another interesting piece of info that shows why people ultimately stop following and engaging with brands through social channels.  Most people won’t be shocked to see that acting irresponsibly will get brands to lose engaged customers BUT, what might be a bit more surprising is that over communicating is just as much cause for disengaging with a brand as is acting irresponsibly.  Clearly users do not want to feel as though brands are forcing a relationship (or are being spammed).

I’ll be honest here I though solving problems would be the #1 thing that users look for when engaging with brand online but according to Cone that’s definitely not the case.  Incentives and coupons trump all!

This final statistic I think speaks volumes about the value of social customer engagement for brand.  I didn’t find anything TOO shocking or out of this world with the report but if anything it helps show brand and organizations that the value derived from social customer engagement can be beneficial to both the brand AND the customer.  You can read the full study by Cone which has a few more pieces of information in it but I think I covered the most interesting points here, still it’s worth a read (registration required).

What did you think of the  study?  Were you surprised by anything?  Did I miss anything?

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