Your Website – Your Future

If any of your colleagues are less than 100 percent enthusiastic about your Web projects, here is how to light a fire under them:

Share the latest findings of the Digital Future Project (PDF), conducted for the past seven years by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Start with this:

Internet users consider the Web to be a more important source of information for them than any other principal medium, including television, radio, newspapers, and books.

How much more important? Eighty percent of Internet users age 17 and older consider the Internet to be an important source of information for them – up from 66 percent in 2006. That beats television (68 percent), radio (63 percent), and newspapers (63 percent).

The Digital Future Project is probably the country’s number one source of reliable data on the impact of digital technologies over time. More than 2,000 individuals across the United States, the same ones, take the survey each year. The survey looks at more than 100 issues, covering both their usage of digital media and how that usage affects their behavior.

And we are definitely behaving differently. Membership in online communities is now up to 15 percent, more than double what it was three years ago. More than half of online community members check in at least once a day. Seventy one percent consider their community “very” or “extremely” important to them.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. The Editorial Advantage has been following the steady growth in importance of online communities. For a good introduction to this vital element of Web content, read Gabe Goldberg’s recent posts Why Is an Online Community Like a Barbecue? and Meetings at the Online Virtual Water Cooler.

The Web isn’t magical, and it may or may not reinvigorate the social contract, as many at Annenberg hope. Like all other media, it plays a fairly minor role in most people’s decision making when compared with the influence of family, friends, colleagues, church, and the like. But the Web gives us a lot more access to a lot more of those people.

So how is that Web project coming along?

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