• Ad Age, Tuesday, August 22, 2006 11:30 AM

We've been talking about the massive marketing opportunity that blogs and RSS feeds provide. Yet two years in, both remain on the fringes of high-tech usage. According to JupiterResearch, just 7 percent of Americans write blogs, while 22 percent read them. Meanwhile, a separate study from WorkPlace Print Media says that 88 percent of Americans have no idea what RSS is. These formats were supposed to change the way consumers hold conversations about brands, but recent data from word-of-mouth specialists Keller Fay reminds us that the vast majority of brand conversations take place offline--92 percent, in fact, more than the commonly assumed rate of 80 percent. Furthermore, Jupiter reports that mobile phone entertainment, believed to be the next major land grab for marketers, has attracted just 1 percent of the country's 210 million mobile phone subscribers to date. And younger generations, considered the major turning point for all of these technologies, are showing less enthusiasm for high-tech than previously predicted. According to Frank N. Magid Associates, 66 percent of 12- to-17-year-olds say they never watch video online; 41 percent never listen to or download free music; 84 percent never pay to watch or download video; and 69 percent never use social networking sites. All this amounts to a ton of hype surrounding many different distribution channels. What the Ad Age article doesn't tell us is how old these studies are. In time, usage of the platforms that most of us are well-versed in will move from the early-adopter stage to the mainstream.

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