• by Chris Cunningham , Op-Ed Contributor, December 13, 2007

Occasionally I have to remind people that social media is not comprised solely of social networks. There's that "media" part in there too--the content that people create in order to give communities something to view, read, watch, ruminate over, connect to, comment on, dig into, dig at, or just plain Digg.

As you might anticipate, age is inversely proportionate to a person's likelihood of creating content online. Of the adult demographics, 18- to-24-year-olds are most likely to have created content online, and 51% of online users indicate that this is something they have done.

For many advertisers, the story stops there. Social media is largely equated with younger demos. So much so, in fact, that we often overlook how other demographics are using it. We shouldn't.

According to Pew, about 32% of 30- to-38-year-old and 26% of all 39- to-48-year-old online users are content creators as well. So, yes--soccer moms are less likely than their kids' babysitter to be up late blogging and uploading pictures to Flickr and sharing homemade LOLCATS. Relative to college age, they appear to be light content creators. But in an absolute sense, especially if you are a marketer, one-third and one-quarter of family decision makers engaged in a social activity around the creation and sharing of media has to be worth looking into.

Still, these percentages mean nothing unless we know the absolute numbers they refer to. Here's the first surprise. In a separate study, Pew points out that there are many more Internet users in the 35-44 demographic (what we call "Family Decision Makers") than in the younger 18-24 group more commonly associated with social media. According to Pew, 8.6 million 18- to-24-year-olds are creating online content, which is well shy of the 12.9 million 35- to-44-year-olds doing the same thing. Put another way, there are far more Family Decision Makers engaged in creating content online than any other adult demographic--including the 18- to-24-year-olds thought to be the mainstay of social media.

Ready for surprise number two? At Freewebs, we have analyzed how Web site owners across various demographics create and share content. Given all the hype about the connectedness of younger demos and their online ubiquity, we decided to delve into the behavior of our user base, and we found a very interesting story: while teens may be the most likely to create content online, we found that the Family Decision Makers--particularly the women in this age group--generate far more page views against the content they create. Several multiples more than younger demographics, in fact.

As a group, these women are highly engaged in consumer-generated content. And judging from the size of their audiences, they are generating highly engaging content.

The other major distinction we saw between these women and younger users is in their fickleness quotient. Every social network's biggest nightmare is losing its users to a shinier, newer social network. But Family Decision Makers show retention rates among the highest of all our users. They've found a platform and either brought or drew their audience, and they stay.

Advertising is changing. Models based on sheer tonnage are giving way to those where quality trumps quantity, and genuine brand interaction more valued than some combination of reach and frequency. I believe that advertisers will very soon evaluate media properties not by the size of their audience, but by the quality of conversation they stimulate.

As advertisers seek engagement, they will enjoy the most success where people are already engaged and actively participating. The Family Decision Maker is a notoriously difficult woman to engage. She is easily reached through all manner of media--from drive-time radio to 30-second spots to ads comprising two-thirds of her favorite magazines, as well as on the sleeve of her hot cup of coffee and with those awful red blinky-light coupon dispensers at the grocery. In fact, it's precisely because there are so many ways to reach her that she remains elusive to engage.

But the Family Decision Maker is engaged with the content she is creating online, growing her audience and with it her sphere of influence, and staying put. Advertisers who reach her there may find that the conversation they've always wanted to start with her is already well underway.