The State of Our Social Media Cultural Evolution: 7-Months In

We deployed Jive Clearspace 2.5 in September 2008, so it's been seven months now and I want to look at what the results have been. I've written several other posts today that address this, too, but I'll try to share some statistical results here. I know all too well how hard it is to find useful statistics about social media, so bear with me as we are still very new at this part.

We've gone from a few dozen testers in the summer of 2008 to more than 4500 user accounts. We estimate close to 30% access the wiki (that's our name for it, and I know it drives Jive crazy, since it's far more than a wiki, but wiki really is faster to say and type!) every day. About 3% are creating content daily (and not the same 3% all the time).

We have over a thousand communities already. There are a couple of thousand discussions containing about 10,000 messages. We have nearly 10,000 documents that have been created or uploaded. Although the number of blog posts seems puny by comparison -- a couple of hundred -- we have a couple of thousand comments on them, meaning we're averaging more than four comments per blog post, which seems to me a very healthy level of interaction and engagement.

Our monthly page views have climbed above 300,000 and for the first six months were growing 50% every month. We'll have to see whether this trend is slowing or will resume.

In summary, we've reached and surpassed critical mass. The wiki is here. It is not going away. The exciting questions now are along the lines of, "just how far can we go in realizing new value from this?" New answers -- and more questions -- are popping up every day. We are, indeed, undergoing a social media cultural evolution.