Looking at the chart below it is not surprising that there is a strong correlation between the familiarity and relative longevity of certain technologies (video, blogs and rss) and their benefit to corporations. Companies, especially larger companies, tend to avoid adopting new ideas until they have seen other companies take that risk. It’s interesting to see Social Networking ranking so high – given it’s short lifespan. I would expect to see Social Networking topping the list in the next two years.

It’s also interesting to see these referred to as ‘technologies’. They are all certainly enabling technologies but the real value is in the content they allow to be more freely shared. In time the focus on these communications tactics as ‘technologies’ will fall into the background and the emphasis will be on the marketing and communication value that they promote.

Not every every tactic is right for every company but it is safe to say that video sharing should be at the top of any company’s list that is considering adopting new Web 2.0 tactics.

Comscore has released new research showing Internet video viewing continues to grow at an impressive rate. Some highlights:

• 158 million US viewers watched 21 billion videos online in July
• Google continues to eclipse it’s competition with over 10 times the number of videos viewed compared to that of it’s next closest competitor
• Interestingly however, Google has only twice the number of unique viewers compared to Microsoft – it’s closest competitor in that category
• 81% of people online watched videos
• 8 hours of video was the average time spent per viewer watching video online in July

See details here:  Comscore  July 09 online viewing survey

This video presents some impressive and thought provoking stats on the prevalence and influence of social media. Are the numbers true? Hard to know but the overall thrust of the video is clear – Social media – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. is changing how companies communicate with their constituents and the rate of that change is accelerating.

Follow this Socialnomics link for more detail and discussion around the topic.

Nielsen has released a new report  that looks at online engagement by Internet users. John Burbank (above), CEO of Nielsen, provides highlights of the study. Online video and social media lead the way while the rate of growth for  ’traditional’ online activities such as e-mail and search has continued to decrease.

According to the report online video and social media have now surpassed e-mail in terms of online activity.  Why is this happening? Johan Jervoe, CMO for Marketing at Macdonald’s summarized this new behaviour well: ” It’s not about technology and wanting to be online constantly. It’s about wanting to belong and be connected constantly.”

• US Internet users viewed 13.5 Billion online videos during October which represents a 45% increase over last year.
• Google (through YouTube and Google Video) had a 40% market share serving 5.4 Billion videos.
• The average time spend viewing a video is 3 minutes.
• The average online viewer watched 274 minutes of video
• Over 80% of 18-34 year olds watch online video.

We are in the rapidly rising section of this growth curve. These numbers – both for consumers and for business viewers will continue to grow quickly.