世論 What Japan Thinks

With communication and community being two of the driving forces behind many new web sites, and indeed being two of the building blocks of Web 2.0, it is instructive to have a look at this survey recently reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by Corss Marketing Inc into internet communication.

Demographics

On the 7th and 8th of November 2007 300 members of Cross Marketing’s online monitor pool successfully completed a private online questionnaire. The sample was split 50:50 male and female, and 20.0% were in their teens, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, and 20.0% in their fifties.

Looking at the results of this survey, it is fair to conclude that the average Japanese internet user is not an anti-social git!

Research results

First, 162 people from the original sample, or 54.0%, had communicated with someone over the internet using something other than email. They were asked the following question.

Q1: What kinds of people have you communicated with over the internet? (Sample size=162, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Internet friend	90	55.6%
Work, school friend, associate	77	47.5%
Old classmate, other childhood friend	60	37.0%
Someone I’ve never talked to before	45	27.8%
Friend of a friend	39	24.1%
Family, relatives	33	20.4%
Other	0	0.0%

When a similar question was asked in June of last year, 52.2% had talked to old classmates, perhaps suggesting that SNSes have lost more of their charm, or perhaps they are now being used differently.

Next, people were asked if they had a internet friends that they regularly kept in touch with, including by email. 124 people, or 41.3%, said they did, so they were asked the following questions.

Q2: How did you befriend these people? (Sample size=124, multiple answer)

	Votes	Percentage
Blog I visited	37	29.8%
Bulletin board other than 2 channel	33	26.6%
Social Networking Service	33	26.6%
Blog partner visited	27	21.8%
Instant messenger	23	18.5%
Text chat	23	18.5%
Dating site	9	7.3%
2 channel	8	6.5%
Social bookmarking	8	6.5%
Voice chat	6	4.8%
Question and answer community	5	4.0%
Video chat	3	2.4%
Other	18	14.5%

Finally, everyone was asked the following question.

Q3: Have you ever met in real life someone you got to know over the internet? (Sample size=300)

Yes	18.0%
No	82.0%

This is up over 8 percentage points from last year’s survey.