NEW YORK A new global study of social media use reveals that the U.S. severely lags behind Asian and South American countries in participation rates.
 
Consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe are more likely to be passive social-media participants -- sharing videos and reading blogs -- while those in emerging markets often create content through blogging, social networks and video and photo sharing sites.

"By and large, in the U.S. we're a country of voyeurs," said David Cohen, U.S. director of digital communications at Universal McCann, which conducted the study. "We love to watch and consume content created by others, but there's a fairly small group that are doing that creation -- unlike China, which is a country of creators."
 
The Interpublic Group media agency has charted a steady rise in participation rates for social media in the third phase of an 18-month research project. In its first survey, conducted in September 2006, a little over half of respondents said they read blogs. In the latest survey, over 70 percent did.

Thanks to the emergence of YouTube, watching video clips has become mainstream. While 30 percent said they watched video online in UM's initial survey, over 80 percent said they had this year. Less than 30 percent of respondents said they set up a social network profile in 2006; over 60 percent did two years later. (The survey shows big increases in nearly all online sharing activities, such as listening to podcasts, subscribing to RSS feeds and commenting on news items.)

UM surveyed 17,000 Internet users worldwide in March 2008 as part of an effort to track the global rise of consumer-generated content and online communities.

While it found social media is a global phenomenon, UM charted significant differences, mainly cultural, in terms of how people use social media.

In the U.S. and Europe, consumers are avid consumers of social content while less likely to create their own compared to other markets.
 
A little over 60 percent of Internet users in the U.S. said they read blogs, but just 26 percent had created one, compared to over 70 percent of Internet users who blog in South Korea and China.

Consumers in Asian countries are also much more likely to read blogs: 92 percent of South Koreans read them. In China, 88 percent read blogs.



Tom Smith, a research manager for the EMEA region at UM, said the gulf exists because blogs play a different role in the societies. In China, for instance, blogs tend to be about daily life rather than current affairs.

"Blogging in Western Europe and U.S. has been less of a community but conveying your opinion on different topics," he said.

Because of how widespread blogging is globally, UM declares it "rivals any mass media in terms of reach, time spent and wider cultural, social and political impact." For that reason, blogs represent an accurate reflection of trends and consumer opinions, according to the agency.

A similar dynamic is underway in video sharing. Consumers in the U.S. have taken to video sites like YouTube in droves, but not many actively participate.

About a quarter of U.S. Internet users have uploaded a video to a site like YouTube. In the Brazil, 68 percent have done so. India, China, Mexico and the Philippines all boast video-sharing participation rates topping 50 percent. The results are similar for photo-sharing, where a little under half of U.S. consumers have uploaded photos, far behind rates in South American and Asian markets.

A divergence can also be seen in social networking. The study finds that social networking is still growing worldwide, but is reaching a "saturation point" in the U.S., while countries like the Philippines, Brazil and Mexico more avidly use it.

Despite the popularity of U.S. networks Facebook and MySpace, other countries dwarf the U.S. in joining social networks. The Philippines, Hungary, Poland and Mexico all boast participation rates over 75 percent, while just 43 percent have joined social networks in the U.S.
 
UM found that MySpace is the top social network worldwide, with 32 percent weekly reach, followed by Facebook, which reaches 25 percent weekly. Yet regional patterns differ. In Asia, social networks like Cyworld, Mixi and QQ are leaders, and Google's Orkut remains a cultural phenomenon in Brazil.

The survey also found smaller divergences in social media use that track to cultural difference. While photo sharing is a popular phenomenon across the world, it has low use in Japan (21 percent).

UM charted similarly low rates in Japan for tools like instant messaging, which Japanese tend to find overly intrusive, Smith said.

"It's a cultural thing," he said. "Sharing personal moments is not the done thing in Japan."