Digital citizens behaviour & information policy

The video Did you know 4.0 outlines many shifts or trends which have an impact on how individuals behave as digital citizens.  Among trends/shifts identified in the video as at September 2009 are the following:

• Print newspapers have experienced a decline in readership whilst online it has increased.

• Revenue from online ads has increased, whilst print ad revenue has decreased.

• More video gets uploaded to Youtube in two months than gets shown over several years over multiple tv channels.

• Traditional media outlets such as tv gets a fraction of unique visits that social networking sites such as MySpace/Youtube/Facebook get per month – 10 million v 250 million – yet the social networking sites have only existed for the last 6 years.

• 95% of music downloads in a year were done for free.

• Wikipedia, which started in 2001, has more than 13 million articles in 200+ languages.

In terms of the need for, and development of, information policy in organisations, these trends/shifts demonstrate that digital citizens are behaving differently to what has previously been the norm.  Where once they sourced their information from traditional, non-online places, they are now increasingly abandoning those sources and seeking the same information online instead.

For organisations this means developing/updating information policies to allow individuals to access the information they want in the way they want to do it.  Organisations cannot afford to continue on as they have done, they must adapt to the new way of doing things if they wish to keep their traditional users and to gain new ones. Organisations must adopt use of social networking, and other online tools, to establish a relationship with users in a way users are now comfortable with and prefer to more traditional methods.

Indeed it won’t be long before this online behaviour is considered the norm thus organisation need to jump on the bandwagon sooner rather than later or else risk losing their relevance and credibility with little hope of regaining it in a market providing a multitude of other sources.