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If you are a business providing products or services of any kind, and you don’t have a strategy for finding out what people are saying about you online- in the new social circles, you should cringe when read this article. The numbers don’t lie, more and more people are actively online participating in all sorts of social media activities and many are directed toward product and service reviews. If you have customers you should think about your strategy for social media and how to get in the game.

Critics, creators and spectators are all on the rise in social media, according to a new report from Forrester Research’s Josh Bernoff.

Bernoff looked at the number of “US online adults” who are using social tools. The overall percentage rose from a little over half in 2007 to three-quarters in 2008.

To help visualize the different types of social media users, Forrester created this excellent visual last year:

The new data showed that every category — except “Inactives” — grew in the past year as a percentage of Web users.

Check out the year-over-year numbers:

While a few more people have made the always-intimidating jump to “Creator”, what surprised me was the growth of the “Critics” category.

There’s nothing new about letting people review products online, but it definitely seems to be an increasingly mainstream activity.

So what does this mean to businesses trying to use social media? If you’re one of them, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Have you given your visitors or customers any way to weigh in on your products through your own site? And no, listing an e-mail address on your “Contact Us” page doesn’t really count.

2. Do you know where and how your products or services are being critiqued? Such reviews used to be limited to books, movies and hotels. These days, you can review anything from dentists to day cares.

3. All these reviews — even the bad ones that make you cringe — are creating priceless data. Are you incorporating it into your research, development and planning?

[From More critics are cropping up online. Are businesses ready?]

Tags: Common Sense Customer Service, Food for thought //