If you still needed evidence why it’s critical to understand and use social networking and collaborative tools, here it is. The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report based on a telephone survey of 935 teens ages 12-17, and here’s what they found:

• 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
• 66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users.
• 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.
• Older girls ages 15-17 are more likely to have used social networking sites and created online profiles; 70% of older girls have used an online social network compared with 54% of older boys, and 70% of older girls have created an online profile, while only 57% of older boys have done so.

The survey shows that teens’ use of social networking sites is more sophisticated than they’re given credit for, as shown by the fact that 66% restrict access to their profiles. In addition, 92% said they use the sites to reinforce existing friendships with people they see often, and 82% use the sites to keep in touch with friends they see less frequently or rarely in person. Ana Neves asks some important questions about the report’s findings on the Headshift blog, such as:

• Are these sites improving or damaging teens social skills?
  My response: I think they can improve teens’ comfort level with social interaction by taking some of the unknown out of it. When you’ve already read your friends’ latest thoughts on their blogs, and maybe checked out some of the music they’re listening to, it could just make for deeper and more meaningful socializing.
• Organisations will have to cater for this new way of “being” if they are to win over and retain the brightest graduates – how are they getting ready?
  My response: I think this question is spot on – organizations that seriously embrace social software will be in the best position to get the brightest college graduates and innovative thinkers. Organizations – be they large corporations, small businesses, universities, non-profits, NGOs, governments and so forth need to be open minded and willing to change because the benefits from bringing in new collaborative tools that break down communication barriers and speed up knowledge creation, along with a workforce already skilled in using them, are limitless. Bambi Francisco writes more about this in The social enterprise, how companies could use Web 2.0.
• What are these sites doing so well to motivate members to create and maintain their profiles that organisations are doing so wrongly (as almost every organisation suffers from out-dated, abandoned or empty yellow pages systems)? How can organisations learn from these sites? How can organisations pass on to their staff the public relations / profile management skills that seem to become so important?
  In a recent post on the Atlassian Blog, I discussed how SharePoint focuses too heavily on business processes and eschews the social aspects of collaboration. There’s a reason “social software” includes the term “social” – collaboration is only really successful when you build a cohesive, participatory community in which people are able to share something about themselves other than what they contribute to a TPS report.

The full report is available here: Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview