Universal McCann‘s ‘Power to the People‘ survey is now in its 4th year, or better yet – Wave 4. Every year UM researchers go deep behind the hype of social media to reveal the dramatic changes in the way consumers are using the internet to create and share their thoughts, pictures and videos. Wave 4 was conducted between 11/2008 and 03/2009 covering some 22,000 users from 38 countries, in what is considered the largest global analysis of social media usage.

Highlights:

• total estimated number of global active internet audience (16-54) is 625 million
• mobile internet users has reached 125 million
• 71.1% have visited a friend’s social network page
• 33% of social networkers have uploaded a video to their profile
• 62.5% created a social network profile
• China has 111 million social network profiles, USA 57.8 million, Korea 11.9 million, Japan 10.2 million, UK 12.1 million

In short – the first (actually 4th) inside look into how social media and the internet have changed the way we behave. Must read, for marketer, consumer, business executive, anyone.

You can watch the results of that survey over at UM Wave 4 website – using a very cool visualization graph to see the changes in the past 4 years. Another option is to review the 40 pages PDF, available at Business Exchange.