While the summer offers up more market jitters and deepening concern over the mortgage debacle, one might assume that a downturned economy could cut the legs out from the heady growth of social media industries.  Not necessarily so.  Venture capital might tighten, but social media consumption continues to skyrocket.  Subscribed media consumption / podcasting continues its mass popular ascent along with its social media cohorts.

This spring year, Universal McCann conducted its third wave of data collection using its Social Media Tracker survey system.  Entitled Wave.3, concurrent with its Next Thing Now solutions strategy, the global survey shows nothing but massive adoption of social media.  In fact, we might have arrived at the point where daily participation on the internet essentially is the use of social media.

The entire document is available for PDF download here

For the time-depleted, here’s a selection of interesting figures:

• 45.1% of respondents ever downloaded an audio podcast, over double from last year.
• Of those that download subscribed media, 7% do it daily, 16% weekly, and 8% monthly.
• In the wide 16 to 54 age demographic, globally, 216 million people download video podcasts, almost the identical amount of those that download audio.

As with many of these reports, a significantly larger data set surrounds blogging and top-line social media platforms like MySpace and FaceBook.  And it all looks very promising for our industry.