One of the best books you can get about social media is Groundswell. The book has been around a few years now but it's still the first one I recommend to any business leader getting started in social media.
One of the interesting things in the book was its "social technographics" ladder. Back in 2006 the ladder looked like this:
Now, three years later the research is updated and a new category, "Conversationalists", has been added but look at how the other categories have shifted as well:
As you compare the old data and the new data here there's a lot to glean from it. For instance, it's interesting to see that almost twice as many people are "Creators" now than a few years ago despite some people saying things like blogs or podcasts are dead now. We could break this data down multiple ways, but the thing that strikes me first and foremost is the incredibly small percentage of "Inactives" now from a few years ago. Regardless of whatever your boss or your coworkers tell you, 4 out of 5 people are now doing something in the world of social media according to this new data. A few years ago it was only half the people and they might have had an argument, but not anymore.
I recommend you stash this data away for when you need to do a little bit of convincing in a future meeting or presentation. You still want to make sure social media is right for you (and the book is great for helping...the POST method is worth the price of the book) but the numbers continue to show that social media is right for more businesses than ever before.