Ethnography in Social Media: Language

From Ebonics to Standard English (SE) to regional dialects, accents and contractions – all are elements of our daily lives in an urban setting.The larger the city you live in, whether it’s the U.S., Canada or Europe, the more ethnic groups we find and the bigger the challenge in Social Media engagement. Executing a Social Media campaign in one language is hard enough, crossing multiple cultures in one urban area is another.

But as predominantly English-speaking Western nations see ever increasing numbers of immigrants, language will be an issue in Social Media – for monitoring, marketing and engaging. Another challenge as part of this challenge is the use of the English language, it’s nuances, slang and context.

In our ongoing research into Social Media use, we have found increasing use of ehtnographic-centric Social Networks, such as AfricanZone (there are several others) for Africans in and outside of Africa. Or Biggada for Indians.

For large Social Networking companies like Facebook or NetLog, this can mean lost eyeballs for ad revenue models. For marketers it represents adding yet another social technology channel into the mix. For monitoring companies it means they’re missing potentially key information.

Just adding new language capability in Facebook is not enough. Beyond language are uses of colours and more specifically the forms of content. Bigadda and Bebo in the UK add their own content and engage with those communities because of their added content. More on this in another post.

Suffice to say, language and subsequently culture will be an issue in Social Media development in Western nations in future years.