We’ve done a fair amount of research into the financial sector in the past year, both Canada and the United States. Most of our data is of course, confidential to the client. But we can speak in “aggregate” terms of our findings. The broad strokes so to speak.
To put it bluntly, there is a lot of anger, frustration and distrust out there. No surprise given the tail end of 2008 and the subsequent spiral into a financial quagmire. Canada may have gotten off a little better, but it still saw a wallop at the banks in terms of consumer mistrust.
There’s lots of chatter going on, as might be expected. We found women tend to discuss bank services more than men (62% female overall) and that the most popular age group for discussion was 30-45. We looked at commentary in online newspapers, newsgroups and forums, blogs, microblogs and some social networking sites. Over 1.7M “conversations” in total across Canada and the U.S.
The topics that ranked the highest for consumer negativity towards the financial sector;
1. Mortgages
2. Fees and service charges
3. customer service
As might be expected, the larger the bank, the more negativity. Smaller, more localized banks in the U.S. had higher consumer sentiment while in Canada it was credit unions that saw the most positive sentiment. People are frustrated. Banks that used “trust” statements in their slogans were hit the worst with re-purposed content turning those slogans back on themselves.
So what does this all mean? As an industry sector, the financial world of businesses has a lot more trust building to do with consumers. It’s no small surprise, but banks and other financial institutions are likely addressing this issue. One wonders how consumer sentiment might be in a year or two from now. The volume of discussion is still rising across multiple social media channels as well. We expect to see a peak by May or June of this year, but that remains to be validated.
We haven’t really seen significant impact on politics in Canada, the USA or UK yet as a result of Social Media. You might be tempted to say “ah, but Obama used it well.” Yes, he did. But it was campaign stuff, slogans, videos, speeches. We’ve seen some effective use of Twitter in Egypt, Iran and attempts in Belorus.
In Canada the whole “prorogued” issue took off in Social Media and became a meme, and continues to thrive, albeit somewhat less so. But it didn’t result in the Prime Minister calling Parliament back. Discussions take place, there are plenty of political blogs, messages on Twitter and then there’s all those Facebook Groups; support this, protest that, save this. Nice. But still window dressing in the end.
I think there’s two factors at work here:
1) We’re still enamored with the capablities; making fun videos, sharing stuff, editing photo’s and such. I’d suggest we’re still in the “Honeymoon Phase” which I’ve suggested before. It’s all still new and fresh and fun. That will change.
2) It’s because it’s still in large part entertainment and to some degree, industrial media portrays it that way. Metrics to measure and understand Social Media are still in their infancy and there are no standards like there are with focus groups and polling mechanisms. That makes it hard for politicians and policy makers to take it seriously.
So if that’s the case, will Social Media become a serious contender for the attention of government policy makers and political parties? Absolutely.
One very important fact about Social Media: it enables the almost instantaneous formation of groups and the collaboration capabilities to enable consensus development.
We just haven’t seen real activism develop from a Facebook group that’s evolved into a determined political agenda resulting in regulatory, policy or legislative change.
That will happen. It’s starting. Some small groups are figuring that out. The US Government made a huge step with the Peer-To-Patent program. As government departments understand the collaborative and citizen-expert engagement advantages, Social Technologies will start to see deeper engagement between citizen and government. I give it 5-10 years. Look at how Innocentive is using such social technologies to solve problems.
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch)
We’re delighted to provide here the 2nd annual Atlantic Conversations II Report on Social Media Use in Atlantic Canada. The information here is downloadable (below) in PDF format and is the data we’ve made publicly available for general consumption under Creative Commons license. A more detailed, 30 page version is available at $450.
Social Media use in Atlantic Canada continued to climb in 2009. The biggest service to see growth was Twitter, while the average age of a Facebook user climbed to 53 this year. In terms of being active in Social Media channels, New Brunswick lead the way. We did see some leaps for Newfoundland & Labrador as well as PEI.
You can download the PDF report here. If you’d like the pay version, please contact us directly.
What’s “new media” now? We’ve hit the “500 channel universe” on the telly, the Web has become truly “interactive”, smart phones are ramping up for mobile use. We’re texting, tweeting, calling, voice mailing, videoing, gaming in vast virtual realities; creating and sharing content like never before in the history of mankind.
And now on the bleeding edge is “Augmented Reality” (AR) technologies. Think of it as your personal digital butler (see a video of Yelp’s Monocle in use here) using your smart phone to find out information about the real-world objects around you. Add in the ability to instantly add your 2 cents on a restaurant you just ate at or a coffee buying experience – well, you get the idea. We’ve added a whole new media channel. And as McLuhan said, the medium is shaped by how we use it. Will people use it and shape it? It’s simple enough to use. We’re already commenting on things. Then there’s Microsoft’s Natal project for the xbox.
My one area of concern over AR technologies is that studies have already shown people are reticent to use geo-location in their smart phones (less than .23% of mobile users in UK & USA). Using AR technologies requires some loss of privacy; are consumers willing to give more up?
More than anything, I just wonder, how many channels can we as citizens deal with and how many channels can marketers, PR pro’s etc., manage effectively? A lot of our research helps guide companies more effectively, but going from budgeting for 20 channels to 180 and then measuring effectiveness? When many metrics are still being debated and are yet to be defined?
What do you think? When is enough enough? At what point do we see channel decay in media formats? Or will we change?
As a social intelligence firm, we do a lot of research; that’s our life blood. So naturally, we look at trends and broader “uses” of Social Media technologies. Blogs are a key element in our research and here’s what we noticed this past year in how blogs have evolved.
A recent study by PEW Internet suggests about 11% of online people in the U.S. actively blog and of that only about 23% actually read blogs. Our findings are similar though we note Canada has a higher % of bloggers active. What we wanted to look at however, was the least and most successful blogs; how they have evolved in terms of architecture and usage.
Length: We found that of the most successful blogs, 87% tended to be 250 words or less in length for each posting. The longer the paragraphs, the less successful the blog.
Links: Blogs with higher search engine rankings have more outbound links with an average of 3.5 outbound links per blog post.
Video Blogs: Video blogs (vlogs) over 3 minutes in length tend to be viewed less. Our study group reported they would view a video blog an average of 64 seconds.
Comments: The top blogs in our research saw an average of 10 comments per posting across the board. We noted that 75% of the time these were simple statements of agreement and 8% of the time a form of conversation would take place in the comment sections. We also noted that 22% of the time in comments, they would go off topic. With video blogs, comments tended to be shorter (4-8 words 92% of the time) than on text blogs.
Media Mix: We noted that bloggers who mix images, video and text had a higher rate of comments (31.4% of the time) than plain text.
Business Blogs: Here we looked at blogs written “by” a business, that is, not an individual who is a consultant, but a business with multiple employees, even an enterprise. They averaged less outbound links (1.5) per post and had an average of 3 comments per post and less engagement. We distinctly separated business blogs because they skewed our findings. We also found businesses tended to be less frequent in posting (62% less) than individuals and only 14% of business blogs ever had the author respond to comment strings after a post.
Our summary is that blogs have become shorter and “snappier” as our online attention span seems to be getting shorter as well. The comprehensive data is for clients, but we wanted to share the highlights of our findings.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)
Today we’ve added a new metric to our mediasphere360 Social Media monitoring and analysis tool; we call it the Echo Ratio. So what’s that? Quite simply, we look at Social Media marketing campaigns or activity that we monitor for clients and can measure the viral uptake of a campaign, meme or discussion topic being monitored.
In Social Media marketing campaigns and with any meme or hot topic, the content delivered starts somewhere; someone “tweets” it out, posts to YouTube or similar and then finds Conversation Igniters to start the spread. In some cases it’s just a blog that someone posts and it takes off like wildfire. This often happens with high profile bloggers/thought leaders like Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Seth Godin or Beth Harte. read more
Media Measurement, Thunking•
on November 26th, 2009•
A fundamental rule of economics is that when you create a wealth of one thing, it results in a scarcity of another. Today we have created a wealth of information and a scarcity of attention. I’m not the first, or last, to say that. But looking at some of our research into Social Media across varied industries from pharmaceutical to manufacturing to software, one thing has become apparent as a growing issue – it’s getting hard to get attention on a big scale, now and ever more so into 2010. read more
It’s a question we get almost every day from current and prospective clients. Usually it focuses on Social Media, but of late Social Media is getting lumped into “media consumption” as a whole. Let’s put this into perspective. Generationally speaking.We think the question is more appropriately posited as “What media is most popular by age group?” Different age groups consume media in different ways. Understanding this is vital to developing effective communications strategies, advertising or marketing. read more
As we’re constantly monitoring Social Media use in the Atlantica region, here we release some high-level findings from this years ongoing research.
We define “youth” as 20 and under in this market. This research comes from a sample population of 1,500 within the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI and the U.S. states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine and Connecticut.
Social Network: Started out the year as MySpace (as expected) but has seen an increased use of Facebook (by 42% over 2008).
Social Places & Games: Club Penguin was most popular in the 7-12 age range while second was Miniclip and Yahooligans by Yahoo! was a close third for games services. For the 12-16 range we found Our World to be most popular. Picnik proved most popular for photo’s due to the services offered for photo manipulation. YouTube topped for videos, followed by Vimeo as a distant second.
Social Communications: MSN seemed to be the choice for “chatting” with second being eBuddy and GTalk a distant third followed by AIM and ICQ, Mebo was second to eBuddy for connecting multiple services . Controls and some of the features enabled on MSN were the deciding factor for usage. Apple’s iChat barely registered use in the under 20 bracket.
We noted that the under 20 age range for Social Media tools enjoy services that provide creative outlets. Picnik as an example enables a wide range of free editing capabilities before a premium service kicks in. A habit of youth seems to be editing photo’s in a service like Picnik and then sharing them on Facebook or via messenging services.
We found that 53% of females are more active than males, although we were surprised to see such an equal usage whereas in the 20+ range we find women are 65% more active than men in Social Media, specifically Social Networking services.
There was almost no difference in services used between Canada and the U.S. A finding we found encouraging in the sense of cross-border relations as these youth grow up.
The in-depth report has been made available to select clients and is available for $750.
Some of our findings in our latest analysis of Social Media use in New England, Atlantic Canada and Southern England. Our focus was on the 30+ demographics.
Research has shown women spend more time on Facebook than men. Our research into social media use in Atlantic Canada, New England and Southern England has backed this up. We’ve also noticed that different age groups perceive the technologies differently and use them for different purposes. Here’s some of what we’ve found that we can share:
Age 30-40: They’re driving much of what’s happening with social technologies, not the under 30 range. But are more conservative than the under 30 crowd. They’ll use social technologies for work and play, but more so than the 40-55 demographic. This group is also more open to leveraging newer services. PC age range in this group was about 2 years old. This group also adopts newer browsers with the majority using IE7 and FireFox.
Age 40-55: A very engaged segment and they will use social technologies for both work and purely social connection with friends. This age group is still fascinated with connecting to high-school and university contacts their parents couldn’t have enjoyed. The 40-50 crowd were also early adopters of the Web and so their usage behaviours correlate with earlier technologies. This range will use 3 or more social technologies and are 82% more likely to look at a new social media service. PC age in this group was an average of 2.5 years old.
Age 55 – 65: Are primarily motivated by their teen to early 20’s children who are often geographically separated by school or early career work. This age group prefers social technologies that enable picture sharing and family connections. Their secondary reason is personal hobbies, sharing with those of a similar mind. This group is not inclined to investigate new services. They’re more likely to stick with what they started with. They remain somewhat skeptical of technology and shy. This group will use 1-3 social technologies and are somewhat more likely to adopt new software and browsers with 42% using IE6 or 7 and the rest FireFox or Safari. PC age in this group was an average of 3 years old.
Age 65+: While still the smallest segment, this is changing. They’re preference is family connectivity over 90% of the time in the 1,500 people we surveyed. We found that this group tends to only engage in 1-2 social applications such as Facebook and a photo sharing site. They are extremely conservative in adopting new social technologies and consume most digital media through 2-3 sites. We also found this group very reluctant to change software apps they’ve grown comfortable with. In this demographic we found the highest continued use of IE6 (at 76%) and older PC’s (average age of PC being 5 yrs old.)
What we did find interesting was the commonalities across three different countries in each age group. There are some cultural differences, but I’m afraid we had to reserve those for paying clients. As could also be expected, privacy concerns escalated with age.
Methodology: We surveyed 3500 respondents via an online survey and email with a 75% completion rate. This was done over a period of 30 days. We surveyed people in Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Connecticut, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland then Surrey, Berkshire, Kent and Hampshire in England.
