As the Queen paid a visit to Canada at the end of last month, we wanted to take a look at what Canadians felt about the Royal Visit. Some countries in the Commonwealth are having that ongoing debate; should the Queen be the head of State or not. Then there’s the Royalists vs. the Republics split. We’re not getting into politics, just a snap look at overall sentiment.
So we set loose our software to look at the sentiment around the Queens visit and here’s the stats on what we found for sentiment;
Methodology: We sampled commentary across Canada’s major news papers online where comments were enabled. In addition we mined semantics from Twitter, Plurk and Identi.ca (primary microblogs) and Facebook fan and group pages. Representative sample size was 21,500 Canadians.
In all of our Social Media research looking at age groups and the tools they use is vital to later helping clients and agencies develop an effective strategy for their Social Media engagement.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, but there are generational differences in the types of Social Media tools preferred, namely the level of creativity or functionality a service offers. Here we provide a basic snap of these preferences which can aid in designing Social Media campaigns/projects or tools.
Generation Tech or Gen Z: Only just edging into their teens at the start end of the curve, this group is all about being “interconnected” and “networked” and use the tools to gather into formal and informal groups for short and long periods. Highly creative with the tools they are the least fearful to adopt new social technologies, they are also very fickle and not loyal if a service doesn’t meet their demands.
Millenials: They’re happy to go wild with features, functionality and ability to express. This is the crowd that likes MySpace with the ability to create all kinds of backgrounds and move things around on their MySpace page. Having grown up with these tools, there is no fear. This is a highly “networked” group and prefer to function as “many” instead of singularly. Don’t waste your time trying to find these folks in Twitter though. They prefer tools where they can clearly identify who it is they are connecting with.
Generation X: Somewhat creative and flexible, but less so than Millenials (Gen Y) they prefer systems already in place. They’ll step outside the box a little, but not much. They prefer to be guided easily and have little time to waste on fancying up pages. They get to the point. Generation X is a little less “network” oriented than Millenials.
Boomers: Set the framework. Good UI is critical for this generation. They’re not as comfortable as any previous generation with Social Media. They use an average of no more than 3 Social Media tools, those usually being one Social Network (i.e. Facebook) on photo sharing (i.e Flickr) and email. It’s not about funky features, bells and whistles with this group. They’re more fearful of changes, like their privacy and are less “network” oriented online.
Silent Generation or Pre-Boomer: Extremely limited use of Social Media tools with email being the preferred tool, although we see some uptake with Skype and certainly Facebook. This group, when they use the tools, use them mostly for family and close friend communications.
Methodology:
These insights are the results of aggregating our research findings from over 180 research projects for the business, NGO and government sectors since 2008 where age has been a factor in strategy development. This aggregate data represents the summation of looking at over 100,000 people across these generations in the United States, Canada and UK.
For a more comprehensive report and breakdown of tool preferences by country and region we do offer reports to clients for purchase. Naturally. This is our business after all.
(Author, G. Crouch, CEO)
Facebook’s continual attempt to “open” up people’s information is, I think, I gross miscalculation on the meaning of a persons “social network.” It’s not really about privacy of the individual it’s about privacy of our network of friends and family.
I am on Facebook and I like it. I will not however, connect as a “friend” with someone I have never and likely never will, actually meet. I ignore these requests, for business I use LinkedIn or I may connect via my Twitter. To get to know you better first. The mayor of my city made a “friend request” and while I’m sure he’s a very nice guy, I just don’t know him. I’m not a friend. Maybe someday I will be. Then I’ll include him.
The point is, Facebook is about a persons “network”, or who they work with, family and well, actual friends with whom there is a social or emotional connection. That connection may have started 25 years ago in high school or a year ago at a function and well, you just connected.
We already know that we can not possibly be friends with everyone. Nor do people want to be. This is where Facebook has entirely missed the point of social networks in the sense of “social networks” and in fact, I will submit, that by trying to expand, falsely, a persons “social network” beyond people they really want to connect with, they are significantly diluting the value of their data to marketers. Since there is no longer a “true” representation of a persons network. It ruins the “data set” and dilutes it.
Facebook adds significantly more value by looking at “network effects” of people and will be able to draw much better conclusions and provide much better resale information (in aggregate) to buyers and advertisers than opening things up too much.
Keeping privacy rights at the forefront is actually in Facebook’s better financial interest. The more they try to open things, the worse they actually make their offering.
Manging privacy better is in fact, in Facebooks broader financial interest in my opinion.
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, CEO)
After three years of analyzing Web and Social Media behaviour and engagement for clients and reading many other reports like those of PEW Internet, Forrester etc., I’d like to formally state that Social Media is a total and utter mess.
It’s just a messy place. In terms of information, both useful and not. Because it’s very hard to define what is or isn’t useful.
Just look at blogging platforms alone; there’s over 300 blogging platforms out there (i.e. Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad) and then there’s the search engines for blogs…Google’s blog search, IceRocket and Technorati among the leaders. Recently when we looked at the results our system brought back from Google and compared them to IceRocket, we found Google had an average of 62.4% more spam and unrelated content than IceRocket and don’t get me started on Technorati.
Think Twitter is the only Microblog? It’s not. There’s over 170 different microblogging services being used. Think Facebook is the only Social Networking service? Yup, you guessed it. There’s over 40 of those and their fragmenting everyday.
Then there’s aggregator services that enable you to share all your information or suck it up into one place. Google’s Buzz is a kind of aggregator combined with participation.
All of this to say; Social Media is a massive tangle of data.
It’s not information until you can make sense of it. There are a number of “reputation management” tools out there that enable some form of aggregation of the data into information, but so far none have proven overly useful.
There’s nothing wrong with this messy place called Social Media. It’s part of the progress. It’s wonderful because ideas are being shared, new approaches being developed towards a better world and well, that’s good.
It’s just a messy, unmanaged mess right now. And it likely will be for a while yet. This creates a nightmare for marketers, PR pro’s, businesses, government and the average citizen.
To me, Social Media will evolve to more simple systems. Such complexity is not sustainable.
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, CEO)
Although they aren’t launched yet, Starling.tv could be a game changer technology. They’re about to bring broadcast TV to Social Media and Social Media to TV. Exactly how we don’t know yet (though a chat with someone there left me grinning from ear to ear.)
I’m sure many of you reading this article have “tweeted” about the Olympics while watching, or a hockey game or footise or added a comment on Facebook or MySpace about a TV show you’re watching, have watched or are about to watch. Am I right?
So, the concept of Social Television is today, rather amorphous and undefined, but people are trying to make it happen. From our research we think this is closer than many think. Today, the platforms are fairly distinct.
But take for example MTV and MuchMusic with their channels that show txt messages from viewers and use txting voting to vote up a selection of videos. This isn’t just for the benefit of the audience; it tells MTV what’s hot and helps for radio play and lineups on other shows etc.
A whole conference on this topic took place in London this past March. There are hundreds of bloggers talking about it. And then there’s Boxee, enabling you to bring Social Media onto your television set.
Don’t be surprised if one day in a few months from now, you’re “tweet” or “like” from Facebook pops across a screen bottom of the show you’re watching.
So;
1. Will it make us tune back more into television to see if our tweet makes it there or our friends are hanging there?
2. Will we want to connect with social networking capabilities on NBC, BBC or CBC if we see others there who like the same shows?
3. Will TV finally have a new way of driving ad revenues or will it be micro-payment subscriptions?
What do you think?
Increasingly, we’re seeing mobile play a key part in our research for clients. In fact, we saw a 30% increase in mobile driven engagement of Social Media tools in the first quarter of 2010 than compared to 2009.
In the microblog segment alone, we saw over 40% of the posts (over 50,000 measured in total) made in 80% of our research projects coming from mobile devices (Twitter and Identi.ca and a few others.) Similar results were found in looking at blogs and services like Posterous. We do not measure SMS/txt messaging.
People are increasingly pushing content via mobile devices. If Apple does in fact add increased video capability and with video becoming a key component of mobile smart phones in 2010 and onward, this only further drives the proof that mobile needs to be seriously addressed by business looking to engage in Social Media.
And if you’re thinking it’s just kids, it’s not. We found that over 35% of the mobile posts were made by the 30% demographic. Generation X and Boomers alike are increasingly using mobile phones. And we found that overall, they are more likely (62%) use a mobile device to post to social networking services such as Facebook.
Mobile will increasingly impact citizen journalism, instant commenting on restaurant service and similar service-experiences. Are you ready to address that capability?
(Author: G. Crouch)
As we compiled some of our research from the past year, we wanted to look at possible differences in how social media tools might be used across Canada. This is aggregate data compiled from research we’ve done in all provinces (excluding NWT and Nunavut for which we have insufficient data.)
There are differences. For marketers this means regional preferences for tools are apparent and thus a national campaign means adjustment according to the tools of preference. For public relations firms this means different tools for the audiences. Just when you thought there was enough fragmentation now we’re into regional preferences.
So that begged the question…why? We don’t know. I welcome any thoughts or ideas. One theory we have is that it depends very much on Word of Mouth. Take up of these tools is not as a result of paid marketing efforts, that we do know.
As you’ll notice in the chart below, Facebook remains prevalant across Canada although was much lower in British Columbia than we expected. Flickr stood out as the number one photo sharing site and LinkedIn tops for business networking online. What does stand out is that regional preferences are defined and marketers, PR professionals and others should be aware of these preferences.
This data is compiled to reflect the 20-55 bracket, for which we have the best data and protects the privacy of our clients at the same time. Sample size represents a minimum of 1,500 users per province. The data is compiled in aggregate from various sectoral/industry research carried out from March 2009 to March 2010. The services mentioned are the top Social Media tools we noted by overall usage (there are many others.) Data is “ranked” from 1-10 with 10 being the most popular.
(Author: G. Crouch, MD)
Here I argue that traditional news media (a.k.a. industrial news media) is still and will continue to, play a critical role in how we consume our news and share it. Only now citizens can participate in the story.
Internet memes or stories are a key part of the mix, but often the big online memes or stories don’t become so until they are covered by industrial news media. Industrial media still has 1) mass reach and 2) credibility (maybe that is declining in some ways, but they still have credibility over the average citizen.)
Let’s look at just a few of examples;
Rogers iPhone Launch in Canada: We posted an article on the research we did while this was happening. Not until the online petition had attention from mainstream news media did it take off.
United Broke My Guitar: While it was raging across the Web as a meme, only 600+K people had viewed the story until CNN and a few other mainstream newsmedia outlets reported it. Then within 2 days the video on YouTube had surpassed 2 million views.
Motrin Moms: While the story simmered over the web through Social Media channels, it wasn’t until newspapers, radio and television news picked it up that it went truly viral. Motrin pulled the ads within 72 hours and no doubt their marketing department was taking a lot of Tylenol.
These are just 3 examples that point to the proof of how mainstream, industrial news media still plays a relevant role in spurring on a story. So while some may say traditional media is dead, I beg to differ. We still look towards these sources for actual news.
Traditional news media does face challenges though. The story of Gordon Lightfoot being dead was broken by a traditional radio news station. It was false. They didn’t do a fact check beforehand. It’s the fact checking and source analysis that citizens expect news media to do. Validating the back story. This factor will feature prominently in the future over who grows as a news source and who doesn’t. What we can say is that traditional news media is still very much alive, well and relevant.
We’ve been around the Social Media block a few times, hangin here for the past 3 years and doing an awful lot of research into this space. Last week I saw a few “tweets” on Twitter that pointed to articles about Social Media marketing – all the same topic, just a slighly different spin per article.
So I thought why not have a look at how many times we keep saying the same things about Social Media and here’s what I found in that look. Methodology at the bottom for those curious. I’ve tried to bring them into a Top 10 list and categorize them in a broad sense.
Top Ten Most Over Talked Social Media Topics?
1. How to make money in Twitter
2. Who “owns” Social Media in a business? Sales, Marketing or PR?
3. Why blogging is important for your business
4. How to use Social Media for marketing
5. Understanding Twitter / How to get more Twitter followers (ed. kinda went together)
6. Social Media Crisis Stories (Motrin, Nestle, United etc.)
7. Why Social Media is important in Public Relations
8. How to use Social Media for customer service
9. How to become a Social Media guru (ed. groan)
10. How to manage your online reputation
I suspect the “industry” or “business” of Social Media may be the most user-built “industry” in the world. On the one hand this is very interesting, since the discussions of what Social Media is, means and portends is developed using the very medium itself. One the downside, we end up repeating ourselves over and over again, creating a lot of clutter.
What do you think? Are we over-talking the business side of Social Media?
Methodology:
We ran our tool, mediasphere360, out there to search topics we found based on the Twitter hashtag #socialmedia. We put the findings into our AI Engine to find common phrases and words, then set the system loose to analyze over 2,500 blogs, 85,240 “tweets” and re-tweets and 60+ newsgroups. We estimate n=8,500 people as a baseline.
(Author: G. Crouch, MD)
I’ve seen several linkedIn discussions and more than a few blog posts about using Google as a free reputation management system. Doing so could cost your business in a big way and result in failed engagement in social media engagement – the same goes for Yahoo! or Bing. Why?
1.) It’s A Search Engine: Google et al, are consumer search engines. They are NOT designed to search Social Networks, .alt networks, forums and 99% of newsgroups. That’s not what they do. Most issues regarding reputation and brand are in those semi-closed networks. Sadly 97% of the “online reputation management” services also only search Google and miss everything else.
2.) The Deep Web: Yes, it goes deeper than what Google, Yahoo! or Bing delivers. There are crackers and hackers and more in the subterranean depths of the Web. What they’re doing there can be critical to financial management firms, multi-nationals and more.
3.) Ecosystem Bias: Google owns “Blogger” the blogging platform, Microsoft owns “Live Spaces” their “blogging” platform. That means those platforms may be carrying their advertising – they inherently have a bias towards their own network of online properties. Therefore you may miss what’s critical.
4.) News Is Not All The News: Google News Alerts is very good. But. They only deliver news alerts for those news agencies with whom they have news distribution agreements. That means you again may miss what’s critical.
Only MediaBadger and 2 other companies go beyond Google, Yahoo! or Bing to explore the deep web and source the information that matters, one is in the U.S. and the other in France. If you’re truly concerned about online reputation management and seeing what’s happening online, relying on Google, Yahoo! or Bing may be the most costly mistake you make.
