Content Usage Differences in Social Media

So you’re 40 something and you’re a hobby photographer with a nice DSLR you paid some good money for. You understand f-stop and ISO isn’t just a quality control system. You upload and share your photo’s. Then chances are the 90% of you edit your photo’s on your PC/Mac and then upload them. But not too much editing. Or perhaps you’re 20 or under…you take photo’s like mad everywhere. But you’re more into friend and party photo’s and you prefer to add captions, change colours and do all kinds of funky things with an image – and you’ll do it in browser online.

Our research through over 200 reports now across a wide spectrum of industry sectors, shows that age groups engage with digital media very differently. If you’re a marketer reading this – listen up. An example to engage with the younger generations is giving them digital content they can manipulate. That’s been done, yes. Perhaps most famously with Jeep and it failed miserably. Still, opportunities exist.

Once you hit the 30+ crowd however, they are less likely to manipulate photo images, are more concsious of what they post and where. In fact, the 30+ crowd tends to be a bit snooty with their content. They have less comfort with some of the technologies and spend less time manipulating digital content. Our research shows that about 15% of an over 30 audience will take to manipulating content. Under 20? About 80% will tend to manipulate digital content.

Much of this is simply logical – the older the person the less technology they’ve interacted with and the less time they’ll spend to learn and manipulate.

Understanding how different generations prefer their content and manipulate it can be crucial to planning a campaign or developing the creative elements.

Why New Social Networks Will Have a Hard Go

There’s two clear trends we’re seeing with regard to Social Networks (i.e. Facebook, Bebo, Ning etc.) in our research;

1) Specialization: There’s a growing number of specialized Social Networks for people’s hobbies, cultures or activities. Such as sailing, Indians, African Americans and more, we call these SSN’s (Specialized Social Networks). Then there’s services like Ning that enable social groups to connect and organize.

2) Consolidation: People are getting over the mad rush and excitement of new stuff and staying put, including consolidating where they are and what services they are using. If they’re on Facebook, they’re staying.

In terms of global Social Networking services, Facebook has won, as LinkedIn won for business networking. MySpace, Bebo, NetLog and others can try all they want, but pulling in people from existing services is going to be a tough job. Why?

It’s Not Contacts It’s Relationships & History

Sure, Buzz already enabled your Gmail contacts to easily migrate into Buzz (a problem with privacy in and of itself) and Facebook and the others offer the same service. But it’s not about your contacts. It’s about your content history (the photo’s and videos you’ve shared, commented on, laughed and cried over, the notes you’ve made and shared and more.) This is the real value inherent in a Social Networking service.

While it may be easy to import contacts, it’s much harder to convince all your friends and connections to move to a new service. Because they too have a history on that service. And they don’t just connect with you. They too have their own family and friends they’ve established relationships with.

For new services that want to compete directly with Facebook, this is their biggest challenge. And relationships and that history are not transferable. It’s just not technically possible.

Specialized Networks Have Opportunity

This doesn’t mean there isn’t still opportunity. We see a trend toward specialized Social Networking services, such as AllSailors or ConnectedSailors or singles dating for sailors like LoveSail in the UK. Then there’s Ning where you can set up your own Social Network for whatever hobby, sports group, community group you want. Easily and quickly. These specialized Social Network services are growing and what we’re seeing is that people are keeping their Facebook, NetLog etc., services and then engaging with specialty Social Network related to their hobby. We have seen as well, that people who are passionate about a particular topic, cease engagement with general services like Facebook; this will represent a monetization challenge to these services.

Age Related Context
Tied into this is that the under 20 demographic is most active in broad social networks, it’s the 20+ crowd who are establishing hobbies and extra interests that are migrating more to Specialized Social Networks (SSN’s), especially the 35+ demographic, men and women alike.

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Behaviour: The Kid Phase?

There’s a lot of nasty behaviour online – understatement of 2010. A tweet from a smart communicator, Lauren, lead me to a post about Richard Dawkins feeling slighted over improper behaviour on his forums. The irony of the subsequent comments on that blog post were rather enjoyable.

We’re facing a complex set of new issues around social rules on the Web; in Social Media channels and other online channels. As humanity, these technology tools give us an ability to express ourselves unlike ever before.

Given all the research we do on Social and Digital Media, behaviour is something we look at regularly. We wade through an immense swampland of comments and discussions daily. And probably 85% of it is junk. Spam, nasty comments that are destructive rather than constructive. Porn spammers and the rest. The problem is, we face a challenge in moderating this behaviour in Cyburbia that we don’t have in the real world.

In the real-world in a group of people gathered for whatever reason, a naysayer or nasty person can be quickly shut down and asked to leave. In forums, newsgroups or blog/newspaper comments, there are moderators or a person can be deleted from a forum (but they can easily re-register.) So there are limits to what can be done effectively in Cyburbia. Then you get to issues like Richard Dawkins’ and the final result is to shut off the channel altogether, then we all suffer. Something that can be avoided in the real world.

We often call this online behaviour “childish”. Perhaps because that is exactly the phase we’re in with Social Media; we’re just finding our “Voice of Humanity” and so much of our behaviour is immature. We haven’t established many social rules yet. The “culture” of the Web is unsettled and as yet not entirely defined. It’s easier too when we can hide behind anonymity in these instances – another issue that will need addressing?

Over time I suspect, we’ll develop rules. Ways to shut out overly negative behaviour. It will take time. So meanwhile it’s just part of the “noise” that we have to learn to self-filter or we all suffer for one rotten apple. Issues like this is part of the reason governments are starting to look more closely at online regulations and legislation.

What do you think? What stage are we at?

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Channel Decline by Users

We’re always doing research into how people are using Social Media, much of it for clients, much of it the result of the research we do for clients. One interesting trend we’ve noted over the past few months – people are turning off the garden hose. We’re learning to filter.

As humanity, we’ve suffered from “filter failure” ever since more books were printed than a human could read in their lifetime. All we’ve done is increase the volume, now more significantly.

When we do research for a client, we always look for the “power user” those engaged more than others. We also look at the Echo Ratio (our own stat based on the Solidarity Value of economics) and applying the Power Law Curve. I’m just stating our process here.

Up until 3 months ago, the average joe user of Social Media (i.e. engaged 5-10 hours per week in social media channels) had 5.4 channels they engaged in (that most often comprised in Canada, UK and USA of a social network, microblog, email, blog and one or two others.)

Over the past 3 months we’ve seen that decline quite significantly, down to an average of 3.25 apps per average user of social media channels.

Are we learning to apply filters? We’re now looking at heavier users. I like the posting recently from David Armano on a similar vein.

What do you think?

What Age Groups Consume the Most Media?

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. Continue reading »