Research, Thunking•
on March 10th, 2010•
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)
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)
Media Analysis, Research•
on February 22nd, 2010•
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?
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
Thunking•
on November 10th, 2009•
The industrial age heralded mass-manufacturing and the use of machinery to do so. The printing press revolutionized our thought processes and communications. With the rise of the industrial age the telephone and it’s widespread use, became possible.
At the opening of the industrial age, children were employed to fix machines. Many died. The work week was seven days, pay was horrid. A new social concept came into being – unions. The church also chimed in saying Sunday was a religious day of observance. The 5 day work week came into being, along with the concept of shift work. Huge social change occurred. As the telephone came into being, new social rules around its use evolved over time.
Enter the Digital Age, the advent of the fax machine, the Internet with email…snail mail use plummeted. It was easier and cheaper to use email. The cost of the transaction was put down to almost zero.
We are in a transition phase from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age. Watching this happen and with our ongoing analysis for clients across healthcare, manufacturing, shipping and more, we’ve noted some curious events happening. Here’s some of what we think will change;
Work Hours: The 8 hour white collar day will change, not so much the length of the work day, but the when. Shifts that enable connecting with other time zones (it’s already happening, has been for a while.) It will just become more common.
Work Location: Well, the concept of home office and remote office working is far from new. But it may become more realistic in the future.
Work Social Rules: Workplaces will first deny all access to social technologies. Then they’ll learn how to use those social technologies to their advantage (some already have) but limits will be put on “personal” social tools.
Etiquette: We predict a renaissance in social etiquette. Just as it’s not cool to wear your mobile on your hip, it will be uncool to check your mobile device at dinner functions and cocktail parties while talking to people.
Social rules are changing. A new age of transparency is upon us, but we are in the early stages of change. We’re just beginning to understand these social technologies and barely understanding their implications on our social behaviours. Paul Carr has some good insights.
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.
Social Media too, has many gray areas. Just not the gray you might think. We’re talking about gray hair here. In the research we’ve done for clients, we’ve found an increasing amount of social media usage by the 50+ demographic, and we expect this to increase.
With txt messaging being so common today, even the 35+ demographic has begun to broadly engage with txt messaging. Our research in Atlantic Canada and New England states has shown us that the average age of a Facebook participant (remember, we hate the term “user”) is 47 years old. We see that increasing as well.
So what does this mean? Why does business need to care? Because it means more of a wealthier market it increasingly engaging with social media. Added to this is then the challenge of how one engages with social media and the tools used. We’ve found that the older the demographic, the differences in the tools and how those tools are used, become quite significant.
Some traits of the 40+ demographic using social media are behaviours such as less personal information revealed, a tendency to write longer and read longer blog posts. More “intelligent” or deeper and longer discussions on topics of interest in Twitter or on blog posts. Older demographics tend to stay more loyal to platforms (i.e. Facebook, Netlog or Twitter) and only move to new platforms/services that have become a mainstay in the social mediasphere.
Understanding the age group you are targeting will significantly influence the communications strategy you engage in, the advertising you conduct and the services/tools that you can leverage. Sounds much like the real world doesn’t it? The difference is that in the real world, your communications and marketing are “broadcast” format, whereas in social media it becomes more of a conversation. And the 45+ demographic is very eloquent and persuasive in their discussions.
(Author: Giles Crouch, Principal)
