No, I doubt it. That’s the short answer. Yes, nearly a million people have “quit” Facenook recently with the new privacy rules and the advent of the “I like it” button being added to the service. But they have over 400 million active users worldwide. Losing a few million, and likely they will, is just not enough to worry about at that size. A few hundred thousand is a blip on the “churn rate” for a month. That’s it. If that even.
One group of aspiring entrepreneurs has raised over $100K to build a more “private” alternative to Facebook and will likely see some business if they can execute. Diaspora says they’ll launch in late summer or early fall. This is the democracy of the Web at work – if you don’t like something, there’s a way to build the alternative.
If reports start to come out that 10, then 20, then 50 million are leaving, I suspect they’ll start to be concerned. But the fact is, we’ve heard these privacy and usage fear stories before. As the Internet began to see popularity in the mid-90’s and the .com bubble started to expand bigger than a Hubba Bubba bubble gum bubble, news stories ran constantly about all kinds of dangers; fraud, luring, lurking. We warned against so many different societal threats. Today, we’ve all learned to delete those emails from some poor sod in Upper Rubber Boot Africa who needs to get to their dead uncle’s millions and only you can help…well, hopefully you’ve figured that out.
Here we are, 15 or so years later. The Web keeps growing and more people keep signing on. This I think, says at a broader social level – people want to connect, create and communicate. Despite the dangers.
Chat rooms, IM services, newsgroups, forums…those early “Web 2.0″ tools, still exist and are as popular as ever. Privacy commissioners may write letters of concern to Facebook…but people still log on. Daily. By the many millions.
If governments step in in a larger way, Facebook may be forced to make changes. But at the end of the day, Facebook has also enabled people to clamp down their profiles. It’s not easy, but it’s doable. Like many things in life, we sometimes have to take responsibility for our own actions and work at things.
Just like the Web is not going away, quite the opposite, so Facebook isn’t going away. Services like Diaspora will come into being, people will learn to better manage their privacy. These are new social rules we’re writing as a society. In the meantime, Facebook is not about to collapse.
Here’s a great 2 min video by Huffington Post on managing your privacy settings.
(Author: G. Crouch, MD)
It’s quite simple as to “where” we find the time. I wish I could claim I found that answer, but I can’t. With all the research we do into Social Media, I get asked this question a lot by agencies and clients alike.
In America alone, over 2 Billion hours of television are watched each year. Or about 2,000 hours per person…which translates into the fact we watch adverts all weekend on the telly.
All we’re doing is adjusting our free time. In Canada, StatsCan research has shown 64% of Canadians watch TV and are online at the same time. That was two years ago.
If we’re watching 2K+ hours of telly a year, then all we’re doing is re-aligning our time. And telly is a one-way medium, there’s no engagement. It’s like the first century of the industrial revolution – everyone drank gin because they had no idea what to do with their free time.
Then the 5 day work week came along and so did television; we suddenly had the sitcom to occupy our brain, since we just didn’t know what to do with ourselves.
Think of that on a grand human race scale; we went from hunting and gathering to still working crazy hours on the farms, to industrialization and modern commerce and we suddenly had, as a race, more free time than ever.
We’re simply adjusting from gin to telly to social media. And I suspect we’re still in the very early stage as many sociologists think. We’re tossing apps at the iPhone wall and waiting for them to stick; most aren’t, but some will.
Sound reasonable to you?
(Author: G. Crouch)
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.
We’ve conducted research on Social Media usage for over 80 companies now, from health care to engineering to non-profits. No, I’m not tooting our horn here; bear with me a moment. We’ve covered Europe, Canada, the USA and snippets of Asia and southern Africa in our wanderings. One thing we’ve learned out of examining over 780 Million (or so) bits of data? People like where they hang online and they don’t really like to change – with a few caveats. Of course.
When it comes to Social Networks (i.e. Facebook, MySpace or Bebo) citizens (I hate the term “user”) become rather attached to those brands and services. Once entrenched and engaged there, they tend to stay there. In monitoring brand and product mentions and discussions over a 6 month period for several brands – people mentioned the brand in a channel where they initially hung out. Less than 1% of over 240,000 people left their initial Social Network to engage in conversations or make comments elsewhere.
In usage patterns, we found that out of the 240,000 sample group monitored, 78% also used a separate photo service and would have an account on YouTube or another video service. Less than 5% of the sample group (Canadians, American and Brits) had more than 3 actively used accounts. Okay, a caveat here, we sampled these 240,000 people where we found the same “user name” being used – but we do estimate a less than 4% margin of error here.
To Seth Godin’s new project with Squidoo “Brands in Public” we are very interested to see what happens. Brands in Public offers brands the chance to engage with people when they mention their brand by creating a portal that sucks in any mention of their brand across Twitter on blogs etc.
The upside is that the brand can then “go” to the channel(s) where the issue is being discussed and engage with people. For the most part. I like it for microblogging services like Twitter or Plurk, but suspect it will fail when it comes to newsgroups, usergroups, the BB and Usenet etc., all areas some (like ours) services can monitor, but Google does not. Nor would this tool. It’s a great concept, and it will have a positive impact. But.
At the end of the day, citizens like the online home they make. They’ll rarely venture out and away from the services they start with, since that’s where they’re comfortable. Seth has changed the game here for many monitoring services like Radian6, RTGI or Trackur and for Microsofts proposed solution. The good side of this project is the ability for the brands to reach at least most of the services where the conversation may happen that affects them, if not all.
Key is that Seth et al have recognized a key fact; a brand in Social Media has to go to the audience, don’t expect them to come to you.
Did we miss something? What do you think?
(Author: Giles Crouch a.k.a Webconomist)
The standard tools of marketing research for years is being shaken up with Social Media. For years the key research tools to obtain the views of possible customers have been focus groups and various types of surveys, from phone to on the street and then to Web-based. With the advent of so many monitoring tools for Social Media, are focus groups and surveys even useful? Some argue they aren’t. We argue they still serve a purpose, but Social Media monitoring and analysis should be included in the mix.
Why? Because in Social Media you can gather opinion and insight through observation and then draw conclusions – a more “qualitative” approach. Focus groups and surveys imply a greater level of bias, simply because there is an end objective reflected consciously or not in developing the questions or guiding the focus group. In Social Media analysis, you have the ability to simply “monitor” from afar.
Here are what we see as downsides to focus groups:
- A vocal participant can hold sway over the group
- In group settings, individuals are influenced by others in the room
- Participants “know” there is someone behind the darkened window, watching and listening
- A focus group has a structure that brings inherent bias
- One on one interaction is very difficult
- The desire for reward may not produce the right results
- You’re not really inside the consumers head
The downsides of surveys:
- There is an inherent bias to the type and structure of questions
- People do not have to be so honest
- There is the inherent knowledge of being “surveyed”
So how do you leverage Social Media services for research? There are over 60 Social Media monitoring tools for the marketing sector (including our own mediasphere360 base version) that can be used to look at trends and discussions. A company can look at competitors or their own product or spark conversation in various Social Networking applications and monitor the subsequent feedback. Are there downsides? Certainly there are;
- Some inability to assess gender and age
- Behaviours can be unpredictable
- Sometimes you need to control the frame of the research
- It can be difficult to “end the conversation”
- There are challenges in guiding the discussion
- Almost current monitoring tools are poor at understanding “sentiment”
The Conclusion:
All forms of marketing research have their good and bad points; including Social Media analysis. Some pundits have said that Focus Groups are dead, but we think not. Marketers now have an additional tool at their service. Focus groups and surveys have the ability to focus the research and set a framework, where Social Media research can capture more “emotional” aspects of research providing a more robust analysis that provides a meeting spot for “quantitative” and “qualitative” to give marketers, ostensibly, a better picture for decision making than ever before.
Perhaps most interesting with Social Media analysis and monitoring, is the ability to come as close as possible to getting inside the head of your consumer. That’s a little scary, but invaluable as well.
Best Practices•
on November 21st, 2008•
Analysis Paralysis – when you’ve got so much data that you stop making effective business decisions. It happens to the best of us. Perhaps more so now. Marketers and communicators engaging in Social Media are debating heatedly over what metrics are right, what exactly to measure and what to report and how…and so on. With digital media, analysis becomes a easier than ever before – and both marketers and PR professionals are in part to blame, since they hyped this ability to collect such data. Add in that more CEO’s are spending their time bogged down in financial management than building the business, we have a situation ripe for analysis paralysis. There are so many measurement tools for Social Media that it is easy to become overwhelmed – and make the wrong decision, so no decision is made.
Marketers and PR pro’s will dump mass amounts of data into clients laps saying “look, it worked”, and this data then ends up in front of the CFO to justify the budget spends, which in turn has the CFO and CEO discussing budget spends – with too much data to make a truly effective decision. The issue then becomes over-analysis, getting to the minutiae that may not support a good decision by both marketers/communicators and finance.
Metrics are important, analysis should be done, it can help shape better financial and marketing/PR decisions. A CFO will spend money if it is justified, but it’s all about the “right” amount of analysis. So when running campaign or event analysis, concentrate just on the factual data that matters. Set the end metric first, then a few milestones to measure on the way to that goal. Good marketing is a managed investment, and managed properly the return is “growth” however that is organizationally defined. We often advocate heads of marketing and finance working together to align the strategic goals, while the “implementers” or tactical folks in marketing/communications and finance iron out the details.
Today, many financial managers have much a broader understanding of business. Working together you can set expectations on what amounts of data you really need to measure successes and failure and avoid analysis paralysis.
The past couple of years has seen much discussion surrounding the rise of video. Reading the writings (note we say “reading”) of pundits and analysts alike, it would seem the keyboard is fading to a faint memory. Then there are those that hail the doom of good grammar, spelling and creative writing. So, which is better? Text or video? We set out a few weeks ago to explore this question, not in any extensive detail, but using our mediasphere360 tool and plumbing the brains of our team.
Essentially text is very much alive and well with no signs of slowing. In fact, the use of text is growing, we argue, more so than video. We see the reason for text as being predominant over video as a mix of issues, mostly that there are bigger barriers to video than text. More technology is required for video; camera, editing software, the right PC and the knowledge to make truly effective use of these tools. We also noted some key changes in the use of text, noted below in this article.
As monitored blogs we found that using estimations by eMarketer, Gartner and Forrester (all respectable research houses) we see there are roughly 60 Million text-based blogs. Then there are the microblogs like Twitter, Plurk and identi.ca, all text driven. Add in the increasing use of SMS to blogs, microblogs and participatory services, you have about 60% more text than video. In our research of monitoring daily blog entries we found that there is on average over the past 4 weeks a ratio of 3:1 for text over video blogs. Additionally, underlying the use of video on video sharing sites is that user comments are 95% text based even when video commentary is an option.
It is still easier and faster to produce text-based content than it is video. Additionally, we find that video when shot personally using a Webcam on a PC tends to be more “personal” and a quick survey found that users were less comfortable putting their “face” out there versus writing a blog entry in text. The other factor was that with a Webcam mounted on a PC or in a laptop creativity has limits; the person must operate within a restricted field of the cameras range. So to really make video interesting, you need a camera operator to create more movement, since this is how broadcast television and movies have trained us to view video productions.
We believe that video will continue to be very strong, and predict that video and text will grow closer together in the coming years. The ability for Smart Phones to have higher quality video, quick in-device editing and lower cost uploading will impact the increased use of video as well; but these technologies need to develop and become easier to use.
The changes we have noted in text are interesting as well. This article/blog post actually exceeds the average blog post by a few hundred words. We found that of 10,000 blog entries (we though “n” should be about n=10,000 as a minimum representative number) the average entry was 150 words or 3 paragraphs. We found only 30% had poor grammar and found 70% had spelling mistakes. We found a common use of contractions as increasingly popular (i.e. LOL, IMHO etc.) which we think is carried over from mobile device usage and microblogging. We’ll post more on these findings later.
So why does this matter? On the one hand it is a signal to how we are evolving our communicating styles and preferences as a society, and on the other hand it can be a good guide when developing a Social Media strategy to determine a good mix of video and text and where to place effort.
(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Partner)