How Online Behaviour Impacts Real World Behaviour

It’s probably one of the biggest questions of business and governments; just exactly how does what people do “online” in Cyburbia, translate to actions in the real world? The evidence is overwhelming that it does. The challenge is that it’s changing our real-world life so much and in so many complex ways, that it can be a challenge to wrap ones head around it.

Online communities, Cyburbia, social medias or Web 2.0 – whatever you want to call these new channels of communication, are first and foremost the domain of “ideas”. It is from ideas that we develop plans and strategies that translate into actions. Through our past, current and ongoing research projects and from what many a pundit has written, we’ve broken down online activities into 4 key functions of how we use these new, hyper-connected tools to translate to real-world activities;

1. Ideas: We have ideas all the time. A new way to do something online or in the real-world. An idea about new laws, buildings, saving energy…anything and everything we do has human beings comes from an idea first.

2. Organizing: When an idea takes hold and we (and perhaps others) decide to take actions by translating that idea into reality, we have to organize. That could be meetings, protests, writing, creating a website or opening a restaurant. This all requires a number of steps and processes – this is organizing. There are a number of tools for organizing online; for one person to thousands of people. The key is that these new digital tools allow people to organize as groups quickly, anywhere in the world, at any time across multiple devices.

3. Collaboration: While your organizing the idea into actions, you’ll likely connect with others. Humans must work together as groups to make big things happen – like building a shopping centre. This is collaboration. Just as with organizing (and often they are integrated) these new tools enable a group to shape an idea, expand on it, refine it.

4. Communication: Once you’ve shaped your idea, you then communicate it to many or a few people. Once you’re team or group has formed, collaborated and organized, you then communicate again to drive awareness and action. You will likely create all kinds of communications content to get action (video, images, brochures, documents, blog posts, tweets etc.) Just as online tools enable collaboration, development of ideas (writing and research) and organizing, they facilitate communications that are faster, almost no cost and easier than ever before.

It is these 4 elements that combine to result in the actions that change our world; whether that be political or business. If you’re seeking to understand the translation of online activities into real-world actions, apply these elements to any groups and you’ll have a framework to understand how these interested parties are behaving and what may happen in your area of interest.

Perhaps you have some thoughts on this? Anything to add? Let us know.

Google+ vs. Facebook: A Human Approach

Being as we are constantly researching social media use and activity for clients, I guess we can’t help but weigh in on the Google+ and Facebook battle that opened up with last week’s announcement of Google+ (with my trial so far, I’m exceedingly impressed with Google+)…so as we spoke with our team members who are sociologists and anthropologists one glaring fact came to our attention: Google has taken the time to look at how people use the web and adapted Google+ in this manner. Facebook does not take this approach, they force people to behave a certain way. This is a vital, perhaps critical, difference and why Google+ may take the win in the long run.

The Privacy Battle
Facebook’s constant battle on privacy issues is a boon to Google+ who’s sorted out this issue well with Circles. On the ease of use for privacy on what is or isn’t shared, Google+ is a clear winner. Google learned a lesson from the launch of Buzz and no doubt closely looking at Facebook’s approach to this issue. Every time Facebook launches a new service or tweaks their system, there are howls of protest. Facebook is one of the top 10 most hated companies in America. Google stepped back from the trees and thought this through carefully.

The Opposing Philosophy of Privacy & Sharing
Seemingly, Facebook just doesn’t care about your privacy. if it does, its actions certainly don’t portray this. Not to say Google hasn’t had its slip ups as with Buzz, but it would appear that Google has a different approach to privacy at a fundamental level. Zuckerburg wields influence much like Apple’s Steve Jobs…and one can see that privacy is not something Zuckerburg is concerned with to any serious degree. When it comes to sharing, the “Wall” on Facebook has become one sorry state of affairs. Yes, you can manage who sees what, but it is insanely difficult, where Circles is easy and intuitive. Facebook just doesn’t understand human communications and how people want to share. This is a critical point in social media channels. Google has spent some time to understand how people share information and lifestyle communications; they are interested in how humans naturally behave. A vital, opposing philosophy to Facebook.

Segments & Lifestyle or Social Behaviour
What Google understands is that as humans, we have different social groups we connect with. Workers, family and hobbies or interests. Therefore we share different information with different people in different ways, at different times and frequencies. Facebook does not understand this, or if they do, they haven’t made it easy. The new sidebar for “easier chat” is not an answer to Circles, it is squirrely attempt at a new feature that adds little or no value.

Natural vs. Forced Behaviours
On our team we have sociologists and anthropologists who weigh in on almost every research project. This because how people behave in a social network provides critical insight for market research and public policy research. What we can very clearly see with Google+ is that as they spent time to understand privacy and sharing behaviours, they used their vast amount of data from other channels they own (Blogger, YouTube etc.) to understand how people behave online…and here’s the real kicker in Google’s approach – they built Google+ around how people naturally behave online, whereas Facebook forces you into their system. This fact alone is what we suspect will lead to a very good end product from Google. They’re just getting started with Google+ and we can’t wait to see what’s next.

What “Rick-Rolling” & “Cone-ing” Really Tells Us

Rick-Rolling was quite a fad for a while; playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley (from the 80′s) at an event and people dancing while videoing and then placing it on YouTube. This harmless, seemingly daft activity was carried out all over North America and even across Europe. Now there’s “cone-ing” in which a guy goes through a drive-through window having ordered soft-cone ice cream and does inane things when handed the cone..videoed and put on YouTube. Or the Coke & Mentos experiment. We shake our heads and wonder why? For what purpose?

We Are Exploring Our Culture
With well over 200 social media research projects under our belt and three years plumbing the deep depths of Cyburbia and its social alleyways, we’ve garnered some pretty interesting stats and insights. One conclusion we’ve started to come to is the “cultural exploration” of social media…ok another fancy label, but as humans, labeling things helps us frame an understanding. Pop psychology 101. So what do we mean here?

From the time we are infants, as individuals, we strive to understand the world around us. We learn language to express to our parents when we are hungry, what hurts and what we like. We do this in varying degrees all our lives. So with social medias, we are simply expanding our desire to explore the world around us as individuals and as a group and culture.

Communication is A Fundamental Trait
As humans, we must communicate to survive. We do better by communicating and working together. You cannot build a hospital and serve all the sick people by yourself. A government needs a bureaucracy to make a society work. Our very nature is to work together.

Social Media Is An Exploration of Defining Our World
We’ve never been able, as humans, to communicate and explore and attempt to understand the world we live in like we can today. One can argue that it is our fundamental drive to communicate that drives ICT technologies forward. Social Medias are so popular and driving the Web and mobile devices today because we must communicate to survive as a species (I mean survival in more ways than just finding food and shelter.)

Individual & Group Behaviours in Social Media
The example or Rick Rolling indicates group behaviours whereas cone-ing is the act of an individual that in like Rick-Rolling gets the attention of large or small groups of people. If you pitched BBC, NBC, CBC on having a camera crew attend random events and broadcast them live at your whim, they’d laugh you out of the executive suite. But because of social media tools, we don’t need their permission and thus we are free to explore how we communicate and engage with people.

How We Are Adapting Social Technologies
But we are adapting through these behaviours. Today, people will rarely answer their mobile phone during a meal; if they do, it is seen as rude and disrespectful. Similarly, where it was “cool” and gave you “social rank” to walk around with a phone glued to your ear, that is no longer the case. Wearing a phone on your hip is not cool anymore. Hopefully one day it won’t be cool to have a little black thing with a flashing blue light stuck in your ear either…

Summary
Actions like coneing and Rick Rolling seen individually and by some may seem inane and irrelevant. But they are how we as people, are exploring our world. They are all simply experiments. Sometimes they work and sometimes they flop. Badly. But that is what we do as humans. Taken together, looked at over time and seen for what they are, these actions can help us better understand our modern way of life and the society we live in. For us as researchers they are valuable clues in sociology, cultural anthropology, marketing and governments.

The Role of Social Networks in Online Engagement

Social Networks are a cornerstone of Cyburbia…they are the hubs or “cities” of our online lives. But their role in our online lives is complex and multi-layered. From over 200 research projects into social media usage across a number of industries and public policy engagements, we’ve garnered some interesting views into social networks. Here’s what we’ve come to understand about them.

Multiple Social Networks Per Person
We’ve found that on average people have 3 social networks that they engage with. Facebook today (formerly MySpace) tends to be the “overarching” or primary network. This is where people engage across a broader audience of friends, family and acquaintances. The Personal Hub is the one that gets the most activity. In a Personal Hub communications behaviour is focused on personal life issues. For marketers that means trying to sell a business product will more than likely be a failure. Engagement in these channels means understanding the different frame of mind the user will be in. A fact we often see overlooked by marketers.

The Other Networks
Outside of the Personal Hub social network people will tend to have a social network we term the “hobby network” which will be around their primary recreational activity; golf, kayaking, sports, books etc. These networks are superb engagement channels for marketers with products or services for that particular vertical. Then we find people will engage in at least one “professional network” such as LinkedIn (far less so in blue collar or low-knowledge jobs however.) Here they connect for professional reasons.

Cultural and Ethnic Social Networks
This is where diaspora communities engage with each other in their host nation communities and with their homeland online communities. Cultural groups connect similarly. Those of Caucasian North American origin rarely have a reason or interest to engage in these communities in the US, UK and Canada. Cultural and ethnic groups will spend more time in these social networks than the social network more suited to the host community they live in. Some examples are BigAdda for Indians, AllAfricans.com for Africans, although a large number of African Americans and African Canadians engage in this social network.

Some may think that such behaviour creates walls and isolation of online communities. We argue no more so than in the real world. Just as in the real world however, there are linkages across the communities.

Is Social Media the End of Friend Nostalgia?

Unlike those under 25, I didn’t grow up with Facebook in my face and my head pummeled with tweets and whistles of notification services and microblogs. I played in mud and sand and helped do my part to keep the laundry soap market in business like all kids into the 80′s. I lost friends when I moved, I made new ones. Over time my social circles changed. Like everybody else. I wondered from time to time about my high-school girlfriends and regular mates. It was nice to have a beer with the friends I’d stayed connected with, the two or three of them, and reminisce for a few minutes with a laugh or a groan.

Now, I’ve reconnected with most of them on Facebook or LinkedIn. Now I know all about what happened to them, who went to pot, who fell off the wagon who did amazing things. Kids today start connecting on various social networks at around 5 or 6 years old.

They will likely never know the bittersweet nostalgia of the natural process of losing friends and acquaintances. Sure, finding an old friend can also be wonderful and rewarding.

But before Facebook and Classmates and all these ways of reconnecting, there was a certain part of ones character that developed with these losses. Chances are, that will be less likely (at least in wealthy nations with prevalent Web usage.) What might be the ramifications? It will require a new set of etiquette behaviours for certain.

How do you think it might evolve?

(Author: G. Crouch, Principal)