Senior Citizens and Social Media

It’s easy to assume social medias are the domain of the young and frenetic. To assume the “silver surfer” or the silver haired 55+ dem0graphic is rather technologically disconnected. That assumption would be wrong. Marketers would do well to take a second look at this market and it is growing. In Atlantic Canada and northeastern USA, the average age of a Facebook user is 53. In England we see a similar trend, though it is somewhat lower at 46.

How do figure that the Silver Surfer is more active than we might have assumed? As the Internet grew in popularity, it was first most popularly adopted by people in their 40′s, back in the mid-1990′s. Computers were triple or more the cost of what they are today and those that could afford them for the household, and the cost of Internet connectivity (dial-up no less!) were in the higher middle income brackets, professional and well educated. Now, 15 years on, they are into their 50′s and 60′s and they are active.

Reason for Engagement
The pie chart below indicates the reason Silver Surfers engage in social media. Friends and family come first; no surprise there. This is followed by hobbies (golf, knitting, sailing etc.) but shopping and banking comes in last. Silver Surfers are still untrusting of online financial transactions. We also found that this demographic is among the most vocal in local newsmedia websites for commentary.

Channels Used
Here we have a graph of the channels used by various age groups. As we can see, Silver Surfers prefer to Forums and photo sharing. They may watch video but are unlikely to create and share videos through channels like YouTube or Vimeo. For social networks in Western nations they prefer Facebook for its ease of use (all things considered) and because it is more likely that’s where family and friends are. This research was conducted prior to Google+ launch.

Conclusions
Silver Surfers or Senior Citizens (classed by us as 55+ in this instance) are active in social media. They love to comment on news sites and as expected have strong opinions. For the most part, they prefer simple tools that fit in largely with services they are already familiar with. They quickly develop habits of use with preferred tools and are unlikely to change their preferences once established. New tools that take some exploration or anywhere near complex will not be easily adopted. They are “late adopters” of any technology and service online.

This is an active social media demographic. Marketers have an opportunity to engage in these channels and push products and services. We do note they are not likely to plonk down a credit card number into an online purchasing system unless they truly establish a trust connection.

Methodology
We collected and aggregated data from 2,500 profiles in Atlantic Canada and New England states and 1,200 profiles from England for a sample size. All data collected was publicly available. We did not access individual and/or private information. Over 1.5 million text files were analyzed using our Artificial Intelligence Engine and crawler, mediasphere360. Human verification of data was applied. The data was collected from June 2010 to December 21st, 2010.

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.

Where Social Media & Politics Intersect

There was little doubt that social media played a key role in the election of Obama in 2008. Or did it? Then the recent Canadian election where social media played a key role for the first time and Canada’s political landscape underwent a major shift. But the voting population only increased by almost 2%. Did social media really have an impact? In last years election in the UK, social media tools were used, but nowhere near the degree in either Canada or the US. Yet the UK saw a significant political change to its traditional landscape.

The question that keeps arising then…is social media having an impact on politics? The answer is that we really don’t know. There’s not been a comprehensive, empirical study conducted. And how do you measure that? What are reasonable standards of analysis to draw conclusive hypothesis?

We do an immense amount of work in the public policy sector; not much of it around politics however. At least not yet. We do monitor the elections out of our own interest. We don’t do work for political parties as part of our best practices standards. But from our research projects, we do see where we think politics and social media are and will increasingly, intersect.

Political Culture: A key aspect of social media and the technologies that enable the connections (cameras, laptops, iPad’s, smartphones etc.) is creativity. Very quickly video mashups, images, text tweets and blog posts can be put online and reach the community. The other aspect of these social technologies is the ease of organizing, planning and communicating at almost no cost. Bring these two together and you have a powerful set of tools to drive changes in political culture. A key aspect of political culture is citizens perception of “legitimacy” of the political process in their country.

The Danger - these tools and approaches can be used to build a greater sense of legitimacy in the political system, but can also cause a lot of damage and be used to make the political culture seem less relevant or important. This will be a key consideration for the use of social media by political parties in democratic nations.

Political Behaviour: This is essentially, peoples views on a political party or process. Mostly they are influenced by friends and family, then cultural and ethnic groups and perhaps ones social situation. When it comes to social media, the question arises of it’s impact on political behavior; does it influence change? Or perhaps it further solidifies ones views because of the accessibility of tools and technology to easily express ones views? There is no answer yet, we just don’t know.

The Danger – Further and deeper stratification of peoples views that might lead to a more divisive nation, perhaps causing rifts and polarization that then leads to nation-splitting. A worst-case scenario is a resulting information war that spills into the real world and results in civil conflict.

These two areas are where we see social media impacting and connecting with politics. Some argue social media played a role in sparking the Arab Spring. We somewhat doubt that. Certainly it was a key element in “organizing” and enabling “communication” but the causes were endemic and long-standing. They were sparked in Tunisia by the fellow who set himself on fire and in Egypt by the guy beaten to death by police. Social media was relevant, but only enabled a story to spread (critical as that was.) The impact in well-established democracies however, is still far from known. That social media will have an impact on political culture and behaviour we have little doubt. The evidence however, is not easy to collect and interpretation needs the collective thinking of political scientists, sociologists and anthropologists…fortunately we have them on our consulting team and we continue our research.

But, what do you think?