After three years of analyzing Web and Social Media behaviour and engagement for clients and reading many other reports like those of PEW Internet, Forrester etc., I’d like to formally state that Social Media is a total and utter mess.
It’s just a messy place. In terms of information, both useful and not. Because it’s very hard to define what is or isn’t useful.
Just look at blogging platforms alone; there’s over 300 blogging platforms out there (i.e. Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad) and then there’s the search engines for blogs…Google’s blog search, IceRocket and Technorati among the leaders. Recently when we looked at the results our system brought back from Google and compared them to IceRocket, we found Google had an average of 62.4% more spam and unrelated content than IceRocket and don’t get me started on Technorati.
Think Twitter is the only Microblog? It’s not. There’s over 170 different microblogging services being used. Think Facebook is the only Social Networking service? Yup, you guessed it. There’s over 40 of those and their fragmenting everyday.
Then there’s aggregator services that enable you to share all your information or suck it up into one place. Google’s Buzz is a kind of aggregator combined with participation.
All of this to say; Social Media is a massive tangle of data.
It’s not information until you can make sense of it. There are a number of “reputation management” tools out there that enable some form of aggregation of the data into information, but so far none have proven overly useful.
There’s nothing wrong with this messy place called Social Media. It’s part of the progress. It’s wonderful because ideas are being shared, new approaches being developed towards a better world and well, that’s good.
It’s just a messy, unmanaged mess right now. And it likely will be for a while yet. This creates a nightmare for marketers, PR pro’s, businesses, government and the average citizen.
To me, Social Media will evolve to more simple systems. Such complexity is not sustainable.
What do you think?
(Author: G. Crouch, CEO)
Media Analysis, Research•
on March 8th, 2010•
Perhaps “killing” is an aggressive word, another might be maturation or natural selection. Our nearly three years of researching consumer and citizen behaviour in Social Media has taught us a lot and enabled us to see some interesting trends now that we’ve been at it a while. Chief among them now is how people are deciding the fate of existing and new Social Media apps and services. We suspect 2010 may be a year of attrition and consolidation.
Consumers in the U.S., Canada and England tend to actively (i.e. create content and interact) use only 3 services on a regular basis (more than 4 hours per week.) Other services are used about once every two weeks, on average. This is usually tends to be one Social Network app (i.e. Facebook or Bebo), one time-sensitive app (i.e. Twitter or Instant Messaging) and one video app (i.e. YouTube.)
Other services that fall behind the actively used ones are photo sharing or editing (Flickr, PhotoBucket or PicNik), blogs and Wiki’s.
We can clearly see the economic concept of the Solidarity Value at work in Social Media. As in the more people using a service the more inherent value it gains, socially and economically. Twitter owns the microblog space; Plurk and Identi.ca lost out. Facebook owns the Social Network space, MySpace is on a steady decline and lost that race. Facebook has already acquired FriendFeed in August of 2009.
But what we’re also seeing is an interesting trend towards specialized Social Networking sites; such as for cultures, hobbies or life-interests. This trend is just emerging as far as we’re seeing, but has been trending upwards over the past 6 months. For marketers, we suggest monitoring this trend since people tend to spend the most time on the things that they are most passionate about.Obviously.
As we have an abundance of information and a scarcity of attention, the same goes for Social Media services – people can only spend so much time using any set of services. And now we’re starting to see habits emerge as these channels and services become more commonplace in our daily media consumption lives.
When it comes to age groups and this pattern, it repeats itself. In fact, the younger the age, the more “closed” loop they like their services to be (i.e. txt messaging, IMing and Facebook.) Added to this factor is the increasing “interoperability” between services (i.e. aggregating your activities into one place like Buzz or Facebook.) More on that later.
All of this is pointing to a trend that will see a significant increase in the fight to gain peoples membership in free and freemium services and to keep them there. That will be a tough challenge ahead.
(Author: Giles Crouch)
Media Analysis, Reputation•
on January 19th, 2010•
United and the broken guitar, moms insulted by Motrin, snotty-nosed Domino’s pizza employees; they’ve been analyzed and analyzed. Each element picked apart and pontificated over. I too am guilty of that. Let’s face it, they make fur juicy fodder to citizens alike and those of us engaged in the social mediasphere. Now it’s about to get a lot harder for Joe-citizen to get anywhere with social media.
Time to take a deep breath, step back and look at it from a different perspective. The likelihood of many of them happening again, to the degree that they did, is minimal. Each has changed an industry; mostly for the better. But what happens after the first big crisis in each industry?
United wasn’t the first airline to suffer from a social media crises and it wasn’t the first time United suffered from social media either. JetBlue gets that honour on valentine’s day 2007. Taco Bell will likely wear the unadorned crown of first for restaurants in 2006 with the rat scare and Domino’s second.
Most of the social media crises have happened with major brands. Not all, however; we’ve dealt with smaller businesses facing more localized crises. These big crises are likely to happen again, but one can speculate they’ll be in different industries. The airline industry groaned yet again with the United issue. Food services with Domino’s.
If citizens want to truly make a point with a negative experience via a major brand, they’ll need to become increasingly creative. Dave Carrol wrote a great tune and added a video behind it. Simply text blogging his experience likely wouldn’t have worked. We picked up on the Motrin issue more because it took a series of practitioners involved in Social Media to push out the message on how flustered moms were.
While it’s not impossible that another video of fast-food employees doing gross things to customer orders couldn’t go big, it’s not likely to happen to the degree it did with Domino’s.
There are still a lot of industries to be hit in a negative way, but as we did our research into the discussion volume around these crises, we found that each time around (with only United and the guitar incident as an exception) the volume of discussion decreased as did the viral factor and the Echo Ratio increased (the story stayed quite contained.)
Essentially, we’re saying that it’s going to get harder for the average Joe to use social media as an effective weapon for change or compensation when done wrong. Messages are 30% less viral the second time around in an industry and 65% less the third time around. The story will also have less of a long-tail effect; although it can stay alive forever in the digital world of Cyburbia.
While this can still be damaging to a company’s bottom-line, it’s less so than before; unless your industry hasn’t been hit. In that case, brace yourself if you’re the first to be targeted. Business will (and are) get savvier in dealing with them and citizens will have to work harder to get the message out.
Blog, Media Analysis, Research•
on January 12th, 2010•
The under 25 age group prefers video and adults like photographs better our research finds. Using our monitoring tool and looking at average ages in Social Media profiles, plus language analysis, we wanted to know if video as a medium was popular in the same way across all age groups. Obviously it isn’t. Why? Understanding such preferences can help marketers understand what medium works better for different age groups.
We were somewhat surprised by this finding, given the popularity of video sharing services such as YouTube and MetaCafe. Our findings showed that the older the person, the less likely they are to create and share video. Watching video online is more level across age groups. Of the profiles analyzed we found that less than 10% of those over 35 were likely to create and share their own videos while 40% of those under 30 were likely to create and share a video. Once we go under 20 we see that there is an 80% chance a user will create and share their own video.
When it comes to photos, the over 30 set are more likely to post to photo sharing sites like Flickr or PhotoBucket, while the under 30 groups are more likely to restrict photo uploading and sharing to their social networks. This is not entirely surprising to most I would suspect, but validating as well.
The over 30 age groups however, will share and watch online video almost on a par with the under 30 segments.
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.
A bad news story for your company hits traditional media. You kick in the standard damage control processes and try to move beyond the issue; it’s always worked before. Except this time a prominent or even not so prominent blogger picks it up…and it spreads. Have the rules changed? Can you move beyond the story like before?
Certainly, except it may take a little longer than before, and there may be “aftershocks”. When the Blogosphere picks up on a story it can suddenly take on a life of its own. Sometimes there’s no real need to respond, other times you must respond. There are ways to manage a crisis point with Social Media, but the issue can stay hot in the Social Media world a little longer.
In most bad news incidents, the best strategy is to acknowledge the issue, state your proposed resolution and then move on to more positive stories, knowing that in traditional media, the story will blow over fairly quickly. Bloggers and microbloggers however, can add their own opinions and what was a small issue spirals out of control. Not responding can make the perceived issue worse and carry on for weeks or months.
Deciding whether or not to respond is something you need to determine with your PR team or Social Media agency. Deciding how you respond is key, along with follow up. Once you’ve said something in the Social Media sphere, it will live on. This means you may be held accountable at a later date as someone may inquire in a few months to see if you’ve lived up to the proposed solution. If not, you’ll suddenly have another crisis, this is what we call “aftershocks.” Developing a good plan for a PR crisis should always include the Social Media angle today.
With Social Media, the vital point to remember is that a story can live on far longer and resurface at any time. Sometimes you can take the high road and not respond, deflection is still very much possible, but going about it is very different in Social Media.
Best Practices•
on July 27th, 2008•
Social Media has definitively hit business and is slowly working its way into the ranks of government departments at varying levels. So where are Social Media professionals coming from and what will the requirements be for Social Media professionals?
A brief search of Workopolis and Monster and a couple of other smaller and regionalized online job sites brought up several varying titles such as; Online Communities Coordinator, Manager of Web Communities, Social Media Marketing Manager, Online Communications Officer, Director of Social Media, Social Media Development Manager, Social Media Coordinator and a few others.
Quite a wide variety. I decided to look at the types of companies hiring for these jobs and salary ranges where available. What I found was of 120 jobs offered (USA and Canada) that fit into “Social Media” related, over 80% were in marketing/advertising agencies, the others were a mix of technology and Web companies and only 3 non-technology companies focused on consumer products. No business-to-business and no government. All were looking for some degree of marketing experience or public relations background. One even wanted 8-10 years of Social Media experience (I wish them luck there.) In terms of wages, they were remarkably low. From the low 20’s to mid 30’s for someone who’s going to be speaking on behalf of the company and its brand? All reported to a director or VP, and there were no senior management jobs available in Social Media (that I could find anyway.)
While this is all very anecdotal and by no means proper in-depth research, it would seem to indicate some interesting trends taking place. While businesses recognize the need for engaging in Social Media, the responsibility is being left to people with relatively minimal experience in the professional world. It would seem that senior management feels Social Media is just a “channel” and mostly for marketing (which in many cases is correct.) It would also seem the remuneration is fairly low in some cases where an individual has an incredible amount of responsibility communicating a company brand.
So we’ve seen Social Media start to ease into the corporate world through low-level functional jobs. Titles remain somewhat vague as do overall responsibilties. It would seem that Social Media is gaining traction, but in what way? In challenging financial times when many companies are laying off people, we’re seeing a whole new element of jobs opening up. New positions with previously undefined responsibilities means finding budget and defining purpose to organizational objectives – no small task at the best of times.
What role do you think Social Media will play in terms of jobs in the future? Is there a place for Social Media professionals beyond just marketing and public relations? How about with Human Resources? Will Social Media ever gain a seat at the Executive Table? Should it? A lot of questions remain.
Media Analysis•
on July 23rd, 2008•
All other issues around metrics, guidelines and methods aside, perhaps a key underlying question around Social Media might be; is there enough people participating in a way that matters to corporations and governments? Part two of that question might be; and is it local enough?
Social Media is part of our business, so of course our objective is to say “yes” to both posed questions. Saying “no” would be shooting ourselves in the foot. Our position is “yes” because we’ve done the research to validate our business case (we’ve identified some niches the competition hasn’t, but we can’t say anything yet on that front.) So why do we pose that there is enough mass? And what do others in Social and Traditional Media think?
Obtaining precise numbers on blogs and microblog usage is challenging at the very least. We can say there’s roughly 50 million blogs and upwards of 200 Million+ people active on Social Networks, blogs and microblogs on a regular basis. Then there’s mobile social networking, where research firm eMarketer estimates roughly 2.7% of Americans use mobile Social Network apps, and our research indicates about 1% of Canadians (Canada has the worlds highest mobile data fees, reducing uptake significantly) use mobile Social Network apps. All of these areas are growing in usage. There are also 40+ companies that are active in the Social Media monitoring market, indicating a growing market segment. of those 40, roughly 95% are less than two years old. Suggesting an early-stage market.
Quickly and anecdotaly then, we can conclude that the mass is there. People are using Social Media and everything points to an increasing use. Patterns are still developing, acquisitions starting to occur and battles are raging over “measurement” and “monetizing” of Social Media. But that’s another topic.
So then, are people participating in a way that matters to businesses or governments? Given the CNN/YouTube Debates in the U.S., the forcing of Rogers to lower it’s iPhone pricing in Canada in less than a week through Social Media pressure, the CEO of JetBlue losing his job due to Social Media reaction – all point to evidence that yes, there is enough mass. Governments and businesses, along with other institutions are justified in their growing concern.
Is it “local” enough to matter to smaller businesses and municipal governments? Soon we think. As “local search” improves and newspapers move more services on line, locally Social Media will begin to matter more and more. There may be other reasons local social media matters as well and we welcome views on this. So yes, the evidential actions and supporting usage statistics would say – Social Media matters. The tipping point has been reached.