Teens Don’t Tweet
Teens and young adults are blogging less and using Facebook more, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project:
Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. In 2006, 28% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 were bloggers, but by 2009 the numbers had dropped to 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over thirty who were bloggers rose from 7% blogging in 2006 to 11% in 2009.Much of the drop in blogging among younger internet users may be attributable to changes in social network use by teens and young adults. Nearly three quarters (73%) of online teens and an equal number (72%) of young adults use social network sites. By contrast, older adults have not kept pace; some 40% of adults 30 and older use the social sites in the fall of 2009.
New survey results also show that among adults 18 and older, Facebook has taken over as the social network of choice; 73% of adult profile owners use Facebook, 48% have a profile on MySpace and 14% use LinkedIn. “Blogging appears to have lost its luster for many young users,” said Amanda Lenhart, lead author of the report. “The fad stage is over for teens and young adults and the move to Facebook — which lacks a specific tool for blogging within the network — may have contributed to the decline of blogging among young adults and teens.”
Other findings include:
Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers – just 8% of online teens 12-17 say they ever use Twitter, a percentage similar to the number who use virtual worlds. This puts Twitter far down the list of popular online activities for teens and stands in stark contrast to their record of being early adopters of nearly every online activity.
Click here for the rest of the report, including a link to download it as a PDF.
read moreFord Shows How Its Done
While its rivals, GM and Chrysler, looked to Congress and the American taxpayer for a lifeline, Ford Motor Co. drove a different road, leverage social media to successfully launch itself back into the subcompact car market. Grant McCracken, writing in Harvard Business Review, explains How Ford Got Social Media Right by working with contemporary culture. He looks at the approach taken by Undercurrent, the digital strategy firm working for Ford on the “Fiesta Movement” project to launch the new Ford Fiesta:
Under the direction of Jim Farly, Group VP at Ford and Connie Fontaine, manager of brand content there, Undercurrent decided to depart from the viral marketing rule book. Bud told me they were not interested in the classic early adopters, the people who act as influencers for the rest of us. Undercurrent wanted to make contact with a very specific group of people, a passionate group of culture creators.
… I think the Fiesta Movement gives us new clarity. It’s a three-step process.
- Engage culturally creative consumers to create content.
- Encourage them to distribute this content on social networks and digital markets in the form of a digital currency.
- Craft this [as] a way that it rebounds to the credit of the brand, turning digital currency (and narrative meaning) into a value for the brand.
Ford’s success comes because it didn’t forget that the “social” in “social media” refers to people, not the electronic pipes that connect them, and that people – online or off – are still people, who still act in normal, human ways.
read moreNot As Easy As It Sounds
The current edition of the Nashville Business Journal has a good story on small businesses using Twitter as a marketing tool. While the entrepreneurs in the story appear to have a good grasp of the medium and how to use it, the NBJ story makes the same mistake so many publications do when they cover this angle: they make it sound so easy that any small business that uses Twitter will see a surge of new customers and sales.
But that’s not so. In fact, Twitter and other social media are no more guaranteed-successful as marketing tools than are television and radio ads, or newspaper ads, or billboards. And not all forms of media are the right tools for all kinds of businesses. Twitter is more appropriate for some businesses than others – and for some entrepreneurs than others. For the others, the right tool might be a blog, or a media relations effort to secure free media coverage, or some combination of free, paid and social media.
Read the NBJ’s story here: Businesses using Twitter to build brand, bring in customers.
read moreTwitter Primary, Update
In Tennessee’s 3rd Congressional District Republican primary race, Robin Smith continues to lead in the Twitter Primary, while in second place, based on the number of people following him on Twitter, is Bradley County Sheriff Tim Gobble – whose lead over Chattanooga attorney Chuck Fleischmann is shrinking.
Another Republican candidate in the race is Cleveland, Tenn., businessman Art Rhodes. Don’t expect him to do much – in the race or with social media. He doesn’t get it, judging from this snippet in the above-linked Chattanooga Times-Free Press article:
Cleveland, Tenn., businessman Art Rhodes, a Republican, said he updates his Twitter account maybe once a week. He said President Barack Obama successfully used Twitter to bring crowds to events during his presidential campaign last year, but Mr. Rhodes doesn’t see the site as facilitating exchanges with supporters.
“It’s more one-way communication,” he said.
No you know why he has fewer then three dozen followers on Twitter – he is using it to talk to people, not to talk with people. Modern campaigns understand that in an era when social media enables conversation with supporters and with potential voters, people don’t want to just be talked to.
They want to be listened to, too.
read morePeanut Butter & Chocolate
Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company’s director of social media, has some useful thoughts about news that LinkedIn users can now update your LinkedIn status via Twitter, and Twitter users can update your Twitter status from LinkedIn: ”The fact that a site as grounded in the business world as LinkedIn would choose to align with Twitter is a huge nod to the 140 character service,” he says. He also has a few words of caution.
My thoughts: LinkedIn and Twitter are social networking tools, but you don’t socialize at work the same way you socialize after work. The brash informality of Twitter – and the easy speed of tweeting – creates potential problems for those who chose to connect it with their LinkedIn profiles. It could backfire on those who don’t temper their tweeting in keeping with their business-oriented social network on LinkedIn.
On the other hand, it could be like combining chocolate and peanut butter.
read moreMeshLinks
