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.

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.

“The risk posed by social media for your company … exists whether you participate or not,’ observed Darrell Heaps, CEO of Q4 Web Systems, an IR website and communications firm out of Toronto. ‘If you’ve ignored social media and said there are too many risks, we‘re not going to get involved, then you are putting your company at higher risk … than if you know how to use the tools. The market doesn’t care whether or not you’re there. They’re going to use the channels that are most readily available to them to put their message out.’

Heaps made those comments during a panel discussion yesterday in downtown Minneapolis on best practices for using social media to communicate material information, co-sponsored by the Dorsey & Whitney law firm and the Twin Cities NIRI chapter.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, collectively referred to as ‘social media’, have worked their way into the IR conversation. As evidence of how hot the topic is, NIRI chapters as well as consultants have sponsored several events on the topic around North America over the past six months.

Embrace the trend; plan your attack; update and integrate your policies across functions; implement consciously; train your employees; monitor what’s being said about your company; and manage the process. Those were the key takeaways in Minneapolis.

“Social media defines the online experience today,” Heaps said. Over the last couple of years, the line between social media and mainstream websites has blurred, he observed. “You go to your favorite newspaper site and you see comments, profiles, people interacting. The social concept has been applied to virtually every website.”

Citing a recent study by Brunswick Group, Heaps reported that 47 percent of buy-side and sell-side players surveyed in the US and Europe were prompted to research an issue and 20 percent made an investment decision or recommendation based on information from a blog. Nearly two-thirds of the US survey group expects blogs and social media to play an increasingly important role in investment decision-making in the future.

While social media raises new issues for publicly-traded corporations that must conduct their investor relations communications within the limits of a variety of laws and regulations, the challenges are not insurmountable – and the overall value of social media to enhance a company’s image and communications with customers, shareholders, clients, suppliers and other interested parties vastly outweighs the challenges.

Business Week looked at some of that in an article regarding Twitter that was published Thursday, saying, “Companies can work wonders before Twitter’s vast interactive audience of consumers, but it’s best to start slowly and build credibility.”

Says Business Week: “Business uses for Twitter are proving to be as diverse as those for the telephone or e-mail. They generally break into two categories: ways to follow customers and ways to increase efficiency.” Note that neither of those categories sounds much like a one-way marketing communications channel. In fact, says Business Week, “Companies who try to use the tool as yet another marketing arrow in their quiver—one that mostly carries targeted, one-way messages—usually fail.”

Twitter – and social media in general – is not a marketing channel, but a conversation conduit. Companies that use it that way will derive real value from doing so; companies that use it merely as a way to distribute the latest “company line” more than likely won’t.

Incidentally, the same is true for political candidates and campaigns.

Common Sense: Anonymous Blogging is a Permalink to America's Past

The Federal Trade Commission has released new regulations will add a layer of difficulty for companies hoping to promote their products, services or point-of-view via blogs and other social media. As the New York Times reports, the FTC…

…said it would revise rules about endorsements and testimonials in advertising that had been in place since 1980. The new regulations are aimed at the rapidly shifting new-media world and how advertisers are using bloggers and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to pitch their wares. The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently.

The regulations deserve to face a court challenge on First Amendment grounds, but until they do and are struck down, companies and organizations that want to pitch their products or services via the social media should implement procedures to help bloggers and other social media users to comply with the FTC regs.

It is unclear how the FTC’s new regulations will affect political bloggers, who often accept “free” access to candidates and political events that they are writing about, or companies which are using the social media to promote a point of view or message rather than a commercial product or service, though Mesh Media Strategies is fairly confident that relevant case law would protect such communications from FTC meddling.

Transparency – the apparent intent of the FTC regulations – is a generally good principle for businesses and bloggers to follow, but there are times when it is legitimate for a company to prefer a measure of anonymity in its communications – especially when politics and government are involved. These days, for example, some health care-related businesses might fear the consequences of coming out publicly in opposition to the current administration’s push for centralizing control of health care in the hands of the federal government, yet still wish to try to influence the debate by working through third-party communicators such as independent bloggers. Or conservative Christian home-schoolers afraid of heavy-handed judges and public-school bureaucrats might prefer to write their blog posts regarding home-schooling, politics and such under a pseudonym.

That is – and should remain – their First Amendment right to do so, and such anonymous writing is a tradition older than the United States of America. In January of 1776, the ppolitical pamphlet Common Sense, urging for revolution and independence, was published anonymously. Only later was the identity of the author – Thomas Paine – revealed.

Sarah Palin

The Politico looks at how Sarah Palin has built “one of the most powerful social media brands in politics.”

While Palin isn’t the only major political figure to try alternative means of communication to bypass the media, her unique ability to remain in the headlines while avoiding the spotlight suggests she may be the first to pull it off successfully.

For several days in August, the national health care debate turned to focus on so-called “death panels,” in large part because of two widely-publicized Palin Facebook posts accusing Democratic authors of the House proposal of creating bureaucratic entities to decide end of life care.

The post was immediately rebuked by Democrats, and even by some Republicans, as untrue and irresponsible. But rather than immediately firing back at her critics when reporters came calling for a response, or issuing a press release defending her claim, Palin waited five days to post her response on Facebook.

The post, simply titled “Concerning the ‘Death Panels’.” went up shortly before midnight on a Wednesday night. By late Thursday morning, a write up of her statement was on the homepage of dozens of national and local newspapers. The post also quickly became one of the most mentioned topics within the political blogosphere.

Palin’s five-day delay before posting her second Facebook note was strategically brilliant. Too many people think the fact that they can publish immediately via the social media means they should post immediately. By waiting five days, Palin essentially forced the media and the politicians to spend five days talking about her original statement, and exploring whether the bureaucracies and policies contained within Obamacare would, in essence, amount to government deciding end-of-life issues. Her response post, after five days, was a meticulously sourced response to criticism.

The Politico notes the true power of social media for someone like Palin: the power to communicate without having one’s message twisted by the mainstream media filter.

One unnamed political ‘insider” in Alaska nails it:

“There was so much difficulty in her getting her message out without it being deliberately, in my opinion, twisted by members of the media. Now, even if a story gets twisted, they all know they can go right to Facebook and see what she said.”

Some sort of social media platform – Facebook, a blog, at the least a Twitter page – is a must-have for any serious political candidate. Transparency and the ability to interact with voters who, increasingly, are using social media to communicate with each other, are important in their own right. And without a social media platform, a candidate is at the mercy of the mainstream media filter. For conservative candidates, that means their message is at the mercy and whims of a media establishment that is likely not on their side.

There’s lots of talk about the Twitter Effect and how it can make or break a movie. When it came to Bruno & GI Joe – thumbs down! In the case of Inglorious Basterds and District 9 – thumbs up! If Twitter has this effect on improving movie ticket sales, do we even need critics anymore?

The Twitter effect is the latest example of online viral marketing, and just as real as the old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, but enhanced and magnified by technology. Where in the past a person might have told a few friends and co-workers their positive or negative opinion of a new movie, influencing their friends’ or co-workers’ decision about whether or not to see it, today that same person can tell hundreds, or even thousands, of people instantaneously, via Twitter and other social media tools like blogs, Facebook and MySpace. And they can use other interactive media, such as YouTube, to post videos praising or mocking a new movie – or your new product or service or campaign.

You can’t stop the Twitter Effect, or control it, but you can make it easy for your customers, clients, supporters and fans to use social media to your benefit.

Your challenge as the owner of a business or leader an organization or campaign is to market your services, tell your story and communicate your message to the right audience using the right media formats and the right social media tools. The first step we recommend is to ignore simplistic headlines that declare that certain groups of people do or do not use or consume any certain medium or technology. There are teens who Tweet and adults on MySpace, and senior citizens who use Skype.

More than half (57 percent) said their peers used social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter for self-promotion, narcissism and attention-seeking. And 92 percent said they used MySpace or Facebook regularly. Two-thirds said their generation was more self-promoting, overconfident and attention-seeking than others.

The survey was conducted by Jean Twenge, associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University and co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic, but not everyone agrees with its conclusions.

“We all kind of put on our best face when presenting ourselves in social situations, online or offline,” says Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing who studies social networking. “When good things happen to me, I put that on Facebook, and when bad things happen, I also put it on Facebook. It’s a structure to receive emotional support.”Houston Dougharty, vice president for student affairs at Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, says today’s students are altruistic and care about helping others, which doesn’t say “narcissism” to him. “I think there’s a negative connotation to narcissism that I would not want to promote as a description of this generation.” Social networking is “a celebration of individuality and sort of promotion of one’s own personality,” he says.

The best use of social networking – whether it be a blog, or Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or other tools – to promote your personal brand, business or campaign is not based in narcissism, but in reaching out to others, to share your expertise with them and establish a conversation.

VoteStacey.com

Mesh Media Strategies’ current projects include VoteStacey.com, the website of Tennessee state Senate candidate Stacey Campfield, a Knoxville Republican serving his third term in the Tennessee state House.

The goal for the site was simple: A low-cost, easy-to-operate campaign website which incorporated the most useful social networking tools for encouraging grassroots involvement and financial support.

Mission Accomplished: MMS built and launched the initial version of the site in three days, and is continuing to evolve the site as the 2010 campaign cycle rolls along.

If you are a candidate or potential candidate for public office, we invite you to contact MMS for information about our services.

In the interest of full disclosure, MMS does not have a client in the race.

While there is still plenty of time for more candidates to jump in, the two “big” candidates known to be running are businessman A.J. McCall, whose multi-generational family-owned furniture and appliance business (D.T. McCall’s) has him on TV in commercials with regularity, and state Rep. Susan Lynn.

Lynn became the first candidate with a website up this week with the launch of SusanLynn.net.

The site is, to be charitable, a design mess, a mishmash of fonts and colors and low-quality clip-art graphics that appear to be salvaged from the wreckage of mid-1990s web design. The “Susan Lynn for State Senate 2010″ banner takes up far too much real estate on the home page, pushing the interesting content down and forcing readers to scroll to find it. And when they do find it…

Functionally, the site is worse. Most of the necessary pieces seem to be there, but it seems obvious that the site was cobbled together by someone who doesn’t understand how to use the internet and social media in a political campaign.

Here are my comments regarding the site:

1. The “Newsletter” link takes readers to a page where they can read old weekly newsletters sent out by the candidate’s state House office – the newsletters can be downloaded as .jpg image files rather than the more common, standard and easily printable PDF. The site should have NEW news, related to the campaign.

2. The “Rumor Mill” feature – designed to respond to rumors and attacks – is a good idea, but the section ought to be a part of the campaign website rather than hosted on a separate blog site, and should share the same design and colors as the main site. The “Blog” link also goes off-site, to the candidate’s pre-existing blog. While MMS would prefer not to have readers leave your site to read your blog, the fact that the blog existed before the campaign site makes this situation understandable.

MMS recently built a site for another state representative running for state senate in a different district, a lawmaker with a pre-existing blog. Rather than just add a link to the candidate’s pre-existing blog, we built the site to automatically pull the latest headlines from the blog and post them to the campaign site in a prominent position, so that the campaign site is updated with fresh content whenever the lawmaker/candidate posts to his blog.

3. The next feature – the “Volunteer” page is actually pretty good. Simple, easy to understand, and meant to give supporters an easy way to get involved in the campaign. Ditto the “Yard Sign” request page – well done.

4. The lists of “Campaign News” and “General Assembly News” headlines are useless. Web readers expect headlines to be hyperlinks to click to read the whole story. The headlines in this campaign site are just text. They go nowhere, and provide too little information.

5. The “Donate” link takes the reader straight to the campaign’s PayPal page – without collecting information required by state campaign donations regulations and without explaining state campaign donation limits. MMS recently completed a site for another candidate for the Tennessee state Senate in a different district who also uses PayPal to collect online contributions, and created a way to handle those two important informational tasks.

6. In terms of social media, the site’s “Facebook” link goes to Facebook’s home page, not to the campaign or candidate’s specific Facebook page. There’s no Twitter link, no YouTube channel, and no use of or apparent provision for future use of video and/or podcasting.

7. The site is not optimized for viewing and use on mobile devices such as a Blackberry or iPhone.

8. And, finally, a major weakness of the site is that it incorporates too much of the candidate’s state legislative content, as if it was meant to be a lawmaker’s constituent-service website rather than a tool for winning a campaign. Contact information is provided for both the campaign and the lawmaker’s General Assembly office. The result is information overload and a lack of focus on the goal. An incumbent lawmaker running for re-election or for another office needs two sites – and the two sites should overlap only minimally, with a single link from the campaign site to the incumbent-lawmaker site as part of the candidate’s bio page. Contact information should be given for the campaign only.

The web and social media are tools of great potential and power for politics and campaigns. This campaign site has left most of that potential and power untapped. The good news: The primary election is more than 11 months away. There’s still time to fix it.

If you’re considering running for the state legislature in your state* and you want a high-quality website that leverages the potential and power but are afraid it costs too much, please contact MMS. We have built websites for state legislative candidates in two election cycles, and we are working on ways to bring down the cost of campaign sites for state legislative candidates while raising their quality and effectiveness.

If you are running to win, you can’t afford not to have a great website.

* MMS only works for mainstream conservative Republican candidates.