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.

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.

“Twitter gave us an up-to-the-minute ability to take what would normally be a crisis situation and make it just another event,” says Mr. Bianchi. “You can’t do that with a 1-800-number.”

But Twitter isn’t an automatic cure-all for customer service woes.

Entrepreneurs should bear in mind that Twitter is unlikely to be of help in dealing with a problem if it isn’t used regularly otherwise, says Shel Israel, author of “Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods.”

“If you just go to Twitter when you have a crisis, you will have no followers and no credibility,” he says. “The key to using Twitter effectively is to build trust with people who are relevant to your business.”

Steve Fusek, owner of Fusek’s True Value LLC, a hardware store in Indianapolis, now has an employee dedicated to updating the shop’s Twitter profile during business hours. Mr. Fusek says consumers expect to see frequent tweets and swift responses to customer-service inquiries they post.

“You can’t just sign up and leave it. You have to have someone on it,” he says. “If you’re not legitimate, you’ll be found out quickly.”

Social media works best when it enables real conversation, rather than being used to carry canned marketing spin. Transparency is the currency of social media.

eBay CEO John Donahoe

EBay CEO John Donahoe has started using a pocket-sized video camera and the company’s internal blog to connect with eBay employees. The Wall Street Journal reports…

Amid a turnaround effort at eBay’s online marketplace, he has been meeting with the company’s merchants and taping the conversations with a Flip camcorder. He’s posted many of these to a video blog for eBay’s internal employees.

In an interview, Donahoe said he got the idea to videotape and share his encounters in the spring from Cisco CEO John Chambers, who also makes videos with the Flip camera. (Cisco bought Flip maker Pure Digital earlier this year.)

“It was like a light bulb going off for me,” said Donahoe of his conversation with Chambers at a Microsoft conference. “I don’t have time to write a blog, and [text blogs] also have the problem that they can get spread virally.” So he bought a Flip camera (on eBay, of course) and started informally recording his encounters and other thoughts to share with eBay’s staff.

“I’m trying to drive a much more customer-focused organization,” said Donahoe. “It has such a powerful impact on me. I want to use it to educate all of our employees and also celebrate some of our sellers.”

What really impresses me with what Donahoe is doing is that he is playing a central role in this social media effort, but in a way that deliberately takes the spotlight off himself. Instead, he is forging a new role for himself as a communications connector between eBay employees and eBay merchants – and as the WSJ story goes on to show, eBay already is reaping tangible benefits from it.

Cheap digital social media technology makes it possible for Donahoe – and for the leader of almost any company or organization – to create such new connections and conversations that were previously difficult to create and sustain. Increased transparency, new connections and conversations open the door to new possibilities.

If he continues with this video-interview-blogging effort, Donahoe should expect the unexpected.
He’s likely to see a lot more light bulbs going off.

Incidentally, the Flip camera is a great product, but it’s not the onlytool that works for this purpose. The new iPhone 3Gs shoots video and allows on-device editing – and can be used to post directly to a blog, YouTube or a social media site like Facebook. With the Flip, you have to be able to download the video to a PC or laptop, edit it, and then post it. On the other hand, Flip has high-def models, the iPhone doesn’t, so far.

MR. GREGORY: …the fact that in this, in this media age, what he said, by anybody’s estimation, was objectionable, to sign a petition saying the government was behind 9/11. But it goes to something that’s going on in this information age…

MR. FRIEDMAN: David, yeah…

MR. GREGORY: …which is you can be a target real fast.

MR. FRIEDMAN: David, when everyone has a cell phone, everyone’s a photographer. When everyone has access to YouTube, everyone’s a filmmaker. And when everyone’s a blogger, everyone’s in newspaper. When everyone’s a photographer, a newspaper and a filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. Tell your kids, OK, tell your kids, OK, be careful. Every move they make is now a digital footprint. You are on “Candid Camera.” And unfortunately, the real message to young people, from all of these incidents, OK, and I’m not here defending anything anyone said, but from all of these incidents, is you know, really keep yourself tight, don’t say anything controversial, don’t think anything–don’t put anything in print. You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges, and maybe you too–you know, when you get nominated to be ambassador to Burkina Faso, you’ll be able to get through the hearing.

Friedman is right – at first – but then goes overboard.

Yes, in an era when everyone has or can have a cell phone, YouTube and a blog, everyone can, theoretically, be a photographer, filmmaker and newspaper. That’s the empowerment enabled by cheap digital technologies for producing and distributing content. And, yes, what people create and post online leaves a digital footprint that will likely reside on some server somewhere forever.

But Friedman goes overboard when he says people should, in reaction, “really keep yourself tight, don’t say anything controversial, don’t think anything–don’t put anything in print. You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges.”

Wrong.

What people should do in this current golden age of grassroots media is, think before they speak – or post online, because actions have consequences and when you publish via the online media you are making your content available to a potentially global audience. Bcause the new media is interactive and decentralized, you know not where your message will go, or who will respond to it, or how they will respond – or what social media format they will use to carry their response.

Say what you believe, and be prepared to act like you meant it. The social media is not a trap for those who follow those rules.

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.

The emerging protest movement is almost the mirror image of the grass-roots campaign that helped sweep Obama into office by pulling in people who’d never been politically active. This time Obama is seeing the other side of what can happen when people are motivated, connect over the Internet and seemingly reach a tipping point that turns them from onlookers into activists.

Don Surber comments on the town hall meetings: “Congressmen wanted to turn them into rallies for health care. That may be the political boo-boo of the year.”

In the age of transparency, when motivated people can easily connect via the web and use social networking tools like Facebook, Twitter and blogs to become instant activists, the old methods of stage-managing events such as town-hall meetings to turn them into rallies as political theater isn’t going to work. The old spin methods don’t work any more. The viral nature of online communications has seen to that.

Next time, though, they should tweet the company news via an official Telstra Twitter page, not on an employee’s personal Twitter page.

Speaking of official company Twitter pages, the recent hacker attack that bedeviled Twitter and made access to it rather spotty shouldn’t scare businesses away from using the service – but they should learn a lesson from it: Don’t rely on any one social networking medium as your online communications tool. Instead, spread out across several. Have a Twitter page, a Facebook presence and a YouTube channel. Be involved in the blogosphere. Make sure your key executives have LinkedIn profiles. Use text messaging. Each of those can be an outlet for company information and marketing messages and a two-way street for communicating with your customers, clients and supporters.

The goal isn’t to spread yourself thin but to reach your audience in all the ways they prefer to be reached or to access information.