Emerging Patterns of Social Media Use

@neilmajor Strategy Director, Yomego

Eight premises

A mixture of data, observation (and conjecture)

…and some conclusions on what this all means for brands

An opening observation

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Global Population by age

1. Real Time

Imagine what attending school is like now

I forgot my iPhone

What this means for brands…

Obvious really – the right message can spread through the network like wildfire – but so can the wrong one.

Think like an editorial outlet

…but don’t newsjack

Know who you are

(chart by @willsh)

2. Semi - Anonymous

Private vs. Public

Private Public

What this means for brands…

The social data land grab could be reaching its end

However, the new networks are places of great user creativity. Learn the culture.

3. Curated self

Curated self?

The idea that young people don’t care about privacy is a myth.

Young people are incredibly sophisticated at crafting their identity

Example #1

Mikalah described that she deactivated her Facebook account every day after she was done looking at the site. Deactivation was introduced by Facebook as an alternative to deletion; users could deactivate their content and for all intents and purposes would disappear from the site, but if they later regretted it could reactive their account and retrieve all of the content, connections, and messages.

Mikalah did this every day, which in effect made it so that her friends could only send messages or leave comments when she was logged in.

Example #2Shamika took a different approach. As she explained… she found that Facebook contributed to drama by providing a plethora of past comments that could be used against people whenever a friendship or relationship turned sour. Thus, she preferred to minimize her risk by deleting every comment she received after she read it.

Furthermore, she’d write a comment on someone else’s page and then delete it the next day, presumably after they had seen it. Shamika’s constant deletion turned Facebook into a more ephemeral space, destabilizing the persistent nature of the space.

Hiding from search enginesTum bl r an d L J u sers sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes.

Chinese users hide political messages in image attachments to seemingly benign posts on Weibo.

General Pretraeus communicated solely through draft mode.

4chan scares away the faint of heart with porn.

More technically astute groups communicate through obscure messaging systems. (insight via @kenyatta)

Book recommendation!

Follow: @zephoria

Website:zephoria.org

We are all increasingly security literate

Young people lead the way

…and are highly technically literate

What this means for brands…

Don’t be creepy (or assume your users won’t care)

But if collecting data, move towards more explicit CTAs

For instance…

4. Hyper visual literacy

Photography is exploding

Where are they located?

Images spreads through the new networks with users are exposed to more than ever

An example

What this means for brands…

Eye candy spreads! Make sure your sites are easy to harvest

Mobile makes images the most important medium

Take time to explore the visual web

5. Networks as cultures

For example, Tumblr

Consider thefandoms

What does this mean for brands?It’s not enough to look at the technical nature of each site or demographics

Consider the culture and don’t aim at individuals - think about the networks of users

6. Internet famous

Internet famous

Just Influencers?

…not exactly. Influencers online traditionally are more akin to bloggers

Internet fame is about what the network decides they like

For instance…

So just memes?

It’s part of it, but only part of it.

What it’s more a manifestation of the offline popularity contests that have already existed.

Internet fame is an end in itself

What this means for brands…

Internet fame is a culturally closed world. Outreach is a little more problematic.

Instead identify breakout hits early for maximum success (velocity)

7. Social as human right

Workplace use of Social Media56% of Generation Y will not workfor a company that bans social media (40% work for companies that do)

¾ disobey these work policies

But they don’t want to be tracked

…and they don’t have to be anyway

What this means for brands andcompanies Context is important – content will be received within a time poor environment

The law of the playground exists in your company

8. What happens next?

“Snowden is 30; he was born in 1983. Chelsea Manning is 25. Generation Y started around 1980 to 1982.

But the signs of disobedience among Generation Y are merely a harbinger of things to come.”

Charles Stross,Foreign Policy, 28.8.13

“Generation Z will arrive brutalized and atomized by three generations of diminished expectations and dog-eat-dog economic liberalism. Most of them will be so deracinated that they identify with their peers and the global Internet culture more than the… nation-state.

The machineries of the security state may well find them unemployable, their values too alien to assimilate into a model still rooted in the early 20th century. But if you turn the Internet into a panopticon prison and put everyone inside it, where else are you going to be able to recruit the jailers? And how do you ensure their loyalty?"

Enter Generation Z

What this means for us…

If things continue as they are, an inevitable tension between the establishment and generation will result

Given the demographics at play this is unlikely to end well

…so in summary

1. Assume a critical audience

2. Be open (explicit)3. Learn their culture4. Examine them as networks

5. Work with them – not through them

6. If it’s not mobile, it won’t work

7. Work/home/online/offline distinctions are dead

8. Watch the demographics

Thank you!

@neilmajor Strategy Director, Yomego