The new Pew Internet and American Life Project report has been issued this week. It won’t come as news to anyone that teens are texting a lot. But here are a few fun facts:
- 74% of 12-17 year-olds now have cell phones.
- 72% of all teens (88% of teen cell users) use text messaging.
- 54% of all teens text daily. This compares to:
- 38% who make a call on their cell (mostly with parents, they report)
- 33% who talk face-to-face
- 30% who talk on a landline
- 25% who visit a social networking site
- 24% who IM
- 11% who email
- Boys send/receive 30 texts a day whereas girls send/receive 80.
One of the key implications here is how many more teens text daily than engage with a social media website. Mobility is critical.
Here’s where I get blown away:
- Half of teens send 50+ text messages a day.
- Roughly one-third of teens send more than 100 text messages a day (3,000 a month).
- 15% of teens who text (or 11% of all teens) send more than 200 texts a day (6,000 a month). Let’s be generous and say that to send/receive a text takes 15 seconds. That’s nearly an hour a day these heavy users spend texting.
Reading between the lines, the instant gratification of communication via this channel says something important about these teens.
(To see the full report, visit Pew Research.)
Question 1: I wonder how this will impact business communications 10 years from now.
Question 2: How does this/should this impact how research is conducted with this hard-to-reach target?
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve had a working theory that the social media buzz of last year is fundamentally changed. I’m not suggesting that social media is dead – no, it’s here to stay. Rather, there’s an evolution to its usage; it’s something of a maturing market. Over the past week, several news headlines have caught my attention:
MySpace looks to the past for its future. The social networking site plans to return to its roots by pushing entertainment content and jettisoning portal-like features. (3/10/10, LA Times)
Facebook and Twitter join the location wars. Facebook and Twitter are each rolling out geo-location services designed to link updates to users’ current locations. Twitter’s feature uses Google Map overlays to show users’ whereabouts, while Facebook plans to introduce a location-based service at next month’s f8 conference. (3/10/10, Smart Brief on Social Media)
At SXSWi, Twitter may finally have met its match. No question Twitter is still huge here, but Foursquare and Gowalla have to be considered a major part of people’s organizing principle. (3/16/10, CNET.com)
Surprised? It was only a matter of time before end-users started asking – and expecting answers to – the question: “what’s in it for me?” (We saw the same thing with Internet adoption in the mid-to-late 1990s.) The economic downturn of last year, in my opinion, helped fuel interest in social media (people had more time on their hands), which may have accelerated the questioning of social media’s value/investment.
A Barracuda Labs’ study of 19 million Twitter accounts supports this idea, at least in part. Interest in Twitter peaked during the first two-thirds of last year, the height of the economic downturn.
This study reported on in MediaMemo, also did an interesting analysis: they defined “True” Twitter users as those who had at least 10 followers, were following at least 10 people and had tweeted at least 10 times. Using that definition, only 21% of Twitter users were “True.”
Furthermore, “in terms of tweets, the report estimates that 34% of Twitter users hadn’t tweeted even once, while a whopping 73% of Twitter’s users tweeted less than 10 times. That means nearly all of the tweets on the social network were coming from about 1/4 of the user base. Power users dominate.”
If the 80-20 rule applies, that means that around the world, around 5% of Tweeters are generating the content. In all likelihood, that’s not very engaging or interactive for most people.
So the evolution in social media isn’t all that surprising. People want to be noticed for their efforts and geo-location services get them noticed.
If you’re a marketer who’s still wondering about social media and its payout, particularly if you have a retail presence, look into the geo-location services and design retention and promotional programs around them. (They will be especially effective with your younger target and should be eminently measurable.)
If you’re into social media, keep an eye out for the aggregation services (tweets posting to Facebook; the centralization of content). This way, if you decide to take a “short-cut” you don’t lose your reach with your audience.
Want to learn more? There’s a great piece from Mashable called “9 Killer Tips for Location-Based Marketing” which you can find by clicking here.
In the January 18, 2010 edition of Newsweek, there was a great piece entitled “Your Online Brain.” It’s well worth the read as it focuses on the different theories about the Web’s impact on how we think.
The last paragraph really caught my attention as I had just participated in a creativity session last week.
“Science historian George Dyson believes the Internet’s flood of information has altered the process of creativity: what once required ‘collecting all available fragments of information to assemble a framework of knowledge’ now requires ‘removing or ignoring unnecessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.’ Creativity by destruction rather than assembly.”
The image I got from this was of “sculpting knowledge.” As a qualitative researcher, identifying consumer insights has always been about sculpting knowledge.
What does this have to do with my brain online? Well, my brain has been overwhelmed lately. I had some downtime over the holidays and I signed up for even more newsletters and feeds. I now need to cut back. I need time to think. The Internet is causing, as Evgeny Morozov said in the same article, “the disappearance of retrospection and reminiscence.”
It’s like a swimmer’s lung capacity: a swimmer might be able to hold their breath for a long time, but they still have to come up for air. I need a breath – to sculpt, process, digest – whatever your metaphor.
So is the Web changing how I think? No, at best it’s impacting how I problem solve (as I’m able to seek out so much more information in this new way). It provides me with more to think about.
Creativity is an iterative, infinite process: from inspiration to output and back again. It’s likely we’ve always been “assembling” and “destroying.” Said another way, when we seek the “knowledge hidden within,” it’s always through the prism of our “framework of knowledge.”
What are your thoughts?
