Teens, Texting + Twitter: age old marketing questions?

The teenage mind is notoriously fickle...in fact, science! [conjure Thomas Dolby song] has suggested that the teen brain pares nearly 60% of its neurons during this formative phase. This biological focussing leads to forgetful moments + ever changing obsessions that could make even a veteran ping pong observer dizzy.

So how come teens don't use Twitter? It would seem to provide a realtime center stage from which to lifestream one's short attention span theatrics. Aren't these two hallmarks of the all-powerful teenage marketing segment's mindset?

According to Neilsen they don't use it as much as their parents. And while parents would be the easy answer, they DO use Facebook, YouTube and other social features-disguised-as-applications that their parents also use.

So what?

Aside from the fact that the graph has some odd segmentation notions (2-24 year olds? do 4 year olds use Twitter? Are 24-year olds really like 12 year olds?) three questions marketers might want to ask themselves come to mind from this story:

1. Why would they use it? Teenagers were early adopters of SMS/Text Messaging. Twitter is more difficult to use as a mobile application and more limited in capabilities. So, what does Twitter enable that they can't already accomplish? (see useful, usable, and desirable here). "What's in it for the user" is an important consideration for marketing to anyone, but especially when the fundamental function has an equivalent already in place.

2. Who knows what they think? Given the notoriously fickle allegiances established during adolescence, isn't the real story that Twitter is being adopted by so many people in pre-Y generations (i.e., the largest population segments)? Even if teenagers tell you what they are thinking, do you ever really get it, er, I mean understand?

3. When does they become you...or me? As in any other story based on age (or gender or race or....) we burden ourselves trying to assign people to pigeonholes. When we use singular dimensions to describe the complexity that is a person, we are left to wonder why such explanations seem unsatisfying when applied to our own behaviors. If the point of social media tools isn't to enable individual expression through social connections, then to what end do we employ them differently than traditional media? Interests, rather than age, are a more reliable predictor of a person's behavior.

I asked my own 16-year-old about Twitter (doesn't use it) and here's what she said:

"It's all status updates, no real interaction. Facebook allows you to do more. It's [Facebook] more convenient and that's what we're already doing. Texting comes with the phone. Some people have it [Twitter], but mostly its to follow celebrities like the Jonas Brothers. It doesn't seem like Twitter is really for us, more for adults."

What about online: 10 answers to question

You might be at a restaurant with the client...or an office gathered 'round a speaker phone. Sometimes it will be part of the meeting agenda...maybe even the whole agenda...other times, it strikes out of nowhere, an ad hoc query or a thoughtful question to stimulate action...'it' is the question..."what about online?"

What about it?

"Oh", you might think, they must mean social media...or they mean a corporate website, or an email campaign...or a rich media Twitooglespacebook widget. 

But what does a client or colleague really mean with a question like that (or one of its various, um, varieties)? Regardless of the time or place, the ambiguity or clarity of the conversation's context (or that of the inquisitor), here's 10 simple questions that can help get us from "What" to "Why" to "How"...they shouldn't be the last questions you'll ask, but they are a reasonable place to start the conversation...

1. Who are the people you have in mind to use this? (i.e., numbers, occupation, education, location/region, other demographics, behavior and their attitudes as possible). 
2. What specific actions do you want the people in Q1 to accomplish (e.g., find information, complete a transaction, etc.)? 
3. Why do you believe the people in Q1 will take the action in Q2 (i.e., why will they find it useful and what will make it desirable)?
4. What are key obstacles to people successfully completing the action now or in the future? (e.g., what makes the experience usable/unusable).
5. What expectations are there for the amount of time a person will spend taking the actions in Q2? (i.e., the frequency of their visits, the duration of visits)?
6. What measurable business goals does the project support (e.g., gain subscribers, solicit feedback/contacts, #leads generated, $ sold)?
7. What are the expectations for content and what are the anticipated sources of content (e.g., visitor-generated, in-house, stock)
8. What are the expectations about end user, development, and production technology environments (i.e., web hosting services, browsers, operating systems, email)? 
9. Who are key stakeholders and decision makers in your organization (for this project) and what review and approval protocols are anticipated? 
10. What other assumptions (e.g., Budget, Schedule, Maintenance, Upgrades) exist about the project and what are the risks associated with its failure?
    

With a little or a lot of detail, the answers to these questions have the benefit of being testable propositions...to see what those people identified in question 1 say as their actions answer the questions for themselves.  

Research Methods: Confabulating Useful, Usable and Desirable

Confabulation is a term that describes the space between one's imagined truth and the actual facts. In describing behavior or attitudes, people abhor a vacuum.  So when we don't remember what we did--or why--we'll create a narrative to fill the void. Mostly, we do this unconsciously or with very little recognition of what we are doing. That's confabulation. 

Put another way, confabulation is the difference between our peronsal truths and the actual facts. 

Confabulation presents a particular challenge to marketing researchers in that research subject's explanations of behavior may not be what they seem. Attitudinal research is no better able to address the issue given it's general requirement to ask the person with the attitude just what 'it' is and where they got 'it'...and of course, researchers being human, they may create their own confabulations for defining and explaining attitudes in others.

Without digressing into a philosphical discussion of the limits of our perceptual abilities, Jakob Neilsen has posted a matrix of research methods and when to use them. Though crafted in the context of usability research, they are applicable in any marketing context from product design, to customer service, to the ever mysterious practice of 'branding'. 

In the end, these methods provide a breadth of support for the discovery and creation of experiences that are useful, usable and desirable...even with the attendant uncertainty of confabulated results.

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State of the blog: Useful, usable, desirable

We advocate a view of design online that incorporates three elements: useful, usable, desirable. If a design is deemed by an individual to be these things, then it is good. If not, it's not. So though this lens, let's look at blogs, bloggin and the blogosphere.

Actually, let's look at what Technorati says first. Technorati has released it's fourth annual report on the state of blogging and the interconnected community referred to as the 'blogosphere'.

You can read the whole thing here.

A few thoughts:

Advertising: Only 53% of blogs globally sell advertising space. Given that advertising is the predominant means of monetizing content on blogs, we are confronted with the reality of most blogs: they are created primarily with non-financial motivators in mind. Among those blogs that do offer advertising, the median revenue is less than $100/year.

Trendiness: While it's easy to start a blog, anyone whose doe it will tell you that the heavy lifting comes in continuing to publish. Estimates by McCann, Technorati and other place the number of US bloggers between 22 and 26 million. Technorati reports that 1.5 million of these have had postings in the last 7 days (see graphic below). In addition these blogs have more than 66 million readers according to eMarketer and comscore.

Demographics: While US blogger would seem to be more evenly divided by gender, the average tenure of a blogger in the US is 35 months. These folks mostly (74%) also have college degree; a slim majority make more than $75,000 annually; and, a majority are over the age of 35.

So what?

Blogs, blogging, and the blogosphere are just terms to describe personal web publishing. Much has been made of high profile, journalistic approaches to the use of these tools. In the end, though, blogs are created and maintained because they support individuals in their need for useful, usable, and desirable content publishing tools.

When blogs are read, its for the same reasons. 

(Click to enlarge)