Article by Jennifer Alsever -"Ultimately, says Hobart, reviews retain customers. The vast majority of AlpacaDirect's customers return, so it's crucial to snag first-timers. "Reviews help build that initial trust," he says. "They are key to the long-term success of our company."
Yesterday Squidoo founder Seth Godin announced that his company would begin launching websites for major companies that collect social buzz--good and bad--from around the Web. In his blog, Godin says that these "conversations" are already happening, so Squidoo is simply going to funnel them into one aggregate spot. That lets any customer or company see what the buzz is around Brand X. But for companies to get on the page and respond, it will cost them money. Is this fair to companies? More importantly, is it good for customers? (Above, one such page for In-and-Out Burger.)
At the end of this article, Chris Dannen, laments that by doing this we will move back to backward looking company-customer relationships. While I agree that this will occur I also see the potential for companies to simply use the Squidoo sites as a monitor and to then respond to customers through other avenues. It is super easy today to find someone on social media so my advice to a client would be to see what is being said and to then respond in a truly social manner.
Computerworld - Reality Digital Inc., a San Francisco-based technology company that helps other businesses launch social media campaigns, is a big proponent of calculating ROI -- for its own uses of social media as well as for customers'.
CEO Cynthia Francis says calculating return on investment starts with understanding what you want to accomplish: Do you want to promote internal collaboration? Establish real-time connections with customers? Generate and track sales leads?
Then, you have to figure out what tools will help you achieve that goal, she says.
"The idea that everyone should have Facebook and Twitter is not true. You have to think about what people and customers want. Maybe all you need is a blog with three people in your company blogging. Bigger companies might want to be in all the public environments," Francis says.
In addition to a Web site and e-mail newsletters, Reality Digital uses Twitter and Facebook to interact with existing and potential customers.
Here's how the company's numbers break down:
"Given the typical size of our deals, the annual cost of our social media programs is covered by revenue from one closed deal (annual contract)," marketing manager Lawrence Mak wrote in an e-mail about the figures.
He adds: "Because we started our social media program only three months ago, I consider it to still be in ramp-up phase. I expect cost per lead and conversion metrics to improve as the program matures over the next three to six months."
Main story: What's your Twitter ROI? How to measure social media payoff
Top 5 Business Blogging Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Josh Catone (Mashable)
Sep 17, 2009 -
Business blogging can be exceptionally rewarding. When done correctly, a successful blog can bring attention to your business, can attract new customers, and can turn your current customer base into the type of fans that companies like Apple, Netflix, and Ben and Jerry's have: people who will not only buy your product or service, but evangelize it to their peers. Of course, like anything, there is a right way to go about starting a business blog and a wrong way.
Creating a blog for your small business isn't easy; it requires hard work and the ability to think creatively about your work. But if you avoid the five big mistakes laid out in this post, your chances of building a successful business blog will be much better.Mistake #1: Treating Your Blog Like a Press Center
The number one mistake that business bloggers make is to treat their blog as an extension of their current press center. Repeat after me: Your blog is not the place for press releases. Blogging is a conversation and it offers a way for your customers to connect with your business on a completely new level. Press releases, on the other hand, are the exact opposite. They're impersonal, they're self promotional, and most readers don't trust them. If you use your blog to republish press releases your customers will have no reason to keep reading and they'll also likely not trust your content.
How to Avoid: First, don't ever put out a press release on your blog. You can use your blog to make product or other business announcements, but do so with original writing and in a more casual voice. Second, do use your blog to write about things other than your core business. Share your thoughts on your industry, share insights into the day-to-day work life and processes at your company, and provide tips and tricks you have learned during your time in business.
Mistake #2: Not Blogging Regularly
Think about the blogs you read on a regular basis -- how many of them publish only sporadically? Most successful blogs put out new content at least a couple of times per week and try to stick to a regular schedule. Consistently putting out quality content will keep readers returning and over time it will help you build a community and turn your customers into fans.
How to Avoid: Blogging regularly isn't easy, so to avoid burning out, brainstorm editorial ideas ahead of time. If you plan to put out new posts every Tuesday and Friday, for example, try not to start writing Tuesday's post on Tuesday morning. Get other people at your company involved so that one person isn't shouldering the entire blogging load, and even consider sourcing content from your customers. Remember that anything can provide fodder for a good blog post, so pay attention to the things you read or see on other blogs, newspapers, magazines, or television.
Mistake #3: Not Enabling Conversation
As I already said, blogging is a conversation, and not allowing it to occur on your blog is a mistake. It's true that blog comments can open you up to criticism, but blogging is an unparalleled opportunity to connect with your customers. You'll get a lot more out of blogging if you enable -- and even encourage -- your customers to respond to what you write.
How to Avoid: Obviously the first thing you need to do is enable commenting on your business blog. But beyond that, you need to remember that the conversation is two-way. Get in there and respond to the comments readers leave on your blog and you'll be more likely to develop a community around your writing that can help turn your customers into fans who will evangelize your products and services and provide you with quality feedback. You should also participate in the conversation on other blogs in your industry by leaving comments on posts elsewhere around the blogosphere. That will help you to establish your "blogging brand" and bring new readers your way.
Mistake #4: Making New Content Hard to Discover
Your blog won't be very helpful to readers if they aren't able to easily find new content. You need to make your blog discoverable and you need to make sure that when you add new content, your regular readers will be able to find it.
How to Avoid: There are a few ways to make sure your blog content is more easily discovered.
- Make your blog easy to find by linking to it prominently from your company's web site and including your blog's URL in your email signature, on your business cards, and in sales and marketing collateral.
- Use a full RSS feed (because the goal with most business blogs should be to get read, not boost page views) and make it easy for your readers to find and subscribe to.
- Embrace social media technologies like Twitter and Facebook as a way to notify your fans and followers of new blog content, and make it easy for your readers to share content with each other through social media channels and via email.
- Optimize for search engines by putting relevant keywords in post titles and URL slugs and write about the things that your customers are most likely to be searching for -- but avoid sounding artificial simply so you can stuff some more keywords into a post.
Mistake #5: Expecting Too Much, Too Soon
Blogging isn't a sprint, it's a marathon. Your blog won't be an overnight success, and for the first few months it might feel like you're writing for no one. It can take time to build up your readership and have a regular community of people who participate on your blog. Don't expect immediate returns from your blog and do expect to put in a lot of hard work.
How to Avoid: Set attainable goals and realize that you're in it for the long haul. Don't cancel your blogging efforts after three months -- give it at least a year of regularly putting out quality, original content. And make sure that your blog is easy to find, and that your readers are able to easily comment and share posts with others.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Franck-Boston
Five very good and very basic principles that any business should keep in mind if they want to use blogging.
by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
With consumers venting opinions about vendors left and right on blogs, social networks, discussion forums and news sites, Jive Software has developed a tool to help companies monitor and analyze relevant online chatter.
Jive Market Engagement, announced on Tuesday, is designed to automate the tracking of specific topics and keywords on sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, so that companies don't have to set up myriad alerts and manually scan notifications and mentions.
For example, the product can monitor mentions of the name of a company and of its competitors in various social media sites and then aggregate and synthesize the findings in a central dashboard, where users can also drill down to details of specific "conversations."
"Companies know their brands are being talked about in the social Web, so they set up alerts to monitor terms and names. They get a ton of references which they have to manually read to understand the intent and whether the arrow is pointing up or down," said Ben Kiker, Jive's chief marketing officer.
"That's a very time-consuming model that you can't scale, and it doesn't work. With Jive Market Engagement, you can do that in a more automated fashion," he added.
The product also provides collaboration capabilities so that workgroups can discuss and analyze the findings, generate reports and decide what actions to take.
Jive Market Engagement, which will be generally available in October, can be used as a stand-alone product, although it also works in an integrated fashion with the vendor's Jive SBS (Social Business Software) enterprise collaboration suite.
The product, which uses monitoring technology from Radian6, is priced at US$25,000 and sold as an annual subscription.
That price includes the monitoring of a certain number of topics, the ability to share and collaborate on the findings with up to 50 end users, as well as consulting from Jive to configure the software.
WOW! While I am excited about the automation of tracking what is being said about a product, company, service, etc. online that is a hefty price tag. Good thing we believe in competition! Looking forward to see what other companies come up with for this same type of service.
5 Ways Banks Are Using Social Media is a great post by Lon S. Cohen. He is @obilon on Twitter.
As a PR who works with banks I know the potential value of social media in that industry and the examples that Cohen features show that potential.
I am also a USAA customer. They are a credit union that have been using social media very, very well. They have also put in place amazing online features such as check deposit via an iPhone app!
Used correctly and with a specific purpose in mind, social media can be a tool that makes business more profitable.
Sep 09, 2009 -
My friend Andy Sernovitz sent me a proof of the revised edition of his 2006 book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking . The revised edition has plenty of new stuff in it: New case studies, new worksheets, and new chapters about B2B word of mouth and how to deal with negative feedback.But what struck me as a paged through the revised edition was how solid the original was, especially for small business trying to figure out how to generate good buzz. Andy’s book remains an easy-to-read, digestible primer: You can read it on a Saturday afternoon, and start implementing stuff on Monday.
So herewith is Andy’s list of 16 “Sure-Thing, Must-Do, Awfully Easy” word of mouth techniques. There’s tons more in the actual book, of course. But you knew that.
1. Search the web for people talking about you.
2. Assign someone to join those conversations.
3. Create a blog.
4. Make a new rule: Ask “Is this buzzworthy?” in every meeting.
5. Come up with one buzzworthy topic. Keep it simple.
6. Put something on your front door (if you have one) that reminds people to tell their friends about you.
7. Let your “talkers” sign up for a private newsletter.
8. Pick one easy way to track word of mouth.
9. Put a “tell-a-friend” form on every page of your website.
10. Put a special offer in easily forwardable mail.
11. Add a small gift and a word of mouth tool to every package you sell.
12. Hire a private sale for your talkers.
13. Apologize for mistakes and solve problems fast.
14. Partner with a charity.
15. Do something unexpected.
16. Be nice.When Andy sent me (and other bloggers) the new edition of his book, by the way, he included a few packets of a picture of the book on Twitter, it was the Bacon Salt that got a few of us talking.
Which was, of course, the point.
What other ways would you add to Andy’s list?
Photo credit: D’Arcy Norman
This is a good list of WOM tactics. By the way, item #12 should read "Have a private sale for your talkers."
I just downloaded the new update and plan to play around with it later today when I am supposed to be working. :)
Mining Social Media for Laughs
Twitter and Facebook not just for narcissistic drivel anymore
By JERE HESTER
Updated 1:27 AM PDT, Wed, Sep 9, 2009
Who knew there was so much humor in social media?
Funny Facebook updates and tweets – some unintentionally hilarious or revealing – are being mined for laughs on the web, and even in old-fashioned print.
The website Oversharers mocks Facebook and Twitter users who give too much personal information in their status updates, prattling on about bodily functions and offering randy thoughts they wouldn’t want mom to read (warning: some entries NSFW).
“A tip: No matter how hot it is, never pull out sizzling chicken while topless,” is one of tamer and less gross of the entries.
(Advice from President Obama, who told the nation’s children Tuesday to "be careful" when posting on Facebook – "Whatever you do, it will be pulled up later in your life," he warned – obviously came too late for serial oversharers.)
Meanwhile, a collection of clever tweets fill a new book called "Twitter Wit." The effort recently notched the official tweet of approval from Twitter co-creator Biz Stone, who wrote the forward for the book, which is filled with one-liners, in 140 characters or less.
"Whenever I see the word ‘Chicagoland’ I envision a cold theme park where everyone is eating sausages and looks like Mike Ditka,” one contributor observed.
Social media has been satirized quite a bit lately in other mass media, notably in Conan O'Brien's “Twitter Tracker” gag, and Ben Stiller's videos about his comically clueless forays into Facebook and Twitter. The attention is a sign of social media's growing prevalence, even if everybody isn't yet in on the joke.
The difference with ventures like Oversharers and "Twitter Wit," is that the humor is being generated from within the online world, rather than from the outside looking in. Internet users send ridiculous posts to Oversharers, while Nick Douglas, the compiler of "Twitter Wit," sought quips for the book via Twitter.
For all the narcissism social media has been accused of fostering, it’s refreshing to see that some folks are using Facebook, Twitter and the like, to poke fun and get some laughs. Now the trick is to heed the President’s advice, and avoid becoming someone else’s punchline…
Hester is founding director of the award-winning, multi-media NYCity News Service at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. He is the former City Editor of the New York Daily News, where he started as a reporter in 1992. Follow him on Twitter.
Copyright NBC Local Media
First Published: Sep 8, 2009 2:37 PM PDT
This is just entertaining!
Social media surging through county businesses
By Josh Arntz • For The Times • September 9, 2009
It's Hammer Time! Everybody dance now! :) I just couldn't resist.
Social networking sites grab big slice of Web ads
Tue Sep 1, 2009 3:36pm EDTSAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - About one of every five Internet display ads in the United States is viewed on a social networking Web site like MySpace and Facebook, according to a new report.
The report by analytics firm comScore underscores the increasing prominence of social media sites in the Internet landscape and broadening acceptance of the sites by brand advertisers.
It also illustrates the increasing competition between social media sites and established Internet companies like Yahoo Inc and Time Warner Inc's AOL which have long billed themselves as the top online destinations for brand advertisers.
The study by comScore, released on Tuesday, said social media sites represented 21.1 percent of U.S. Internet display ads in July, with MySpace and Facebook accounting for more than 80 percent of those ads.
"Because the top social media sites can deliver high reach and frequency against target segments at a low cost, it appears that some advertisers are eager to use social networking sites as a new advertising delivery vehicle," said Jeff Hackett, senior vice president of comScore.
According to comScore, AT&T Inc, Experian Interactive and IAC/Interactive Corp's Ask Network were the top three advertisers on social networking sites in July.
While social media sites have enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years -- Facebook is now the world's fourth-most visited Web site -- some observers have questioned whether the sites can be effectively monetized.
Because the content on social media sites is created by users, and could therefore prove racy or offensive, some have questioned the willingness of marketers to place their brands alongside that content.
"They are sensitive to some extent, but nowhere near to the extent you might think," Sanford Bernstein analyst Jeff Lindsay said of advertisers.
The price of placing ads on social networking sites is significantly less than on a Web portal like Yahoo or AOL, said Lindsay. The vast amount of Web pages available on social networks means that advertisers can purchase a massive volume of ad impressions at bargain prices.
The strategy may not be ideally suited to smaller marketers, or advertisers seeking a direct response from their ads, said Lindsay.
"For big, national brands it works just fine, just like TV," said Lindsay. "It's a huge, huge volume game."
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic, editing by Matthew Lewis)
© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved
I am just a sucker for statistics! Checkout comScore, Inc. http://www.comscore.com/ for more statistics including their press release on this story reported by Reuters. http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2009/9/Social_Networking_Sites_Account_for_More_than_20_Percent_of_All_U.S._Online_Display_Ad_Impressions_According_to_comScore_Ad_Metrix
Based on the follow Hub-Spot stats,
"Those who blog see:
55% more visitors to their website.
97% more links to their website which is a primary factor in where your website shows up in search results. (Want a higher ranking, get quality links to your site).
434% more indexed pages – this is the number of pages that show up in search engines. Just because you have a site doesn’t guarantee it is being indexed (findable). Just because some of your pages are in search engines doesn’t mean all of your pages are."
Janet Meiners Thaeler wrote an easy to read article on the potential return on investment from a blog for a small business.
I know from personal experience that having a blog can be very beneficial to a business or a cause and these statistics will help me better enlighten potential and existing clients on the benefits of blogging.
Additionally, like Janet I must agree that a business, cause or person must be suited for blogging for it to work. Nobody likes to go online looking for something and finding a bunch of stale, boring pages from people and companies jumping on the blog band wagon.
With that said, "Happy Blogging!"
Marketers who closely follow social media can find some enticing statistics to justify their online strategies:
More than 10,000 websites use Facebook Connect, a service that lets Facebook users log in to affiliated sites using their Facebook account and share information from those sites with their Facebook friends.
MySpace
Smartphones power the trend
As smartphones such as iPhone and BlackBerry take off, more people are updating their Facebook and Twitter profiles while on the move.
Smartphone shipments are expected to surge to 164 million this year, up 13% from 2008, says market researcher Forward Concepts.
The mobile social-networking industry is expected to become a $3.3 billion market worldwide by 2013, ABI Research predicts.By Jon Swartz
The article by Jon Swartz in USA Today is very well written and can be used to enlighten business owners, marketers, PRs and even your grandmother on the value of including social media in a PR and marketing campaign.
One of the reason so many bloggers flock to Wordpress has to do with the number of great plugins available to help them customize the experience for their readers. There are plugins to help make your blog more spiderable to the search engines, plugins that foster community building, those that make media integration and breeze and lots more.
Here are some of my personal favorite Wordpress plugins that I think bloggers and small business owners can benefit from.
Feel free to share some of your personal favorites below!
Spam
- Akismet: If you’re using Wordpress, then you probably already know about Akismet. It does a pretty good job of detecting spam comments and holds them in a moderation cue for you to approve or delete on your own time. Also neat is that it’s designed to “learn” what is or is not spam based on what you’ve told it in the past. So, the more you use it, the more effective it becomes. Can’t ask for much more than that.
SEO/Techie Plugins
- All-in-One SEO Pack – The Ultimate SEO Wordpress plugin, allowing you to easily set custom titles for posts, pages, categories, archives, tags and searches. You can also designate noindex for duplicate content areas like archives, tags and categories reducing potential canonical issues in the search engines.
- Google XML Sitemaps –Creating an XML Sitemap can be very technical process, but with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, you just activate it and customize the settings. Keep in mind that if you’ve signed up with Google Webmaster Central and Bing’s Webmaster Center tools, you can get notified of any crawl issues they’re experiencing.
- Headspace2: Headspace makes tagging and managing your meta data much more streamlined. Once activated, you can use Headspace to “suggest” tags for a particular post, which are generated from the content of that post or through Yahoo suggestions (you decide). You can also mass edit meta data, as well.
- Robots META: Use Robots META to prevent the search engines from indexing extraneous or duplicate content areas like your search results, feeds, login and admin pages, privacy pages, archives and more. You can also use this plugin to easily validate your account with Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo Site Explorer.
- CformsII: Highly customizable form builder plugin that allows you to create custom contact forms for specific pages on your site. Setup auto-responders, tell-a-friend functionality, file attachments and comprehensive form tracking. It offers very simple customization and cloning.
- WP Super Cache: Are you expecting a lot of people to visit your site? Use WP Super Cache to reduce potential problems with your host and survive a flood of traffic without the site going down! The plugin works by serving HTML versions of a page to visitors versus the heavier, PHP scripts. If you plan on being “social” this is a must-have.
Media
- All-in-One Video Pack – All-in-One Video Pack includes every functionality you might need for video and rich-media, including the ability to upload/ record/import videos directly to your post, edit and remix content with an online video editor, enable video responses, manage and track your video content, create playlists, etc.
- Widget Locationize: Use Widget Locationize to define where your widgets should be displayed. Assign widgets by tag, category, single pages and exclusions of those.
Usability
- WordPress Thread Comment: If your blog receives a lot of comments, it can be overwhelming for users to follow a conversation. With threaded comments, they can more easily see who responded to whom without having to sort through dozens of unrelated comments.
- Comment Redirect: This plugin gives your first time visitors a unique experience by redirecting them to a page on your site (maybe a newsletter sign-up, upcoming events or even a custom page designed just for your first time visitors). Make them feel welcome and they’re more likely to visit in the future.
- Sociable: Sociable is the power plugin for social media integration. Use it to add social buttons to the bottom of your posts making it easier for users to share or bookmark your content. Select which social networks your users are most likely to be a member of and embed it at the bottom of your posts or in the template of your site,
- Related Posts: It’s important to cross-link related content on your site for both users and the search engines. Use related posts to generate a list of similar posts based on the content of that specific post. This will be automatically generated each time you publish a new post and you choose the number of posts to display.
- Subscribe to Comments: Allows commenters on your blog to subscribe to comments via email so that they’re notified that the conversation is continuing.
- What Would Seth Godin Do: Allows you to welcome new visitors to your site and encourage them to sign up for your RSS feed or newsletter. A nice way to personalize your site for new eyes. (One of my personal favorites for community building.)
There are a TON of great plugins for the WordPress platform, but these are some that I’ve found to be extremely valuable. Definitely check out the plugin directory for additional ones or share your own personal favs in the comments.
I started following Lisa Barone on social media this year and find her insights to be well very insightful.
This article is no exception. Lisa lists out some of her favorite plugins for Wordpress and does so in her usual clear cut fashion. Thanks Lisa!
Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.
Skip to next paragraph
Tim Shaffer for The New York TimesKristen Nagy, 18, sends many text messages, but never on Twitter.
Tim Shaffer for The New York TimesTeenagers, it seems, would rather chat with close friends than tweet to the masses.
Readers' Comments
Share your thoughts.“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.
Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.
“The traditional early-adopter model would say that teenagers or college students are really important to adoption,” said Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis at comScore. Teenagers, after all, drove the early growth of the social networks Facebook, MySpace and Friendster.
Twitter, however, has proved that “a site can take off in a different demographic than you expect and become very popular,” he said. “Twitter is defying the traditional model.”
In fact, though teenagers fueled the early growth of social networks, today they account for 14 percent of MySpace’s users and only 9 percent of Facebook’s. As the Web grows up, so do its users, and for many analysts, Twitter’s success represents a new model for Internet success. The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth.
Adults have driven the growth of many perennially popular Web services. YouTube attracted young adults and then senior citizens before teenagers piled on. Blogger’s early user base was adults and LinkedIn has built a successful social network with professionals as its target.
The same goes for gadgets. Though video games were originally marketed for children, Nintendo Wiis quickly found their way into nursing homes. Kindle from Amazon caught on first with adults and many gadgets, like iPhones and GPS devices, are largely adult-only.
Similarly, Twitter did not attract the young trendsetters at the outset. Its growth has instead come from adults who might not have used other social sites before Twitter, said Jeremiah Owyang, an industry analyst studying social media. “Adults are just catching up to what teens have been doing for years,” he said.
Many young people, who have used Facebook since they began using the Internet and for whom text messaging is their primary method of communication, say they simply do not have a need for Twitter.
Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year.
Another reason that teenagers do not use Twitter may be that their lives tend to revolve around their friends. Though Twitter’s founders originally conceived of the site as a way to stay in touch with acquaintances, it turns out that it is better for broadcasting ideas or questions and answers to the outside world or for marketing a product. It is also useful for marketing the person doing the tweeting, a need few teenagers are attuned to.
“Many people use it for professional purposes — keeping connected with industry contacts and following news,” said Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive. “Because it’s a one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.”
Wendy Grazier, a mother in Arkansas, said her two teenaged daughters thought Twitter was “lame,” yet they asked her to follow teenage pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift on Twitter so she could report back on what the celebrities wrote. Why won’t they deign to do it themselves? “It seems more, like, professional, and not something that a teenager would do,” said 16-year-old Miranda Grazier. “I think I might join when I’m older.”
The public nature of Twitter is particularly sensitive for the under-18 set, whether because they want to hide what they are doing from their parents or, more often, because their parents restrict their interaction with strangers on the Web.
Georgia Marentis, a 14-year-old in Great Falls, Va., uses Facebook instead of Twitter because she can choose who sees her updates. “My parents wouldn’t want me to have everything going on in my life displayed for the entire world,” she said. (Of course, because of the public nature of social networks and the ease of creating a fake identity on the Web, even sites with more privacy settings have proved dangerous for young people in some cases.)
Many young people use the Web not to keep up with the issues of the day but to form and express their identities, said Andrea Forte, who studied how high school students use social media for her dissertation. (She will be an assistant professor at Drexel University in the spring.)
“Your identity on Twitter is more your ability to take an interesting conversational turn, throw an interesting bit of conversation out there. Your identity isn’t so much identified by the music you listen to and the quizzes you take,” as it is on Facebook, she said. She called Twitter “a comparatively adult kind of interaction.”
For Twitter’s future, young people’s ambivalence could be a good thing. Teenagers may be more comfortable using new technologies, but they are also notoriously fickle. Although they drove the growth of Friendster and MySpace, they then moved on from those sites to Facebook.
Perhaps Twitter’s experience will encourage Web start-ups to take a more realistic view of who uses the Web and go after a broader audience, Ms. Forte said. “Older populations are a smart thing to be thinking about, as opposed to eternally going after the 15- through 19-year-olds,” she said.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Technology (1 of 15) » A version of this article appeared in print on August 26, 2009, on page B1 of the New York edition.
This article does a god job of clarifying the evolution of social media and the demographics involved. Anyone who is attempting to harness the power of social media for business purposes needs to constantly work to stay abreast of the trends and articles like this by Tim Shaffer are quite helpful.
In today's market place how you handle your customer is more important than ever. The five questions to ask yourself in this article are great and really make you think about how you handle a customer from the first moment to the last.
