Today’s great quotation:
"there are only two platforms – the individual user and the web"
Via Adriana Lukas: Content is for container business
Technorati tags: Adriana Lukas, platforms, media, content
social networking
Shopping centres as social network nodes
In the run up to Christmas, as my wife and I spent endless hours shopping, I noticed – perhaps unsurprisingly – that a lot of young people seemed to just ‘hang out’ in shopping centres.
I suppose this has been an anecdotal trend in the US for a while, but I hadn’t ever really noticed it in the UK before, although I’m sure like the US this isn’t anything new.
But more than that I noticed ever vigilant security guards patrolling the shopping centres and young people clearly trying to evade them.
So it dawned on me that shopping centres had become the new parks. When I was younger (not that long ago) we met in the park and played/mucked around there. We had to watch out for the park attendents though – much in the same way that kids today have to watch out the for the security guards.
I raise these thoughts for two reasons:
- Today I saw a sales assistant in John Lewis shout at two young people to "Get out!" because his furniture department wasn’t "a play centre.". Nice tables though…
- In a prescient fashion, last week Danah Boyd publish some field-notes from the Digital Youth Project about technology and young people’s consumption. She has this insightful observation which dovetails nicely with the thoughts outlined above:
"When it comes to teen culture, consumerism is still rampant, although
shopping is primarily about socialization. Aside from how the mobile
phone allows groups to coordinate, technology is not really altering
the tradition of hanging out in consumer places. What it is altering is
the ways in which teens research and purchase things that they know
they want."
Technorati tags: shopping, consumerism, parkies
Cambridge tutors admits using Facebook during admissions process
Story in today’s Guardian about a Cambridge admissions tutor using Facebook to "check" on students applying to his college.
Dr Richard Barnes tells Emmanuel college:
"This has been the year in which I joined Facebook … I have
to confess that I actually joined to see what I was missing and also to
check up (discreetly) on applicants for a college position."
Cambridge University and the NUS say that Facebook shouldn’t be used as part of the offical admissions process (and there’s nothing to suggest it was).
Part of me thinks that’s the right move, but then part of me likes the idea of throwing something less formalised and beaureacratic into the mix. For the sake of equality lets make sure they check MySpace too.
Technorati tags: Cambridge University, Facebook, MySpace
Another web 2.0 coup for the ad industry
I’ve just seen Colin Byrne’s post on the main UK political parties plans for online campaigning.
Derpessingly, it seems that Labour and the Tories will be turning to ad agencies for their digital work. No digital PR work on the cards… for yet, at least.
Authenticity and trust are set to be major themes for online political campaigns which is interesting as it is starting to look as if the ad and marekting industries are turning their reputations around through their "authentic" online work. Meanwhile many in the UK’s PR industry still struggle to shake their reputation as ‘spinners’.
Technorati tags: politics, advertising, public relations
Blogs: that was then, this is now
Happy New Year one and all. As we enter 2008 I thought I’d flag a great post from Richard Bailey reflecting on blogs as mature communications tools and their place in the online mediasphere.
Richard considers how blogs were viewed when they first hit the mainstream somewhere around 2003:
“Compared to newspaper or magazine journalism, blogs seemed ill-considered, ill-informed and unaccountable.”
But that was then and this now. The growth of social networks has become exponential and Richard suggests if we compare blogs to social networks it’s fair to say “blogs seem considered, valuable and highly literate. The froth has gone, but there’s something substantial left.”
I agree and this situation has been hinted at last year with analysis of Dave Sifry’s State of the Live Web report which showed a distinct slow down in blog growth leading some to speculate that blog networks were consolidating with the strong ones surviving and becoming even more important as online influencers.
Even more interestingly, Richard plots a chart of the publishing ecosystem ranked according to speed, reflectiveness, interactivity and immedicacy. As publishing tools blogs sit firmly between traditional media and newer tools such as Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook etc.
According to these criteria, Richard suggests blogs now occupy a relatively important lace in the media/publishing ecosystem. A position whereby they offer the PR professional a tool with “speed [and] a high degree of reflection.”
Put like that it seems pretty clear that the dust has settled around blogs and we can see where the strengths/weaknesses of social media tools lie. In turn this can give us a steer as to which ones are right for different PR programes or campaigns.
I don’t know where Richard got his charts from, but I think it’d be a good idea to continually revise them as new products/tools evolve so that we can build a kind of Gartner Hype Cycle for the online publishing/media tools. If anything it’ll help guide PR practitioners towards the right tool for their campaigns and communication/marketing programmes.
Technorati tags: Richard Bailey, blogs, publishing, media, communications
European 16-24 year-olds spend more time online than watching TV, and other useful stats
Two stories in today’s Guardian make for an interesting juxtaposition and indicate that employers of the future have a rude awakening.
First up, a report by the paper shows employers are cracking down on the amount of time staff use the internet and in particular, social networks. A deeper read reveals that the investigation has only covered the public sector but still shows 1,700 staff have been diosciplined or sacked in the past three years for mis-use of the internet or email. Trade Unions also calims they are dealing with an increase in the number of disputes involving social networks.
Contrast this with the story a bit further on about young people aged 16-24 are spending longer than ever before on the internet and the number of people using social networks has doubled from 23% last year to 42%.
So as employers crack down on people connecting and socialising online, today’s young people (and tomorrow’s workers) are spending even more and more of their lives on the interent. Hopefully when they come to the world of work employers will have realised just how integral (not to mention useful) the internet and social web can be.
The report (produced by the European Interactive Advertising Association) also found:
- an increase in instant messaging and the message functions
of social networks use which has led to a decrease in email (see also, Robin Goad’s recent post) - 81% of surfers say they have sent an
email at least once a month over the past year, down from 85% in 2006 - internet users across Europe (7,000 specially selected
people across 10 European countries) are spending an
average of nearly 12 hours a week on the internet - Italians
are the heaviest users (13.6 hours per week), followed by the
Swedes (13 hours) and the French (12.7 hours). The British – in
seventh place – spend 12 hours a week, up from 11.3 hours in 2006. The
Dutch are last on 9.8 hours - Almost a third of European web users have watched a TV,
film or video clip, compared with 12% last year. - The EIAA study shows the effect on TV viewing, especially
among the youth audience which is using the internet more often than TV
for the first time. The survey shows that 82% of 16- to 24-year-olds
use the web between five and seven days a week while only 77% watch TV
as regularly – a drop of 5% from last year
Technorati tags: European Internet Useage Statistics, Guardian, social networks, employment