The Social Enterprise

Pew's Internet & American Life Project has recently published their report Social Media and Young Adults, which looks at social media usage by teens and young adults.

Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.

The report goes on to say that whilst blogging amongst teens and young adults has dropped since 2006, down to 14% of online teens compared to 28%, it has risen amongst the over 30s from 7% in 2007 to 11% in 2009. 73% of online teens use social networks now, compared to 55% in 2006 and 65% in 2008. 47% of online adults use social networks, up from 37% in 2008. Furthermore, adults are "increasingly fragmenting their social networking experience" as 52% have two or more different profiles.

There's lots more information, about Twitter, connectivity and gadget use. I haven't yet had a chance to read the whole thing, but none of the above statistics should surprise anyone.

Teens never were particularly into blogging and if they were going to blog anywhere it was going to be on LiveJournal. Different blogging tools had radically different profiles in 2006, with tools like Typepad having a middle-aged, white male demographic and LiveJournal attracting mainly teens, 75% female, with a focus on cultural minorities. The blogging landscape has changed a lot since then, and the tool-specific cultures have grown or receded along with the tools themselves. LiveJournal, which had just been bought by SixApart was sold to SUP, a Russian media company and now has 11.6 million users. Movable Type/Typepad seem to have decreased in popularity. Wordpress has developed is now one of the most usable and extensible platforms available. It currently has 202 million users.

Culturally, blogging has moved into the mainstream - a good enough reason for many teens to see it as 'something old people do' and that they should, therefore, avoid. And those teens who were on LJ in 2006 are growing up, hitting 20 and going to university or getting jobs. And I can say from experience that blogging really is easier when you're underemployed!

The wider social media landscape has changed too. Facebook had started off as a closed, school-/university-only site, accessible only to those with an educational email address. In 2006 is opened its doors and so all of those teens/early-20-somethings who were facing having to leave their friends behind as they lost their university email address could continue their activities into the workplace. MySpace, which in 2006 was the most popular social network, became a lot less cool. In 2008, Facebook took MySpace's crown and it is now pretty much seen as Facebook's ugly little brother (even though MySpace is a year older).

Twitter, of course, barely existed in 2006, and whilst it's still not hugely popular amongst teens, plain ol' SMSing is. Teens have greater access to mobile phones now than they did, with 75% of American teens between 12 and 17 owning one. I'd suspect the pattern is the same in the UK and Europe. Text bundles are now very generous, so teens have no need of Twitter - their social circle is based on their school friends and neighbours for whom texts work well enough.(In most cases, they have yet to develop geographically scattered networks that tools such as Twitter are useful for sustaining.)

As for adults using more social networks, but fragmenting their social experience, well again, there are a lot more networks to join now than their were, and they don't all do the same thing. I can't do on Twitter what I do on Flickr or Dopplr. So I would expect to see usage and fragmentation continue to increase.

I love the Pew reports. We don't have anything like this in the UK, although we desperately need this sort of research to be done. As I've said before, Ofcom and the Office for National Statistics do some work, but it lacks the focus and detail that business and government need if they are to base decisions on evidence instead of anecdote. However, it is important when we read these reports to remember that the digital landscape is continually shifting, and we can't separate out the changes we see in online behaviour from the development of the web. As such, I'd say there is nothing that surprises me in this report, nothing that seems out of place within the wider context of technology change and adoption.

Last Friday I wrote a blog post on my own blog about The Impenetrable Layer of Suck and did what I usually do with blog posts these days: I Tweeted it. I saw a few people reTweet it, so thought I'd check my stats. This is what I saw:

I've heard many a time from friends at Guardian Technology, who all regularly Tweet links to new articles and blog posts, that Twitter is a greater driver of traffic than Google News. I've found it to be true here as well. On days that I Tweet a link, traffic is much, much higher than days I don't.

I rarely see links from other websites listed in my referral stats, apart from my own site where there's a feed in the sidebar and weekly roundups. The decline of the trackback is an interesting, and sad, thing. They got so polluted by spammers that they became unworkable for most people and now I rarely see functioning trackbacks. Blogrolls have also fallen into disfavour, probably because they were such a pain to keep up to date and the technology to look after your blogroll didn't develop much functionality beyond very basic add/delete/sort links.

This is a shame. In the early days of blogging, I felt like I really was a part of this huge network of bloggers, all passionate about the opportunities this new technology gave us, all excited about the democratisation of publishing. Now blogs feel much more isolated from each other, less connected, less like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. More like lone voices howling in the storm.

Twitter brings traffic, as sometimes does Facebook, but it doesn't make me feel that this blog is connected into a wider network. Whilst information flows through my network, just as it did before, that flow is mostly invisible. Twitter doesn't show me whose Tweet is sending me the traffic, it's all just a nameless wall of http://twitter.com. The network has slipped behind a veil.

It's great that Twitter brings readers, but I miss that sense of connection that my referrals stats used to bring me.

So, how important is Twitter to you, compared to other sources of traffic? Do you get most of your referrals from Twitter? Is Twitter now where you find most of your news?

For any of you interested in intranets, I'm going to be talking at the IntraTeam conference in Copenhagen at the beginning of March. I'm onstage at 3.10pm on Wednesday 3rd, talking about email and how we can use social media to shift the burden of certain types of communication away from email and onto more suitable platforms.

If you're going to be there, please do come and say hello if you see me!

Chris Brogan talks about a handy framework upon which to build your social media strategy:

There are three main areas of practice for social media that your company (or you) should be thinking about: listening, connecting, publishing. From these three areas, you can build out your usage of the tools, thread your information networks to feed and be fed, and align your resources for execution. There are many varied strategies you can execute using these toolsets. There are many different tools you can consider employing for your efforts. But that's the basic structure: listening, connecting, publishing.

This framework is ostensibly about external social media usage, but these concepts are just as important internally:

• Listen to what staff what and need, and allow staff to listen to each other
• Provide meaningful ways for staff to connect with each other
• Allow staff to publish information in a way that makes sense to them

Does it work that way in your company?

The British Psychological Society blog highlights recent research by Leman Tosun and Timo Lajunen (requires login) into personality type and internet usage:

Using Eysenck's classic personality test, Tosun and Lajunen found that students who scored high on extraversion (agreeing with statements like 'I am very talkative') tended to use the Internet to extend their real-life relationships, whereas students who scored high on psychoticism (answering 'yes' to statements like 'does your mood often go up and down?' and 'do you like movie scenes involving violence and torture?') tended to use the Internet as a substitute for face-to-face relationships. Students who scored high on psychoticism were also likely to say that they found it easier to reveal their true selves online than face-to-face. The personality subscale of neuroticism (indicated by 'yes' answers to items like 'Do things often seem hopeless to you?) was not associated with styles of Internet use.

'Our data suggest that global personality traits may explain social Internet use to some extent,' the researchers concluded. 'In future studies, a more detailed index of social motives can be used to better understand the relation between personality and Internet use.'

I wonder how long it will take for companies that use psychometric testing to add an additional "internet user type" section...

I was listening to WNYC's RadioLab on the weekend, particularly the recent episode, The New Normal?. The first section was a story about a tribe of Kenyan baboons studied by Robert Sapolsky. The group got tragically infected by tuberculosis and most of the alpha males died.

Now, baboons are notoriously aggressive and when new males join a tribe, much trouble ensues. But after the death of the alpha males, a new culture took hold, one of gentleness and acceptance. When new males joined the group they were accepted much more quickly than normal. Grooming increased, especially between males. The group had changed.

Initially, it seemed that this was just a temporary effect, but now, 20 years later, the group still behaves differently to any other baboon tribe even though most of the original members are long since dead. The culture of tolerance has endured and has been passed on not just through the teaching of baby baboons, but also through the conversion of incoming adolescent males whom, it was assumed, would have brought their violent culture in with them.

I couldn't help but think of the different communities that I've been a part of over the years and the importance of first contact. What happens when you join a community influences your own behaviour there, like it or not. If someone is rude, aggressive or dismissive of you, then you are more likely to be rude, aggressive or dismissive back. When someone welcomes you to the community with warmth and openness, you return the favour to the next newbie to arrive.

Perhaps one step towards healthy online communities is to shoot all the alpha males (or females, for that matter) that barge in, beating their chest and picking fights with the youngsters. Metaphorically, of course.

Clive Thompson writes on his blog (and in Wired) about how social networks such as Twitter become dysfunctional when the network gets too big and, as a result, too lopsided:

When you go from having a few hundred Twitter followers to ten thousand, something unexpected happens: Social networking starts to break down.

This is a point I've been making for a long time, not really from personal experience but from observing various friends who have very high follower counts. Clive goes on:

Technically speaking, online social-networking tools ought to be great at fostering these sorts of clusters. Blogs and Twitter and Facebook are, as Internet guru John Battelle puts it, "conversational media." But when the conversation gets big enough, it shuts down. Not only do audiences feel estranged, the participants also start self-censoring. People who suddenly find themselves with really huge audiences often start writing more cautiously, like politicians.

When it comes to microfame, the worst place to be is in the middle of the pack. If someone's got 1.5 million followers on Twitter, they're one of the rare and straightforwardly famous folks online. Like a digital Oprah, they enjoy a massive audience that might even generate revenue. There's no pretense of intimacy with their audience, so there's no conversation to spoil. Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you're clearly just chatting with pals. It's the middle ground -- when someone amasses, say, tens of thousands of followers -- where the social contract of social media becomes murky.

'Microfame' is a term I first heard used by Danny O'Brien at OpenTech 2005 in his keynote, Living Life in Public (available from the UKUUG site, embed coming soon!).

This was in an era before Twitter, before Facebook opened up to the world, when most people became 'internet famous' through their blog. But becoming 'microfamous' puts people at the centre of an uncomfortable social dynamic. As Danny said:

There are people out there who know something about you, but you have relatively little knowledge about them.

This becomes problematic because the microfamous rarely have the resources that the truly famous do to protect their privacy. But more importantly, it creates a disconnect, an unbalanced power relationship that we don't really have the societal experience to understand. Knowledge is, after all, power.

This relationship asymmetry has been amplified by Twitter especially. Twitter is a very good example of how poorly we understand these dynamics and how the tools that we create and use are not designed to take the microfame effect into account.

It's appears that there are a number of stages in the growing asymmetry of one's Twitter network. The first is when the majority of @ messages you receive come from people you don't know. That happened a while ago for me, probably at around the 2000 follower mark. Then @ messages from people you know get swamped by @ messages from people you don't. Finally, the @ messages to every last thing you say flood in, killing your ability to have a conversation with anyone and making it impossible to build connections.

I've not experienced those last two stages, but I've seen it happen to friends and it's not pretty. It puts them in a difficult position where the people @ing them feel put out that they don't get a personal reply, but the amount of time it would take to read and respond to every @ makes it extremely difficult.

This is the eternal problem of social networks. In order to be financially successful, social networks need to grow large. But in order to be socially successful, they need to stay small. Seemic was a good example of this. In the early days, it felt like a small, intimate community where one could upload a video and have a real conversation around it. As it grew, the conversational seeds, those first video uploads that broached a new subject, became so numerous that it was hard to find one's own, let alone the responses to it. In fact, it became so time-consuming to participate I had to give up.

With Twitter, the problem is just as much about the tools as the network itself. Twitter clients tend to be designed for people with small networks and don't deal well with asymmetry. Most tools, for example, have two ways to show @ messages: you can see @s from your friends in your timeline or see all @ messages lumped together, regardless of who they came from.

I've yet to see a tool (although clearly I've not used all Twitter clients) that gave you a third choice, to see all @s from people that you follow in a separate view. That would at least allow the Twitterer to focus on maintaining relationships with the people they have chosen to follow, whilst facilitating a dip into the faster-flowing stream of @s from the rest of Twitter whenever they wanted.

It might be tempting to dismiss this problem as one that only the cool kids suffer from, but that would be to miss the wider point. In some situations, creating small trusted networks with variably-permeable boundaries is key to creating a sustainable broader network. This is particularly of collaboration spaces, where you want to invite only key people to work with you, although that group may change from project to project.

(Now, you may think that Facebook achieves this, but it doesn't. It gives one the sense of being in a small sub-community without actually delivering on that promise - the boundaries are far too porous, and their porosity is not entirely under your control.)

We need to do a lot more thinking about this problem. It's relevant in a whole host of context - hot-desking enterprise, for example - and most social networks focus on creating broad opportunities for interaction without considering how to let people create natural boundaries where they feel comfortable.

Via Kate Harding, a bonus post! (Enclicken to enbiggen.)

I recently discovered Keith Sawyer's blog, Creativity & Innovation. Keith is a professor of psychology, an expert on creativity and well worth a read. In his post about cross understanding in teams he discusses the observation that teams including people with the ability to understand another's perspective do better than teams that don't:

[...] cross understanding can help us to explain several apparently contradictory findings in group collaboration research:

1. Diversity often has a negative impact on team performance, and this is sometimes explained by the "social categorization bias" that people have towards similar people. But in some groups, diversity does not result in reduced performance; the authors argue that this will happen when cross understanding is high.
2. In some groups, strong sub-groups can interfere with effective collaboration. But if cross understanding is high, this problem can be reduced.

Related to this is the idea of 'T-shaped people' who have one particular area of deep expertise which makes up the shaft of the T, but then also have knowledge and skills in other areas (the crossbar).

It strikes me that most of the social media and tech people that I admire look T-shaped to me: Leisa Reichelt, Stephanie Booth, Stephanie Troeth, David Weinberger, Euan Semple, Lloyd Davis... the list goes on. I wonder if being empathic, able to put yourself in someone else's shoes, curious about the world around it and other people's experiences, and able to recognise patterns across disciplines is really what marks out a social media natural.

Some people really do just 'get it', almost without trying, whereas others just can't wrap their heads around even basic concepts no matter how often or how clearly they are explained. I have never been able to spot a correlation between age, online experience, social media experience, activity in communities and that ability to comprehend what makes social media different to other forms of communications. Hm, that could be an interesting area of research!

I've been ignoring all the build-up to this year's Apple produce announcement, mainly because I just didn't want to get my hopes up. But it turns out that I'm actually quite excited about the iPad, Apple's tablet computer.

I had a very spirited discussion with my husband on the train last night as we were catching up on the announcements made whilst we were in a plane. My thought is that there will be two reactions to the iPad: the spec-geeks who will pour over the physical specification and find it wanting in comparison to their own laptop or desktop. People who look at the iPad the same way they looked at the Air, as a smaller version of their existing laptop will be disappointed, as many of them were with the Air, because the iPad is not as powerful or as fast as a laptop.

Then there'll be people who come at it having used an iPhone or iPod Touch. For them, the iPad is a different proposition. It will give them a bigger and better browsing experience. Reading ebooks will be easier, videos will be bigger, email more readable. For people who want a better sofa experience, who want to be entertained and kept busy on a long journey, or who want a less conspicuous machine to take meeting notes, it looks like a goer. It's not going to be a MacBook replacement, but a machine to sit between the iPhone/iPod Touch and the MacBook.

Obviously I see sociability in everything, so I think the iPad is going to be great for social media. I find the iPhone too small to write a blog post on, yet I have most of my blog post ideas whilst I'm out and about. Would an iPad encourage me to write more?

Because the iPad taps into the existing App Store and is able to run apps either at iPhone definition or x2, without any interventions necessary, it comes ready to rock and roll. There's already a Wordpress iPhone App along with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and many others. Your social web is there, ready and waiting. App writers can, if they want, upgrade their apps to take advantage of the bigger screen, which means potentially more functionality and a richer experience.

And because of the form factor, might we see more people using an iPad in scenarios where you wouldn't get a laptop out? I have long felt that opening a laptop, e.g. in a meeting, is a bad thing from a psychological point of view: Flipping up the screen puts up a barrier between you and the person you're talking to, something I greatly dislike. Would an iPad be better in meetings or at social gatherings? Would they make the iPad user able to socialise both in person and online simultaneously without the people present feeling blocked out?

For my money, though, Apple has some changes to make to ensure the iPad's success: Stop inhibiting innovation by placing strictures on what sort of apps are allowed in the App Store. By all means, have a QA process to ensure that malicious apps aren't developed, but their current rules about not developing apps that conflict with Apple-provided apps is stupid and counter-productive. If I want to run a different browser than Safari, for example, a browser that integrates with Instapaper, Delicious, Twitter and other social tools, then I should be able to do so.

Equally, they need to rethink their age warnings. It is utterly absurd to see an age-related warning when you install a dictionary or an RSS reader just because it's possible to see some naughty words in those sorts of applications. Apple needs to understand that it can't expect to promulgate the values of conservative America (as opposed to the rest of America, which is much more sensible) around the world in a techno-cultural hegemony.

Apple are already coming under fire for being shills for DRM, and rightly so. Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote:

Members of the Free Software Foundation staged a small protest outside today's Apple event in San Francisco, making the case against Apple's use of DRM. The group's four-foot signs were headed with the message "Entering Apple Restriction Zone" and laid out the tablet's detriments:

* No free software
* No installing apps from the Web
* No sharing music or books
* We can remotely disable your apps & media

Much as I love the look of the iPad, Apple needs to deal with these issues and as a community we should bring to bear as much pressure as we can. This is the one thing that dulls my enthusiasm for the iPad. I was vehemently against Microsoft's Vista and all the DRM and 'phone home' controls that it supported. Anyone who felt that Vista was an invasion of their privacy must apply the same logic to the iPad. We can't just let Apple off the hook because their device and OS are prettier.

I'm confident, however, that people will take steps to route around the barriers that get in their way. It didn't take long for someone to jailbreak the iPhone and we can expect the iPad to come under much more scrutiny. I never felt comfortable jailbreaking my primary communications device, but I'd be much happier to fiddle with an iPad in order to install the software that I want to use. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

I'll leave you now with the iPad keynote for your delectation and delight: