Social Life and Social Media

WHITE PAPER FALL 2009

SOCIAL LIFE
AND SOCIAL MEDIA

WHITE PAPER: SOCIAL LIFE AND SOCIAL MEDIA 3

In October 2009,
Euro RSCG Worldwide
commissioned a survey to
map the trajectory of social
life and social media usage
in the United States, quizzing
1,228 Americans from all
online demographics. This
white paper looks at the
macro developments in social
media; it also brings in
numbers and verbatims about
people’s hopes for their
social life online and offline
before finally drawing
conclusions and implications
for marketers and
their clients.

4 WHITE PAPER: SOCIAL LIFE AND SOCIAL MEDIA

INTRODUCTION
Recent headlines have been dominated by the economic crisis, Barack Obama, wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, and health-care reform, but just behind those
headlines has been a steadily growing buzz about social media.
Corporations everywhere have been keen to install knowledgeable
executives to help get them up to speed.

A notable example came in early 2009, when The New
York Times named Jennifer Preston its first social
media editor.i A document that apparently is an
internal memo about the appointment raised ideas
that apply to many organizations. It’s a clear,
cogent and jargon-free explanation of social
media: “…an awful lot of people are finding
our work not by coming to our homepage or
looking at our newspaper but through alerts and
recommendations from their friends and colleagues.
So we ought to learn how to reach those people
effectively and serve them well. At the same time,
more of us are using social networks to find sources,
contacts and information.”

Anyone who hasn’t heard or read the words “social
media” many hundreds of times this year has either
been on a retreat or a round-the-world sailing trip. Or
maybe they haven’t realized that Facebook, Flickr,
YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, blogs and online forums are all
forms of social media. What makes these forms of media
different from traditional media such as TV and printed newspapers
and magazines is their scope for interaction. As social media pioneer
Robert Scoble put it on his blog in 2007, “When I say ‘social media’ or ‘new media’
I’m talking about Internet media that has the ability to interact with it in some way.”ii

The graph shows the rise in the search volume index of the term “social media” on Google, meaning
the change in the proportion of searches using that term relative to total searches on Google.


Scoble and plenty of other digerati aren’t too keen on the term itself. But all these new,
related phenomena need some sort of collective term, and “social media” seems to have
stuck; it’s now the shorthand term increasingly used to refer to interactive media. The
Google Trends graph on the previous page shows its steady rise over the past three
years. So for the purposes of this paper, we’re using the term social media.

The key factor of social media is the network effect. With traditional media, each
additional user is just another set of eyes for the media owner and of no benefit to the
other users. With social media, each additional user is potentially another resource for
all other users. The bigger the user base, the more attractive it becomes for other
people. As users are now connecting with real-time digital technology, the speed and
scale of changes are both increasing rapidly.

At the time this was written, more than five billion tweets had been posted on Twitteriii
with around 20 million a day being added,iv compared with three million a day in March
2008.v Facebook reckons to have 300 million active users, of whom half log in on any
given day. More than 65 million users access Facebook through mobile devices, and
they’re twice as active as nonmobile users.vi Wikipedia had 67 million unique visitors in
September 2009vii and counts around 85,000 active contributors.viii

These huge numbers for social media speak volumes—but always bear in mind that they
move fast and are quickly out of date.


“
HYPE, FEARS AND REALITY

”
Interactions with friends far and near become more
meaningful as social media matures.
Like most rapid new developments, social media are hyped to the skies by some, feared
by others, ignored by many and used pragmatically by a smart few.

There are the oh-so-smart early adopters and the wide-eyed technophiles and the
digital foghorn evangelists and the bandwagon-jumpers and of course the social media
professionals; they are all proclaiming social media as the ultimate game-changer.
Then there are the doomsters warning that social media could cause terrible damage
to everything from children’s development right up to democracy itself. There are the
skeptics, the technophobes and the traditionalists who think it’s all a passing fad. And
there are the pragmatists—experimenting, watching and seeing what works.

Which of them is right? When in doubt, look at the evidence.

From 2007 through his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign
made astute use of Facebook and MySpace. His campaign mastermind, David Plouffe,
has described it as a marriage between digital technology and grassroots campaigning.
Despite the proclamations of social media boosters, Plouffe made it clear that old-
school technology was crucial.ix

In the run-up to the Iranian presidential elections in June 2009, the government
blocked access to Facebook, which was being used by candidates running against
President Ahmadinejad. In the dispute following the election, one of the main
challengers, Mir Hossein Mousavi, used Facebook as a way of getting his message out.x


Protesters in Iran and their supporters outside used Twitter messaging to report news
and coordinate activities. The White House even asked Twitter to delay a network
upgrade in order to protect the interests of Iranians using the service.xi The protests
made a mark, but the election result was upheld.

In October 2009, a British member of Parliament asked a question about an oil
company in the House of Commons. The company’s lawyers served a media injunction
preventing any reporting of the question and a so-called super-injunction preventing
U.K. media from mentioning the original injunction.xii Within a very short time, the key
facts were all over Twitter and the injunctions were withdrawn.

Probably the most convincing endorsement of social media has come from the experts in
epidemics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S. Its webpage
“Social Media at CDC” (cdc.gov/socialmedia) offers an impressive range of social media
options for people to stay in touch with the latest on issues such as H1N1 (aka swine
flu). There are links to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, DailyStrength, CDC’s YouTube
channel, CDC’s Flickr site, CDC on iTunes and CDC’s Second Life Island,xiii as well as
blogs, buttons, badges, content syndication, e-cards, e-games, mobile services, RSS feeds
and widgets. From a social media perspective, CDC might well be the most viral of all
organizations.

KEY TAKEAWAY: In most cases, social media can’t be expected to do the whole job on their own, whatever
the job is. However, they are now a vital consideration in any communications strategy in any country where
digital media are accessible to citizens and consumers.

“

“
SOCIAL MEDIA MEANS A BLURRING OF SOCIAL AND MEDIA

”
I hope to keep my quality relationships better face-to-face by being
able to keep up with friends more in their daily lives online.

“
Online is cool to get back in touch with friends

”
or maybe find like-minded new friends, but the real fun
is hanging out with them.

“
Online is a convenience, like a phone. The experts were sure phones
would kill face-to-face interactions, but they just keep us better

”
connected. It’s true for e-mail as well. I was housebound for months

“
some years back, and my online life kept me sane and social.

Being part of the acting community in Atlanta, I meet fellow actors,

”
network and get early warnings of possible acting opportunities,
which are later followed up by face-to-face most times.

I enjoy having the opportunity to spend time with friends and laugh, and enjoy

”
good company. Online socializing allows me to continue to share those same
experiences with friends from the past who are separated geographically.


Although the social media handle might not be to everybody’s taste, it’s a pretty
accurate shorthand of what we’re talking about. Media are the various means of
storing and transmitting communication, typically about news or products and
typically to multiple recipients. Social refers to the interaction of people, normally in
an informal way.

In social media, the two elements blend and blur in infinite combinations. Consumers use
online and offline elements to create the social interactions they need.

Top Two Box Agreement Total Female Male 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65+
Base (All Respondents) 1,228 626 602 76 279 318 254 183 118

Interaction through electronic means
is more convenient than face-to-face.
48.7% 51.4% 55.6% 48.7% 48.0% 56.0% 55.9% 59.0% 49.2%
Social groupings online can
be truly social.
39.9% 43.0% 36.7% 39.4% 41.6% 38.1% 40.6% 43.7% 33.9%
Social media online enhances
my social life offline.
27.6% 28.1% 27.0% 35.5% 32.6% 29.6% 25.6% 24.0% 14.4%
I don’t feel a big distinction between
online and offline; it’s all interaction.
25.6% 24.8% 26.4% 23.7% 29.4% 23.6% 23.6% 24.0% 29.7%
Online socializing is for sad,
antisocial types. (Disagree)
57.6% 65.7% 49.4% 51.3% 56.6% 54.1% 59.4% 59.0% 67.8%

Whatever the platform, whether Facebook, Twitter, local community or special interest
forums, there are a lot of the same elements typical of face-to-face socializing:
discussions, opinions, requests for advice, gossip, chitchat, jokes, jibes, gripes and games.
Unlike in most face-to-face interactions, however, social media make it possible to pull in
and share media content there and then, such as images, videos, sounds, news stories and
product information. Anything that’s on the Web, or that can be uploaded to the Web,
can be brought into the social interaction.

What’s more, that Web content isn’t just shared remotely; it’s often shared in person. It
has become increasingly common to see people, especially young people, crowded around
a computer or smartphone screen watching funny, amazing or outrageous videos. An
argument over dinner might be settled by consulting Google on a mobile device. The
boundaries among types of media, entertainment, news, gossip and social phenomena are
increasingly fluid.

Earlier this year, for example, middle-aged talent show contestant Susan Boyle was
catapulted to global fame thanks to hundreds of thousands of people telling friends and
family, “You’ve got to see this.” The YouTube video of her first appearance on the show
has scored more than 78 million views.xiv It started as entertainment on a single TV
channel in the U.K., then became a viral video that spread over the Internet and to TV
shows around the world, becoming a news story in its own right that millions of people
shared with links on social media.


Susan Boyle’s tally is a huge number, but it’s just a fraction of the one billion views a
day, or 11,574 views per second, 694,444 views per minute and 41,666,667 views
per hour that YouTube now scores.xv

As traditional media such as newspapers and TV channels go online and adopt some
of the technologies and techniques of purely social media (e.g., Facebook), they blur
the lines between news and social chat. Those outlets now provide space for registered
users to respond to news items and editorials, which often turns into lively debate.
And they increasingly provide one-button options (“Share” or “E-mail”) to show
someone else the piece on social media platforms.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Convergence rules. With social media it’s impossible to predict whether, when, how,
where and in what forms bits of communication will spread. As most traditional media converge online,

“
communication flows among them and consumers themselves become messengers.

THE RISE OF HYPERLOCALISM

”
I would like to make more friends online that are local that
I could hang out with offline face-to-face.

If social media is a concept most familiar to geeks, techies and marketers, then
hyperlocalism is even more of an “insider” notion. It’s about the sort of new ways of
creating the local awareness and connectedness that virtually disappeared when
consumers stopped walking down Main Street and started relying on TV for their
news.

In the world of cocooning and commuting, consumers were in one of three places: at
home, in transit (typically in a car) or at work. Commutes were getting longer
(because of traffic congestion), working hours were getting longer and homes were
becoming complete entertainment and communications centers. In the world of
cocooning and commuting, it was perfectly possible for things to happen just a block
or two away without anybody in the wider neighborhood knowing.

Social media are making it quick and easy to create connections with people and
businesses in the immediate vicinity. This is happening informally as add-on apps to
services such as Twitter and Flickr enable users to find fellow users near them. It’s
happening as people meet up by chance and swap social media coordinates. It’s
happening more formally as community websites are established, enabling consumers
to bookmark special interests and write about local initiatives.


Technologies are popping up to help aggregate locally relevant information. Services
such as EveryBlock,xvi VillageSoup,xvii Topixxviii and Outside.in track discussions on the
Web and map them to specific locations; they then organize the content by city, state, zip
code, neighborhood, street address, latitude/longitude and discrete place. As hyperlocalism
gains traction, social media commentators see signs of mainstream media getting in on
the action. In October 2009 the Omaha World-Herald Co. announced it had acquired
WikiCity, a community-based social website that serves as an online city guide, providing
information on places, events and people in 22,000 U.S. towns.xix WikiCity lets readers
update their own community pages, giving a bit of a Wikipedia feel.xx

Social media enable people to connect more with each other locally, which helps
strengthen casual relationships and introduce issues of common interest (Who knows
how to install a new printer? What’s happening about that dangerous crossing?). It
provides incentives for people to take a more active interest in their locality, stimulating
conversations, blogs, citizen journalism and local advertising.

The hyperlocal space isn’t just being left to local people and startups. With plenty of
registered users through services such as MyYahoo! and Flickr, Yahoo! has built a strong
position in local services. Google is looking to develop local listing ads as another line of
business. Explaining the concept, the search engine says more than 80 percent of people
look to it for local information; using the LLA facility, advertiser details will show up on
both Google main search and Google Maps.xxi

KEY TAKEAWAY: The Web is worldwide, but its emerging power is hyperlocal. This is the space where
what’s virtual (online) meets what’s tangible (offline), with each reinforcing the other.


ME/MINE: INTENSE EMPHASIS ON SELF
People who spend a lot of time talking and writing about social media sometimes
refer to it as SoMe. How right that is. SoMe (not to be confused with some) is very,
very personal. It puts each individual right at the heart of his or her social media
world.

Social media me/mine is hyperlocalism to the nth degree. Individual consumers can
tailor absolutely everything to their own specific taste: the look, feel and themes of
their social media gadgets (computer, mobile device, phone); the name, look, feel,
themes and content of their blog and their SoMe platform profiles (on Twitter,
Facebook, etc.); the people they connect with; the content feeds they subscribe to; the
playlists they publish; and the reviews they write.

Me/mine is the logical extension of the trend toward personal and personalized that
has dominated thinking for decades now: personal computers, personal digital
assistants, personal trainers, personal coaches, personal finance and, most recently,
personal branding and personalized medicine.

The rising generation born since the 1970s, millennials, is absolutely at home with
digital technology and social media—and apparently takes it for granted that the self
hasn’t always come first. Jean M. Twenge’s book Generation Me comes right out and


says it in the title, going on to explain: “Generation Me has never known a world that put
duty before self and believes that the needs of the individual should come first. This is not
the same thing as being selfish; it is captured, instead, in the phrases we so often hear:
‘Be yourself,’ ‘Believe in yourself,’ ‘You must love yourself before you can love someone
else.’ ”xxii

Whether Twenge and the critics of modern narcissism are right, there’s no doubt social
media put each individual at the heart of his or her media universe and offer a huge
scope for self-promotion.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Social media enable consumers to be more socially collaborative and to share easily
across media types. They also, however, condition users to expect quick responses and clear payoffs; after all,
the next big social media thing is only a click away. The underlying question is always: What’s in it for me?

MORE DARING—BUT EXTREMES GET MORE EXTREME
One of the great benefits of social media is being able to find people with similar
interests and attitudes to one’s own. That can also be one of the big problems; it can
foster polarized opinions, which in turn create political problems.

James A. Thomson, president and CEO of RAND Corp., has said numerous bloggers,
Internet forums, social media, online commentators and talk radio have led to a situation
in the United States in which there is political warfare rather than political debate: “The
proliferation of new, low-cost media, able to aim only at a niche audience, allow people to
hear or to read only what they want to, not exposing them to any challenging thought or
uncomfortable opinion.”xxiii

This is one aspect of the echo-chamber effect of social media. Someone picks up a
comment or a snippet of news they like, passes it to connections who are likely to like it,
and they in turn pass it on. This can easily result in narrow group-think getting narrower
as it feeds on itself.

Social media can also, paradoxically, encourage some decidedly antisocial behavior. When
interactions are mainly online, some participants feel less inhibited than they would if
they were interacting face-to-face, in person. Online, there are no moment-by-moment
nonverbal cues that help keep (most) conversations civil and decent. Words can be
misused or misinterpreted, humor might not be understood as intended and people can
feel they need to express themselves more strongly to make their point or defend their
position.


Agree with the Statement Total Female Male 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65+

I feel less inhibited interacting
electronically than I 42.6% 45.1% 40.1% 39.5% 50.2% 40.0% 47.3% 35.6% 34.7%
do face-to-face.

This so-called cyberdisinhibition can lead consumers to do ill-advised, inappropriate
things such as engaging in flame wars, cyberstalking and posting compromising or
defamatory content that can be damaging to reputations all around. The notorious
YouTube video of a Domino’s Pizza employee is a case in point.

By the same token, a mild-mannered customer such as country singer Dave Carroll
can feel emboldened to take on a major corporation. Setting off on tour in 2008, his
$3,500 guitar was mishandled by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago and
HAS THE ANONYMITY OF badly damaged. After nine months of communications, the airline finally declined to
SOME FORMS OF ELECTRONIC compensate the loss. So Carroll created a music video about the experience, “United
MEDIA LED YOU TO DO ANY OF Breaks Guitars,” and within 10 days had more than 30 unique placements accruing
THE FOLLOWING? 3.2 million views and 14,000 comments.xxiv

Total Female Male 18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65+

Meet new people 48.7% 51.4% 55.6% 48.7% 48.0% 56.0% 55.9% 59.0% 49.2%
Feel empowered to do something
you’d been wanting to
31.5% 29.2% 33.9% 34.2% 33.0% 30.8% 30.3% 32.2% 29.7%
Lash out about or at companies
or their brands
20.0% 15.8% 24.4% 17.1% 20.4% 23.0% 19.3% 18.6% 16.9%


Exactly one-fifth of respondents in the Euro RSCG Worldwide survey had lashed out
about or at companies or their brands thanks to the anonymity of some electronic media.
Almost half (48.7 percent) had met new people, and almost one-third (31.5 percent) had
felt empowered to do something they had been wanting to do.

KEY TAKEAWAY: The more interactions happen online, with no direct offline contact, the more likely they
are to tilt toward extreme behavior. It’s important to blend both online and offline elements.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
FOR BRANDS AND MARKETERS
Embrace the trend, ride the fads. Although it’s important for brands and
marketers to get on top of today’s social media platforms, it’s also important not to get
hung up on them. Consumers can be fickle, and with digital technology it’s easy for them
to switch allegiance. Any of today’s hot social media brands could fall from favor
frighteningly fast if the crowd decides to move on.

The crucial factor is not the specific technologies, which might be fads, but the functional
benefits of social media for consumers. One of the most-prized benefits of the moment is
connectivity with mobility. ISPs are gearing up to implement ubiquitous wireless
broadband such as WiMax and Mi-Fi; location-based services are adding another
dimension of value to mobile devices.

The future of social media is likely to combine sociability, mobility, bandwidth, location
relevance and low cost. These should be on the checklist of all brands looking to join in.

Aim to participate, not dominate. In traditional media, brands have often called
the shots; they’ve certainly claimed the right to grab consumers’ attention with
advertising. In social media, most brands are absolutely peripheral much of the time. If a
brand comes up in an interaction, it might be because they’ve messed up somehow (e.g.,
made a PR blunder), because they’ve made an entertaining video that consumers want to
share or because they have a hot new product.

In social media, consumers are mainly interested in one another, and brands need to be
acutely interested in their leaders—the “prosumers,” or proactive, social media early
adopters who influence other users.

No matter what, a brand has to come into the interaction organically; if the brand tries
to orchestrate an appearance, it risks being seen as a pushy salesman making a pitch at a
party. Rather, brands must figure out creative ways to foster and support the social
interactions that consumers seek online and offline. They must aim to be involved in


interactions rather than be the subject or star of them. And their interactions need to
be “trialogues,” or multi-way exchanges of ideas and opinions among consumers and
brands, which matter now more than ever.

Stop thinking online/offline; start thinking interaction. It’s tempting for
old-school marketers of all ages to think in terms of online and offline, old media and
new media, traditional media and social media, just as some still talk about above the
line, below the line and through the line. In a world where hundreds of millions of
people switch between online and offline interactions many times a day, making a
division between online and offline makes no sense. For brands and marketers, the
watchwords must be “social interaction” by whatever blends of means do the job at
the time.

The “set piece” thinking of the old media world has limited relevance, at best, in an
interactive world of social media where things move and change very fast. Unlike in
the old media world, senior executives now cannot—must not—leave communication
to people lower down in the organization. People throughout corporations have to be
using social media often enough to understand them and their possibilities as
consumers, as real users.

Pay attention to location-specific initiatives. The bigger the corporation or
brand, the greater the tendency for big, remote thinking. This doesn’t play so well with
social media, because the most powerful interactions are those with “local,” face-to-
face qualities.

Typically the challenge for a growing business is how to scale up—to move from
small, hands-on and local to big and hands-off. With social media the challenge is
being able to stay big but scale down and deliver hands-on and local.


FOOTNOTES

i www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/27/jennifer-preston-named-ny_n_208299.html

ii http://scobleizer.com/2007/02/16/what-is-social-media/

iii http://popacular.com/gigatweet/

iv http://popacular.com/gigatweet/analytics.php

v www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/29/end-of-speculation-the-real-twitter-usage-numbers/

vi www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

vii http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wikipedia.org/?metric=uv

viii http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm

ix www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/25/barack-obama-david-plouffe

x http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_presidential_election,_2009

xi www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1905125,00.html

xii www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/16/carter-ruck-abandon-minton-injunction

xiii www.cdc.gov/socialmedia/

xiv www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

xv http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/10/y000000000utube.html

xvi www.everyblock.com

xvii www.villagesoup.com

xviii www.topix.com

xix www.omaha.com/article/20091027/MONEY/710279939

xx www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/omaha-world-herald-rethinking-its-product-buys-hyperlocal-wikicity/

xxi http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=148046

xxii www.generationme.org/aboutbook.html

xxiii www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2009/10/116_52098.html,
www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2009/RAND_WR683.pdf

xxiv http://mashable.com/2009/07/15/united-breaks-guitars/


PHOTO CREDITS
Cover:
creativecommons.org/ianmunroe
Inside front:
creativecommons.org/luc legay
Page 3:
(from left)
creativecommons.org/tata_aka_T; creativecommons.org/tillwe
Page 4:
(clockwise from top)
creativecommons.org/fortes; Google Trends; creativecommons.org/javier.reyesgomez
Page 5:
(from top)
creativecommons.org/luc legay; creativecommons.org/Intersection Consulting
Page 6:
(from top)
creativecommons.org/adamconner; creativecommons.org/Mykl Roventine: Out & About
Page 7:
(from top)
creativecommons.org/yonghokim; creativecommons.org/Daniel Voyager
Page 8:
creativecommons.org/rocksee
Page 9:
creativecommons.org/jonsson
Page 10:
creativecommons.org/Zawezome
Page 11:
(from left)
creativecommons.org/dpstyles™; creativecommons.org/Telendro
Page 12:
(from top)
creativecommons.org/Affiliate; creativecommons.org/andronicusmax
Page 14:
creativecommons.org/Life in LDN
Page 15:
creativecommons.org/wonderferret
Page 16:
creativecommons.org/tiarescott
Inside back:
creativecommons.org/luc legay

MicroDialogue LLC conducted the proprietary quantitative research and analyzed thousands
of verbatims and other conversations across blogs,Twitter and forums for this study.

Social Life and Social Media

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