Twitter? As If!

Sorry Twitter. Teens just aren’t that into you. And Facebook – you’re next.

I just read this article in the Financial Times about how Social Media sites are losing popularity with the young. I’m really not surprised.

I find it weird that anyone ever assumed that teenagers (sometimes called Millennials by marketers) used Twitter. I haven’t seen many teens at all ever on or talking about the service. Twitter is definitely for us old guys. It seems to have a magical appeal for the Gen X-ers (Possibly Gen Y too) and older. Definitely for geeks and for techies. As a matter of fact, my teen (I asked him) says he and his friends don’t use Facebook much at all either and rarely utilize Social Networks, except for MySpace perhaps.

Teens are more about texting, photo sharing (my son claims Photobucket is very popular with his peers) they use and IM (still). Again, except for MySpace, teens seem to want super-fast communication that is limited to access between their friends only (sometimes exclusive of other peers entirely – cliques) and not public (parents or others can’t just search out them and find them there.) MySpace was popular, I think, with teens because it didn’t catch on very much with older people like Facebook did. Also, MySpace was much more customizable than any other Social Newtorking website, which for teens was a bonus letting them express their individuality through colors, backgrounds and pictures but was more of a turn-off to anyone older, seeming a little schlocky.

Twitter is actually too much work for teens, believe it or not and Facebook is too open and static looking. It’s also too popular, especially now and their parents, family, etc. are always requesting to friend them there. I think teens keep Facebook profiles for the family interaction but it’s more of a big Gen X site (and Baby Boomers more and more too.)

Teens like their privacy and individuality at least as it pertains to their social group. They also want to have the perception at least thet they live in their own world. They make up fashions and styles, adopt musical tastes that never fail to offend their parents and speak in an ever more colorful series of slang language. (i.e. Valley Girl talk in the 1980s, Hippie slang from the 1960s or the Beat language of the 1950s?)

Don’t you remember when you were a teenager? Did you go in for anything that you even remotely thought your parents were involved in? Didn’t you actually go out of your way to reject things as passe as soon as the parents got hip to it? Did you want to fly under the radar? Twitter is too popular for them, believe it or not, as is Facebook. IM is quick, private and personal. It can be turned off and hidden from parent as can texting (for the most part).

So I am not surprised to learn that kids aren’t taking to social networks (at least the popular ones) in record numbers as they were before. If I were a youth marketer, I’d be concentrating on iPods, mobile phones, text and IM. That’s where you’ll find the kids – on ever smaller and smaller screens.

Paring Down

By Lon S. Cohen

I’m starting to pare down the number of things I’m involved in. What does this have to do with Social Media? Everything. Just take a look at any of the life stream or control panel type of Social Media applications like Ping.fm or Friendfeed that let you either repost from or post to all of your other social media websites. There’s a million of them. OK more like a hundred, but you get the point.

There’s so many websites to get involved in and they all look so colorful and fun one ends up opening an account on too many and feeling guilty about ignoring them. Have I twittered lately? Am I feeding the Friendfeed beast? Am I commenting back? Did I select a list of songs? Updated my Wish lists? Write a review on Yelp?

Add in my three personal blogs and one blog for work among all my other duties managing the communications at work and I’ve just got too many distractions. (That doesn’t include my freelance writing.) In this economy, you need to be focused and with all the free toys out there on the web, I know that I get distracted. In reality, I’m only using Facebook, Twitter and maybe Friedfeed on a daily basis. I also want to make sure that my work is not taking away from my social life (the IRL one, I mean) and most importantly my family – especially my children. I used to be addicted to the laptop almost 24/7 either chatting, updating, blogging, writing, pitching, managing, consulting, and who knows what else! I’ve given out free advice, written long responses to associates who seek my expertise and then turn them all into a new blog post. I needed to come back to earth.

So I’ve made a conscious effort to pare down my social media, blogging and everything else to what’s really important. I haven’t made an official list (yet) but I do know in the back of my mind what I need to divert my full attention to:

1) Family most importantly my kids.
2) My full time job, which includes all related SM activities.
3) Freelance work that actually pays me money.
4) Looking for more paying work, either full-time or freelance.
5) Freelance that pays me in other ways like exposure and social capital.
6) Social Media including my Twitter obsession.
7) Personal blogging when inspired and when it doesn’t interfere with the above.

I am not advocating giving up the digital life in any way. I am probably becoming better at my digital life by not spreading myself so thin. I’m focusing on one or two endeavors at a time and letting some others that I started—and that only kept up out of some weird guilt for thinking about abandoning—die on the vine, at least for now.

I’ve given up my long form novel that I was researching, my extraneous blogs, my long comments and threaded conversations and most of all my free work. The economy is really bad and it’s looking like it’s not getting better very quickly or any time soon. It’ll be a long slog and to better prepare for what’s ahead, I need a tighter focus.

In good times, I tend to stray with side projects and pursuing endeavors that may or may not lead to a dead end. That’s OK. And I’m not saying in tough economic times, experimentation and innovation should stop either. I’m saying if I’m experimenting, I’d better damn well have a good plan beforehand and I’d better make sure there’s at least a faint light at the end of the tunnel instead of groping around in darkness.

What do you think? Do you have a priority list or have you decided to pare down recently? If so let me know about it.

Geeks Celebrate New Year’s Rocking Eve Style As URL Land Grab Comes Timed Just Right By Facebook

By Lon S. Cohen

True geeks were up to count down the seconds until Facebook opened up its newest feature on Friday night. The ability to grab a vanity URL for your Facebook profile became available at midnight on Friday, June 12th. Curiously, Facebook never instituted the standard of allowing users to sign up with a unique URL of their choosing. I can only speculate that when the service started as a way for university students to keep in touch with each other and share photos and status updates, that the user base was small enough that this was not a factor thought to be programmed into the original application. Now with hundreds of millions of users across the globe and with other Social Networking services long offering the ability to customize the URL for your account, Facebook decided it was time to play catch up and pack on this particular feature. Where before the link to my Facebook profile was an obscure computer generated string of characters, On Friday night I was able to snag my name as my profile web address: www.facebook.com/loncohen.

There was excitement in the air around the geek community as customized URLs allow for people to quickly share profiles in a logical way and gives the service cache once reserved for websites like Twitter. On Twitter I share my handle by telling people to look me up as @obilon. Most people are conditioned to recognize the @ symbol from email. Twitter users adopted the feature of using the @ symbol to alert another user that they were speaking to them or replying to something they Tweeted. As Twitter gained in popularity, the @ symbol became the de facto way to refer someone specifically to your twitter account leaving off the extraneous www.twitter.com/

Now that Facebook has made it possible for users to grab unique user names, the service can share the same cool kind of shorthand. When you tell someone to friend you on Facebook you only need to tell them you’re /loncohen or whatever your unique handle happens to be instead of sending them a request specifically or a complicated url (which no one ever bothers to remember.)

It also will make Facebook profiles easier to share on paper. Printing it out on a business card or advertisement like so:

Twitter: @obilon
Facebook: /loncohen

As I mentioned before, we’ve been conditioned to remember and share specific user generated handles on the internet from email addresses to AIM profile names. This comes on the heels of Facebook offering businesses and celebrities the option of moving their very limited Facebook Group pages to more versatile Facebook Fan pages that act more like regular profile pages. Fan pages with more than 1000 friends were also offered the opportunity to select a unique URL. This is a strategically shrewd business move for Facebook still struggling to monetize an enormous user base. I can only imagine the possibilities that customized URLs will offer large businesses like say Starbuck when they can now put in print that you can friend them on Facebook at /Starbucks. It’s harder to refuse the Facebook advertising salespeople when come calling about custom marketing programs when your company has millions of friends on their Social Networking website.

While some specific people’s custom urls were pre-reserved by Facebook, I don’t know yet if they also captured many brand name URLs for the specific purpose of offering them (or selling them) to the brand owners – think /Apple or /Microsoft, although a rumor on Twitter last night claimed valuable custom URLs like /iPod were still available.

The entire process seemed to have gone smooth for Facebook. Mashable.com reported on their Mashable.com/chat live from Facebook headquarters in an exclusive by Ben Parr that within the first three minutes of launch 200,000 user names had been reserved and that within the first hour they tallied about 1,000,000! So while the true geeks waited with baited breath for the precise moment, about 400 uber-geeks (myself proudly included) were crowded around the live Mashable chat with video commentary by Mr. Mashable himself the always charming and way too young and handsome, Pete Cashmore playing Dick Clark along with the always lovely Jennifer Van Grove and straight-man utility-player Ben Parr reporting from an empty room at Facebook HQ with 1970s furniture and the sounds of cheers, music, shouting and even some bagpipes (which Pete said was in honor of him, being from Scotland and all of course) emanating from an unseen room of engineers off somewhere behind the walls giving the entire scene with Ben an eerie feeling that he was somehow embedded inside the building and spying on the whole affair without permission through a hole in the wall. At other times Ben ran off to record video or audio and bringing back reports at Pete’s bequest looking like the set up in an old SNL skit. In any sense, the crew of Mashable put on a great show that spanned the globe from Scotland to California. They did it all in earnest, covering the entire event from the pre-show to the 10-second countdown all the way through the after party. I must admit the trio brought a very sparkling air to the event that probably made it more entertaining and exciting than it really should have been otherwise. Even Mashable COO Adam Hirsch popped into the chat for a little while, forlorn at the option he was forced to pick for his own vanity url. (My personal favorite Mashable.com liaison, Sharon Feder was missing from the videos but I heard she was in the chat room somewhere.)

The next day I heard very little in the way of buyer’s remorse at the URLs people chose. For the most part it seemed to be a rousing success. Only time will tell how this all pans out. For now it looks like it was a great move on Facebook’s part to offer this feature now especially after migrating Groups to Fan pages a short time ago. It also served as great buzz for the monster Social Networking website probably exceeding their expectations.

Crowdsourcing Caterers In Buffalo

By Lon S. Cohen

People are using Social Media naturally in ways that more “Savvy” Social Media people use it deliberately, like crowdsourcing.

Unknowingly, my sister crowdsourcing on Facebook the other night. I was sitting at home and I got a text message. It was my sister who happens to live in Buffalo and her Facebook status was just updated. Putting aside the wonder at how connected our devices can be (Facebook status to SMS on my cell phone) so I can keep in touch with family who live miles away, it occurred to me that we had reached a real turning point in Social Networking. People who use Social Networking websites for ordinary reasons like sharing photos, life statuses, having conversations and sharing links are now using them for more extraordinary things, like crowdsourcing.

The text read that my sister’s facebook status was updated and that she’s looking for caterers in Buffalo. It was a small request. One you’d make every day to friends and associates if you were throwing a party and didn’t know where to go to have it catered. But the immensity of something so small really hit me. In the past she might call a few friends to ask or ask some coworkers the next morning for suggestions. She might assemble a list of friends and family in Buffalo and email them with the question. Sure, she could look it up in a phone book or do a web search or she might have even looked it up on Yelp! or the local equivalent perhaps on a local newspaper’s business listings section on their website to see what people round town rated and commented on some catering places.

As we know, there’s still a lot to be said for a personal recommendation from someone you know and trust. Businesses spend a lot of time and money making sure that their brand is more well known and adored than the competition. If three people you trust tell you to use Bob and Francesca’s Caterers then you’d probably use them. Your friends may have a million reasons they suggested Bob and Francesca’s Caterers. Maybe they used them personally and liked the service. Maybe they went to a party where Bob and Francesca catered the event. Or maybe they just hear Bob and Francesca’s Caterers on the radio and see their ads in the newspapers all the time so they think they must be the best. Surfice it to say, we may be aware of the advertising ourselves but when a trusted associate confirms what we’ve been hearing, it just reinforces the message that much more.

So when my sister puts up her status message asking for a caterer in Buffalo a whole slew of interactions comes into play. They network may reinforce what she already thinks she knows—that Bob and Francesca’s Caterers are the best in Buffalo. Or they may make brand new suggestions. My sister might come away with two or three businesses and then call, visit or do further research to narrow it down to her first choice. Whatever that choice may be whether it’s price, location, availability or quality or some combination getting on that short list is imperative.

There are two lessons to take way from this. First is that it’s not just the media savvy and technophiles doing the crowdsourcing any more. It’s your sister from Buffalo or your cousin from Philly. Or even your grandfather! The second is that if you are a business and you want to get onto that short list you need to get your name out there. The traditional advertising route works. So does being the best at what you do. But since your customers are now crowdsourcing for your name on Facebook (and MySpace and Twitter and…) don’t you think you need to be there too? Not just as billboard or a place holder for your contact information but really engaged with your past, present and future customers.

My Social Media Grandpa

My grandpa is now on Facebook.

Let me explain who my grandfather is. He’s a World War II veteran. He plays the horses at the track. He used to be a cab driver in Queens. He’s the biggest Yankee fan you’ve ever seen and has been around for almost every championship they ever played. He taught me how to throw a baseball. He is retired and lives with my grandma in Fort Lauderdale.

He’s also 87 years old.

And, he has a Facebook profile.

Which he uses.

Almost every day.

He is not your typical Facebook demographic. Whenever I overhear conversation between people who still think Facebook is for young people who understand all that computer stuff, I laugh, thinking of an octogenarian in South Florida sitting in his little air-conditioned condo at his laptop messing around with his profile picture.

He’s not a pro. He still uses his status updates to talk to specific individuals like my cousin or my mother. (Yes, my mother is also on Facebook, which brings up a whole slew of Jewish cyber-guilt jokes.) He hasn’t figured out quite how to share links or photos. He’s also not joining any groups or causes anytime soon. But he’s staked his ground. He’s a member. Read the rest of this entry »