“Consumers are now spending more than one-half of their waking day with media” according to a 2010 study conducted by Ipsos. Both digital and TV media consumption are increasing. People are not replacing media, they are layering on additional media.

Because the majority of the US population consumes multiple forms of internet based technology, the US has become a truly digital society, and it’s at the foundation of our existence: 46.8% Smartphone penetration (based on 3rd quarter 2011), approximately 160 million Facebook users, over 22 billion searches (Comscore), and while people still love their TV 80% of people have watched video over the Internet (Accenture), and 56% of US adults surf the web while watching TV according to Harris Research.

Teens check out YouTube with their Twitter feed open to make it easy for them to share videos and gain social currency. They posting/unveiling story lines on Twitter and Facebook, while they are watching TV programs in real time provide them with social currency.

Facebook and Peanut Butter and Jelly

We anticipate that Facebook will become as commonplace as peanut butter and jelly amongst younger kids. Kids around eight and nine years old are already getting on Facebook. Because there is limited quantitative digital media research around younger kids, we look to mom based discussion groups on Café Mom, as well as watching kids within our own families, to provide insight into what is going on.

Younger kids desire to be on Facebook. Mom is the gatekeeper, and we see two philosophical camps on Facebook usage (as well as digital usage in general): Permissive and Positive and Heavily Guarded.

Permissive and Positive:

See it as a way for their child to have relationships with family that is important to mom (especially cousins that live out of state). Keeping in touch with relatives builds the relationship mom wants them to have with their family:

Café Mom Discussion:

“My aunt allows her daughter, who is 8, to have a facebook page, but everything is restricted so no one can see it unless they are her friends, and my aunt monitors who she is friends with, which is mostly all family who lives out of state”

Heavily Guarded:

These parents see social media as very threatening to their children. They are also much more restrictive than other types of parents in terms of allowing broader digital usage beyond Facebook.

Café Mom Discussion:

“My 8 almost 9 yo wanted a Facebook account and his dad and I said no way in hell.”

Touchscreen Love

Touchscreens are having a profound effect on toddlers as well as school age kids. If you’ve ever witnessed these tikes with the iPhone and the apps, you will see that they are mesmerized by it. They have utter awe and fascination for the behavior/attributes of the touchscreen and how the games and activities work within this creative structure. In addition, they can figure it out by watching their parent or on their own-and this is amazing the grown ups. It’s making grown ups realize that they have been underestimating how a child can think and learn at such a young age.

The realization of childrens’ instant captivation while using this technology is going to lead to profound effects for children over the next several years because it has great benefit to moms, educators and marketers. Touchscreen Love will:

-Lead marketers and device manufacturers to invent new products for kids.

-Lead moms to buy touchscreen devices for their children because it keeps their kids occupied while educating them at the same time.

-Lead educators to use devices that are similar to iPhone/iPod Touch because they see how captivation and fun leads to a child’s increased learning of concepts.

The last point leads us to the next trend: Smarter than you think I am

Smarter Than You Think I Am

Contemporary educators, like Sugata Mitra, that are experienced in technology are identifying just how brilliant kids are.

Via studies in third world countries, where there is a lack of teachers, educators and technologists are uncovering that kids can educate themselves with the mix of engaging technology and curiosity. Some interesting content around this exists in Fast Company’s article The Real Smart Phone Revolution: How Tech is Making Kids Smarter Everywhere. Sugata Mitra’s presentation at TED is a very compelling piece that clearly showcases the Smarter Than You Think I Am trend.

Digital systems (whether they be the menu of an iPhone, a game application, or an Internet browser) allows for trial and error engagement without the threat of breaking the system. (Mom runs the risk of losing her contact data and the child dropping the device—but there is not danger of breaking the technology) and this means kids can try and try again to figure it out: what does it do, what can it do-essentially uncovering things they are interested in.

These are just a few trends that we’ve identified. For more trends, please email us.

Digital has become a primary way that we engage with our world. Therefore creating user experience that is intuitive, seamless, and delightful are now very important factors that contribute to creating positive brand perceptions on a mass scale.

There is a plethora of ways that people find, are exposed to, and experience a brand in the digital space. Here’s one straightforward example of a poorly designed user experience flow across touch points: A person liked what they saw on a television ad. Their mobile device was in hand. They searched for the brand/product, but they couldn’t find it or couldn’t find it easily. When they found the site it wasn’t optimized for mobile. Instead they received the dreaded Flash requirement warning, an extremely slow site, a poor navigation experience, or all of these.

At this point, the user is either mildly to greatly annoyed by the fact that they couldn’t explore what they wanted to explore in the way they wanted.A range of potential thoughts about the brand are entering the user’s mind: the brand is difficult, the brand isn’t smart, isn’t fun, doesn’t get me, etc. These perceptions go against personality defining statements in most brand briefs. Therefore, this scenario is not only a disappointing experience for the user but a disappointment in the brand.

Best in class user experience is not being championed enough by marketing people. Marketers spend millions of dollars on TV campaigns to create positive brand perceptions, but in a series of digital moments, they greatly diminish the positive equity they created in a person’s mind about the brand.

There are a couple of reasons for the lack of user experience championing. First, it’s not part of their habit of thinking. Marketers are still bound by the thought patterns of historic marketing/advertising practices. Second, the communication silos (politics) of big companies prevent seamless, brilliant consumer ecosystem flow. The result of this is a competitive gap and an opportunity. The company that can overcome, or is designed to close this gap, will be greatly rewarded.

So why is Twitter a gateway for mobile marketing?

• User’s want their Twitter updates wherever and whenever they go. They extend their Twitter feeds to their SMS messaging or other mobile Twitter  management apps like Tweetie.
• People want ongoing communication from a company if it’s beneficial to them. This is especially true of business people who love when important updates are immediately brought to the surface. For instance, if you’re in the marketing business, the NielsenWire updates are extremely beneficial to receive, via Twitter SMS, because their message frequency isn’t annoying and the information they publish may provide important fodder for your next meeting.

It is essential that a brand/product have something beneficial to say. Without a compelling message strategy the media gateways won’t be effective. If your company does not have something truly beneficial to offer—Twitter is not a tool that will benefit your company.

Twitter should be respected for the power that it posses as a technology that is accelerating in its mission to achieve critical mass. Exactly how it will manifest for marketers in the future depends on how people use it.

The number of moms on MySpace far surpass teens on MySpace:

• Moms on MySpace: 18MM Uniques

• Teens 15-17 on MySpace: 6MM Uniques

Moms are are highly involved on MySpace:

• 9 billion pages consumed.

• 3.6 billion minutes each month.

Rapid growth of Café Mom:

• 1.5MM+ moms

Moms with older children are active on social networks:

• “More than four out of ten women in their forties surveyed in October by SheSpeaks had a social networking profile. And over 70% of women with children ages 13-17 had talked about products on social networks, compared with all responding women.” eMarketer, Dec. 11, 2008

Moms drive spending:

• 1.7 trillion according to Ketchum

Moms mobilize, vocalize and create action within social networks:

• An interesting example of this is when breastfeeding moms protested Facebook removing pictures of mothers breastfeeding their babies. They used both the tools of the social network and offline tools to effectively make their point.

• Excerpt from Palo Alto Online News article: “Breastfeeding mothers who claim that Facebook is treating them like pornographers are staging a “nurse-in” on Saturday, Dec. 27, at the company’s headquarters at 156 University Ave., Palo Alto. Mothers International Lactation Campaign (MILC), a group of “lactivists,” are staging the 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. protest because Facebook has been removing pictures of the mothers breastfeeding their babies. MySpace and Facebook have removed the images on the grounds that they are obscene, according to Heather Farley, a Provo, Utah, mom and protest organizer.”

Moms influence other moms on social networks:

• Moms’ friends will tend to be other moms

• Moms influence their friends with communication that is spread via their daily usage activities: email, pictures, blog posts, discussion via groups

• If moms want to rant or rave about a product, their friends are an attentive, active audience

• There has been some initial research that correlates power-blogger moms as being highly involved on social networks.

When you take all of these factors into consideration, it makes sense to explore activity within social networks as part of your marketing activity toward moms.

I’ve been providing formal online recommendations for mom brands such as Kraft, Barilla Pasta, and Pedia-Lax. For a complimentary consulting session, send a short list of some of your marketing challenges to jenni@weluvdigital.com.

A qualitative social network panel identifies insights that can specifically deliver on MySpace’s “secrets” to activating the “Momentum Effect”, as written in their Never Ending Friending study. If you are not familiar with “Never Ending Friending A Journey into Social Networking” study here is a recap of the secrets:

Secret #1: “Your brand is a persona. The name of the game in SN value creation for both consumer and brand is simply recognizing the symbiotic relationship between marketer and consumer…downloads, tools and viral elements all must embody the brand persona.”

Secret #2: “Give them a reason to talk about it.”

Secret #3: “Give the consumer a chance to realize his or her dream/fantasy.”

Our process is rooted in online anthropology. We analyze the daily usage within the panel, expressions on their profile page, expressions on other areas of the social network, and conduct one-to-one dialog via email.

Their Daily Usage
Understand how your target audience segment uses the tools within a social network site. By looking at this on a personal level, versus simply reviewing statistics from Myspace or Facebook, you will determine which tools you should implement and, more important, you will identify an insight that will allow you to create an interesting usage scenario around that tool that aligns with your brand/product and naturally weaves into your audience’s usage pattern.

What’s important to them?
By reviewing: their profile page, groups they’ve joined, discussion that is taking place, subjects of their blogs, etc, you can determine what topics in life are meaningful to them. It’s a cross between a focus group and an ethnographic study. By identifying meaningful topics you can create compelling social media tactics.

By identifying these insights, and aligning them with your brand or product, you can move the brand/product toward a more intimate zone in the consumer’s mind versus being in the public zone.

As marketers, we do a lot of talk about the importance of relationships with consumers. Social networking puts your brand/product to the relationship to test: How much effort and commitment are you willing to put in to creating a “deep relationship” with a consumer. If your brand/product isn’t willing to do what’s necessary, it will maintain in the public zone of consumers.

I currently create research panels for clients such as Kraft and Western Union, and apply the findings to create meaningful social network campaigns. If you would like to further understand this social media strategy planning and apply it to your brand or product, please contact me at jenni@weluvdigital.com or 323-828-8137.

General Usage Findings
The Myspace research development and Facebook research development has revealed an overall consistency across both social networks, in regards to why panelists visit their account on a daily basis and what they do on it (Note: Panelists are visiting their accounts 30-100+ times a month):

Most Noted Reasons That Panelists Visited Their Account:

• They want to find out if anything was happening on their account. “To check on things, any new notifications, etc.” and respond to these.
• Because the social network informed them they had activity on their account, via an email to their non social network email account. Most common and frequent activities on the account are friend requests, comments, new messages, and bulletins.

Other Noted Reasons That Panelists Visited Their Account:

• “Update profile” (Myspace and Facebook: new profile picture, status, updated information, etc.)
• “Find band pages/music” (Myspace specific)
• “Find music venue pages to get concert date information” (Myspace specific)
• “Had to contact a friend and try to get cubs tickets” (Myspace specific)
• “To post a bulletin” (Myspace specific)
• “Bored” (Facebook specific)
• “I wanted to follow up on my Scrabulous game” (Facebook specific)
• “Searched for long lost friends” (Facebook specific)

What They Do:

A core set of usage activities emerged within myspace and facebook panelists: respond to emails, send emails, look at wall postings, read bulletins, post bulletins, address friend requests, read/make comments, look at updated profiles, look at friends’ pages, respond to invites, read comments/make comments, commenting to photos.

These set activities seem to be initiated by:

• Notifications and emails from the social networks informed panelists of the activity on their account. These act as a to-do list for panelists.
• Newsfeeds: They provide a “to do lists” for panelists.
• Indication of new messages on their profile page gives them a starting point if they are “checking in” unaided.

Once they addressed these things that “needed to be done” on their account they did not tend to surf other real estate or applications or add applications as part of a daily usage pattern.

Other Usage Findings

• Facebook panelists used the “events” tool when they are planning an event. Panelists responded to the invites generated by this tool.
• Some Myspace primary users remarked that they prefer Facebook’s event’s application because it’s much easier to use versus myspace’s event creator.
• Myspace user panelists had high instances of posting bulletins. Some myspace panelists noted this many times as their favorite feature of the day.
  • There were not high instances of facebook panelists posting on The Wall.
• There were many incidences of photo posting and commenting to photos on both social networks.
• There were instances of uploading mobile photos.
• Some Myspace panelists listened to music on their profile page and many changed their profile song on a regular basis.
  • Facebook panelists did not indicate these activities.

How Should Advertisers Act On These Findings:

• Ensure that the brand message is encountered throughout the daily usage activities to drive brand awareness.
• Create new ways to involve the brand within the daily user activities.
• Create ways to be a leisure activity within social networking, because social networking is a leisure activity for panelists in addition to staying connected with friends.
• Have presence in music and music related promotions in myspace.
• Consider supporting local bands as well as major bands. Supporting and designing promotions around local bands may be more effective than designing promotions around large corporate bands.
• Consider creating branded tools that make it more fun and easier to consume and organize their music and music lifestyle.
• Pioneer new music tools on facebook.
• Create new photo tools that make it more fun to share and engage with photos.
• Consider print services for mobile photo uploads–it is likely that they don’t have a hard copy of their favorite mobile images.

These insights guide social media strategy planning and the supporting social media tactics. If you would like specific insights for your company from a social network specialist, please contact jenni@weluvdigital.com or 323-828-8137.

* What are the insights for social networking usage? How do they use on a daily basis?
* How are users incorporating facebook applications into their life?
* What do they like and dislike about applications?
* How are facebook users different from myspace users?
* Why do they choose Myspace over Facebook?
* How are people are using both Facebook and Myspace in conjunction?
* How can the identified insights contribute to campaign development?

Here’s a little bit about the Facebook research and Myspace research panel:
It consists of women in their twenties, most are in college or grad school. They live in the Chicago area (to help keep the study more representative of the nation as a whole versus skewed to the coasts). For now, the study will focus on women in college due to the time involved with managing multiple segments. The methodology: Each time panelists use their myspace/facebook account they email me, via their social network, responses to questions. In addition, data achieved via analyzing the newsfeed, friend subscription, and profile activity will be overlayed.

I’m also offering this panel to marketers, as well as other panels, as a way for marketers to obtain feedback from their target audience segments. If a company is planning a Myspace campaign or a Facebook campaign, a social media research panel is a smart tool to utilize when planning social media tactics.

If you are in need of a social network marketing expert, please contact  jenni@weluvdigital.com or 323-828-8137.

Developers and software companies tend to take a holistic view of the digital ecosystem, and there are conferences and blogs dedicated to this topic. However, they don’t discuss, in depth, the fact that marketing communication opportunities and issues exist within the digital ecosystem. To identify and address these, a corporate marketing lead needs to take a holistic approach and view their marketing activities as part of a digital ecosystem. By applying their marketing lens to the digital marketing ecosystem, profits can be maximized. I believe this process of defining a corporate marketing ecosystem should become a new layer of optimization within corporate marketing.

To begin optimization of the digital marketing organisms, within a digital ecosystem, marketers need to become digital ecologists. They need to study the relationship between all of the digital marketing organisms and their digital and human environments.

To begin this study, digital marketing ecologists need to have a comprehensive understanding of how the digital organisms currently operate within the framework of the digital ecosystem. As a start, two different schematics, and correlating analysis, need to be created:

• Create a schematic that outlines all digital organisms and map how they connect to each other.
• Outline all offline communications, and overlay how these affect all of the digital organisms.

Once the schematics have been developed, a comprehensive understanding of how the digital marketing organisms operate can be achieved, and an in-depth analysis can take place. Identification of opportunities and issues will emerge, and digital ecosystem optimization can begin.

For a digital strategy consultant that understands how to assess and optimize the digital marketing ecosystem, please contact jenni@weluvdigital.com or 323.828.8137