The Graying of Social Media

A popular myth about social media is that it's a fancy of youth, something endemic in the teen set but largely ignored by those well past their college years. If there was any doubt that this is a fallacy, read the latest Pew Research report.

According to their numbers, 47% of American adults have used some kind of social networking site, close to double the number recorded in 2008. The average age of users has shifted up from 33 to 38. On first blush this may not seem like much, but it's significant: Those 50 to 65 accounted for only 9 percent of social network users in 2008 and today they account for 20 percent of users. The numbers tripled for those 65 and over.

There's no question that the Early Adopters of social media were largely young, but we've long moved past the early stages of adoption. Social media is a part of the online landscape for most everybody.

What astonished a jaded marketeer like me was the response to the question “most people can be trusted.” Be honest – you'd expect a healthy majority to lean towards a “Nah” on this question – and indeed there is a majority, but far less than I'd thought. Forty-one percent of adults are trusting, and this actually increases slightly to 45% for social media users (non-Internet users are a gloomy bunch, with only 27% being trusting).


What emerges is that active users of social media are far more engaged, open and have more social support that non-users. Stating the painfully obvious, social media is about being social. It's about sustaining existing relationships (only 9% of Facebook “friends” have never met in person) and rekindling old friendships.

The implications for marketing pros are clear. First, the days when social media was a playground for consumer-facing youth brands are over. But we've known this for a while. What may be more important is that social networks are focused around trusted relationships that preexist. For marketing to engage with these close-knit communities will require creating a persona – a brand – that can feel familiar, that is already a part of the extended social network, and that can instinctively be trusted.

Secrets and Lies

It's no secret that there's no secrets anymore. We all live untidy online lives and leave behind a trail – little pieces of information, small actions, and fragmented facts – that others can too easily follow to reconstruct a whole picture of Who, What and Where.

Secrets come in many flavors. Google's Eric Schmidt boasts about his company's ability to identify our predilections, better to serve content and advertising. An amazing 5% of the US population was a victim of identity theft in 2009, accounting for $54 billion in fraud. Popular computer repair outfit The Geek Squad have become the new best friend of the Feds, discovering and reporting illicit content on computer hard-drives.

The newest fertile ground for uncovering our secret selves is social media. Technorati calls social media a “playground” for ID thieves. A friend who advises High School kids on how to stay out of trouble has one big admonishment: if you think it's risky, don't photograph it, don't post it, don't IM it. Everything is evidence. Loose lips used to sink ships; now they sink careers, reputations, and lives.

Social media have long been active in this newly capitalized muckracking. Twitter, Facebook and the rest need to make money, and this means that they need to infiltrate our online identities, and use or sell the information they gather. This can be as innocent as matching anonymous demographic information to placed advertising, or as nefarious as data mining exquisite details about our finances and friends.

And now, social media metrics tools are being put to the same end, according to the Wall Street Journal. The Journal reports that Nielsen and its social media business BuzzMetrics opened an account at PatientsLikeMe, then began to siphon off information about participants on discussion groups. So, even if social media sites themselves provide safeguards or permission barriers around your personal information, monitoring and measurement tools can still scrape data about you.

It may be too easy to find our secrets, but it is often impossible to isolate the truth of things. In this month's Atlantic magazine, Michael Hirschorn reports on how online discourse allows all sides to invent their own set of facts, and that this has pernicious consequences. Twelve percent of Americans believe their president is a Muslim, according to the Pew Research Center. An amazing 41 percent of Republicans believe Obama was foreign-born, which if true would make him ineligible to be president. Opinion has always blurred facts, but increasingly it's impossible to take anything on face value – even so-called news.

In an old post I'd borrowed the old joke, “on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog” to illustrate how easy it is to mask reality online, and how vital it is to establish authenticity and source credibility. This is true, but things are also more complicated: It's hard to reconcile that our personal identities – the facts of who we are- are being strip mined, yet at another level it's all too easy to propagate patent lies.

There is so much information today, and who controls it matters.