Twitter and Generation Y

I attended a Social Media conference on Saturday.   One of the talks was from entrepreneur and social media enthusiast, Jonathan Kochis, and he discussed the emerging popularity of Twitter.   What age group do you think Twitter is most popular?  One would suspect the Generation Y (people born between 1980 and 1995) crowd, because they were the early adopters of popular social media websites such as Facebook and MySpace.    However, the latest surveys here and here show that the Generation X (people born between 1964 to 1979) crowd were the ones driving the recent Twitter phenomenon.

Mr. Kochis explained how youth interact with social media.  He mentioned several insights from a report from the MacArthur Foundation, which studied youth and their online behaviors.   Some of the insights included: young adults and teenagers tend to have no patience, low reading and research skills compared to Generation X adults.   Generation Ys mostly use the internet to connect, to share and to make plans with friends.  They also use these tools to maintain friendships rather than find new ones.  Whereas, Generation X adults tended to use the internet for research and for work.   They also use the social media tools to organize events, issues and causes.  Making new business and professional contacts as well as promoting oneself and their work are used more often with Generation X than Generation Y.

Twitter is a great tool to organize events, to make new business contacts and to promote oneself.  It is also mostly text-based (140 characters or less).  None of these attributes attract the Generation Y crowd.  Twitter can be used to attract and maintain weak ties to people.   Random people who may use the Twitter search to find keywords can add random users.  The Generation Y crowd seeks to maintain friendships, and there is a need to find tools that strengthen these strong ties.  Facebook, IM (e.g. MSN Messenger, Adium, etc.)  and SMS texting are all very personal and very direct.

What are your thoughts on this?  Do you agree with this analysis?

Augmented Reality

On Monday evening, I attended a speech by Tom Purves about Augmented Reality.  It was quite a thought-provoking talk.  Click above the video to view a demonstration of Augmented Reality.  I have written about mobile technology and how it will displace internet as a popular media.

What was interesting about Mr. Purves talk was that Augmented Reality would enhance awareness, tacit knowledge, wisdom and discovery through serendipity.  However, it would obsolesce the desktop web, newspapers, iPods, guidebooks, paper maps, introductions to people and privacy.   As shown clearly in the video, Augmented Reality flips into “Batman” vision when pushed to extreme.  While at the same time it returns the written word, gestures, lore and gossip to the forefront.

Augmented Reality on one hand can potentially enhance relationships as well as facilitate information flows, but on the other hand, are there certain groups it marginalizes or perhaps it empowers?  Mr. Purves had  posed at interesting thought, who benefits from augmented reality?

Brands vs Consumers, State Control vs Opposition, Police vs Criminals, Developed Countries vs Developing Countries, The Center vs The edge elements of society, Extroverts vs Introverts, Old vs Young and e-government vs e-Anarchy.

This new technology could be the evolution of web 2.0.  With augmented reality, it changes the advertising model completely.  Advertising will be used to enhance the user’s experience and to help the consumer with what they want.  Leland Maschmeyer, a prominent Account Planner, brilliantly used a metaphor that described the old versus the new advertising approach.

As the advertising model is flipped, there is much opportunity that can be done to better engage with consumers in this Augmented Reality.  I believe consumers will only increase their power versus the marketers because commercial content will have a more fierce competitor which will be user-generated content. This Augmented Reality will become a stronger filter than a TiVo or Ad Block Plus.  This filter not only applies to TV or Computers, but anywhere especially in the offline world.

Marketers and Advertisers toolkit

Hello Everyone,

For the last few months, I have been trying to learn as much as possible about Account Planning and anything subjects to do with advertising. For more on it read here. I have made a ten minute video summarizing and synthesizing all the materials I have been reading.  Unfortunately, ten minutes is not much time to discuss everything I have learned.  This is only an brief overview of the ideas I have researched.   Depending on the demand, I may or may not release additional videos on what I have learned.

If you are curious, check it out:

My presentation without audio.

Here is my presentation with audio.   Here is another site that my presentation with audio is on.