Last week I spoke at the She’s Connected Conference in Toronto, about marketing to and with millennial moms. Here are the slides.
Irksome Mobile Tech Habits
May 24, 2010 By 14 Comments
Two new studies in the news last week about mobile phones, both focused on how the devices prove irritating to people in our immediate vicinity.
Textiquette
The teen who must consistently tap out SMS to friends day and night is a frustration to parents and teachers alike, but as author and psychology professor Larry D. Rosen explains, the kids can’t help it. In fact he suggests that, having grown up digital and constantly connected to their circle of friends, multitasked parallel conversations are a norm of everyday life for millennials. “From a purely behavioral point of view, we are looking at a generation that can’t not text,” he says. Other researchers call it connected e-presence, a kind of ambient accessibility that appeals not just to teens but increasingly to older generations of on-the-go cell phones users as well.
While this explains our tolerance for and the appeal of texting, it doesn’t change what experts call “the other people factor.” This refers to the fact that when someone gives you their continuous partial attention it is both humbling and even supremely annoying. And again, it’s not just the kids who cannot not text. In today’s corporate culture, take a peek at any boardroom meeting and you’ll see that “the way people use their phones has taken rudeness to new heights,” comments Stephen Overell in a column for the BBC. Though admittedly, Overell adds, it’s part of a culture in which “we like our 24-hour rolling news, our always-on connections.”
Texting netiquette guides suggest strict rules for times when it is thumbs off! Yet surveys show that “interrupting a meal, a trip to the bathroom, or even a romantic moment in bed to fire off a text is fast becoming the norm,” for many users.
Halfalogues
Also in the news, a study by researchers at Cornell University on why listening to someone talk to another person on a mobile phone is so irritating. They found that being subjected to half of a conversation (a halfalogue) gets on our collective nerves because “the brain has to work twice as hard to understand the conversation and fill in the blanks, requiring more attention and making it harder to shut out.”
It is always a challenge to block out an overheard phonecall, most especially in the case of the LOUD TALKER, a phenomenon researchers call yell hell!
Seems mobile communications technology is one of those paradoxical scientific developments that enriches our lives while introducing wrinkles, new problems, and in the case of mobile telephony, new degrees of cultural cohesion and disturbance.
tipsy texting
April 20, 2010 By 8 Comments
News this week from The Chronicle of Higher Ed that digital creatives from The University of Florida and Santa Fe College, launched a new website, aggregating and rating text messages students receive while partying. GenY user ratings will determine which US campus earns the proud title of No. 1 party place via the new Party School Texts service. Inspired by Texts From Last Night, this site operates to collect and categorize text messages based on location.
Not unlike FML, Chatroulette and the Bathroom Stall Facebook app, the anonymity of TFLN encourages and accounts for the vulgarity, hateful slurs, and trash-talk of much posted content, and PST appears to be on the same path. Of course, activity online is not quite as “anonymous” as many would imagine, and posting vulgar comments online can have serious repercussions if an administrator decides to retrace the digital footprints.
However while TFLN is well-established with branded mobile iphone and Blackberry apps, PST is not (yet) quite as slick—the student developers explain that their intent was not to compete with TFLN but instead to amuse themselves.
The phenomenon of publicizing drunk texting is part of a long-established trend in college humor fueled by the clever, sarcastic, profane, and grotesque. Yet as participants compete for attention and ratings, desperate to shock and amuse, the tone of these sites becomes less clever and funny. Instead we see the rapid devolution of sites like FML and its spinoffs into realms of ever-more sick and strange contributions. Jumping the shark, as it were.
Or perhaps not, but instead, a cross-platform migration? Last fall Geek Sugar reported that Texts From Last Night was about to be be made into a TV show by Sony. And from texting to television to t-shirts, a line of fashionable and funny apparel is launched to remind us “friends don’t let friends drunk text.”
There are of course many mobile apps to encourage smartphone users to drink and be entertained by their own and others’ digital intoxications. It’s easy to find bartender recipes, alcohol-branded social networks, boozy gameverts, and even apps to help prevent drunk texting and the risks of SMS morning-after remorse.
GenY social shoppers opt for SMS vs. Facebook
March 28, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Interesting little (unscientific) study profiled in The New York Times asked 100 girls shopping at the mall how they alert their friends to sales, via Facebook or texting? The result: 78% chose texting, and only 5% used Facebook. That’s a pretty lopsided survey result—certainly worth considering as a pilot for a carefully planned and expanded market research initiative.
Not exactly news that the millennials are hooked on text. But what’s interesting about this little poll is that until now researchers suggested that GenY was equally addicted to Facebook. And no one has been asking teens exactly how they use the two communication channels differently, as part of understanding how digital natives’ real-time web connections fuel social shopping trends. As a kind of organic social advertising, these trusted referrals spread promotions far and wide via word-of-web buzz. And as a form of mobile marketing, the P2P text messages are obviously far more popular than mobile couponing or any form of SMS pushed to teens’ phones from retailers themselves.
This poll serves as a textbook case illustrating how our social graphs effectively filter for noise and increase relevancy.
Why do girls reach for SMS over status updates when they find a sale worth sharing with friends? “They have the capacity to broadcast at their fingertips, but they don’t do it,” observed the PR group responsible for the study. Millennial mallrats are sharing their finds with a smaller circle of close-knit “intimates” rather than via their larger network of loose-ties on Facebook. The construction of exclusive “velvet rope” social networks to partition friends, acquaintances, family, employers and the like, is common sense to GenY, while GenX and Boomer “digital immigrants” still struggle to grasp micro-addressability, multistreaming, and how to manage various online relationships and identities, using different communication strategies and corresponding gradations of privacy.
In related news, a new study by Ericsson (the world’s largest network equipment provider) confirms that as of December 2009, data surpassed voice as the largest part of mobile network traffic. As reported in The Telegraph, mobile texting, email, web traffic, music and video consumption accounted for “fractionally more” of the network traffic than talking. This trend to reach for SMS rather than voice communication is not limited to teenagers—surveys show that 60% of the 45+ demographic of mobile users report they are just as likely to send a text message as to make a voice call.
