Social Networking: Here to Stay?
With the onslaught of social networking websites today, we wouldn't be doing our job as researchers if we excluded them from a discussion on how to reach young people -- and the effects of social networks on everything from bands to employment to ad campaigns.
As a somewhat-recent college graduate who came of age in the Internet era, I have some experience with these sites. I have a MySpace account and a Facebook account (you'll have to "friend" me to see them, though), and an AIM screen name. In fact, the rise of social networking has some things in common with the rapid rise of Instant Messaging in the past 10 or so years.
When I was in college, if you wanted to gather some friends to go to dinner, you didn't walk down the hall to their dorm room, and you didn't call them -- you simply IMed them. If your roommate wasn't in the room and wasn't online with a posted "away message" informing you of where she was, you got worried. Essentially, if someone wasn't online, he/she might as well have been a missing person.
Of course, AIM didn't allow you to post pictures of yourself, post your phone number or address, or give the world a list of your favorite "Seinfeld" quotes. You couldn't add people to your buddy list without their screen name, and you couldn't get that unless you knew them personally.
Enter the social networking sites. I first heard of Facebook toward the end of my junior year of college, in early 2004. It was only accessible to college students, hardly anybody was on it, and most people's reactions were something like, "This sounds like a scam," or "People will just stalk you." I admit, it took awhile for me to check it out.
Now, you can't really have a discussion about these sites without bringing in another big buzzword in research -- word of mouth. People began joining Facebook because their friends were telling them about it, because they were finding people they'd been out of touch with for years, and because they were just plain curious.
Facebook now has over 58 million active users. 58 million! That's equivalent to about 19% of the U.S. population (although Facebook's membership is international). So if the question is whether this trend is here to stay, I think we can at least say that it's not going away any time soon.
I think it's not unreasonable, however, to predict that people will become more cautious about what they put online. MySpace and Facebook, for example, have in the past year or so created more privacy controls for users to designate how much of their personal information is displayed, and to whom. From a research standpoint, if that many people are "out there" on these sites, how can they be ignored? Perhaps the better question is whether the sites are actually an efficient tool for reaching respondents among all the "noise" of different applications, the clutter of colors and design layouts, and everything else these pages allow.
So what do you think -- are you actively part of a social network, and do you plan to stay that way? And will the sites stand the test of time?
http://www.thetaylorgroup.com/blog/trackback.cfm?1C657414-1422-22E7-23A262FF7FDB182C
I agree, and I also think this is already happening. I've read several stories in the past year about employers weeding out undesirable candidates based on their MySpace profiles. Potential employees are starting to respond to this by aiming for a middle ground that allows them all the benefits of social networking without the pratfalls that can go along with it.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/07/has-fa...
I recently conducted focus groups with 14-16 year-olds, and I felt as old as dirt (I'm convinced they thought I was). Granted, I'm in my late 20's, but I had no idea the important role that these social networking websites play in youth's everyday communication. Apparantly, no one in this age group emails anymore. That's sooo 2000. Calling their friends isn't even a common occurence. Instead, these sites, along with texting, have taken over.
I partly attribute the use of social networking to the multi-tasking society that these kids have grown up in. When you ask them why they use these sites or why they text friends instead of calling them, they'll tell you that it takes too much time. They just want to say what they want, and be done with it. The faster, the beter. When did picking up a phone and calling a friend start taking too much time?
My rant's over. I think social networking is here to stay -- it offers the ability to tell the world about yourself AND the option to communicate on your own time.