Number 36: Autumn 2006
On-line Social Networking: The New Media?
by Andrew Curry
Editor's comment: One of the elements of the Internet that is changing the way in which we live is the rise of new communities. Here Andrew Curry looks at some of these and how they are changing our lives.
On-line social networking (OSN) leapt to mainstream attention about a year ago when Rupert Murdoch – a long-term Internet sceptic – changed track and decided to pay the better part of $600 million for the social networking site Myspace.com. Other high profile deals, such as the acquisition by Yahoo of the photo site Flickr.com, underlined the excitement.
The technology trends which are driving the boom in OSN are easy to see; the increased capacity both of computers and of the distribution networks which connect them. It’s long been a staple of computing predictions that “the browser will become the desktop”. But it has taken the significant penetration of broadband to make this come true.
But the growth is also driven by other strong trends which have less to do with technology. These include, for example, the decline of institutional authority and the rise of peer-based trust systems; the rise in the production of content by users; changing attitudes to the value of the content, and new copyright frameworks; the rise of communities of interest; and perhaps even the decline in the number of safe spaces for young people.
We see four different types of online social network proposition:
- Social: such as Myspace or Bebo
- Gaming: the “massively multiplayer online role playing games” (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft or Runescape
- Content: from Flickr to YouTube (video); and
- Business: networking sites such as LinkedIn or Openbc (based in Germany).
The first three sectors are far more developed than the last. It’s worth having a bit of a reality check here. Although the numbers registered with the largest sites are impressive, monthly usage data from M:Metrics for April this year suggests that in the UK only 10% of on-line users had engaged in any social networking activity (7.2% for German, 6.5% for France, and 6.2% for the US), while only 6.9% of UK users had uploaded a photo (for each of the other three countries the figure was around the 3.5% mark). But users thought they were far more likely to post photos or videos to the web in the coming 12 months (UK 15%, France 13%, US 12%, and Germany 6%). And separate research from Pew on social networking in the US market, which was consistent with the M:Metrics analysis, suggested that usage of social network sites was more intense than that of other sites. In other words, if media value is about attention, social networking sites are taking their users’ attention into different spaces.
“Web sites such as Myspace and Pitchfork have reshaped youth consumption of cutting edge music”
And research done for our forthcoming youth intelligence report, D_Code 6, supports this argument. It suggests that social networking sites are, for young people, usurping the role of traditional media. Matt Hirst, an HCHLV consultant who’s part of the D_code team, says, “Websites such as Myspace and Pitchfork media have played an integral role in reshaping youth consumption of cutting edge music. Social networking sites have provided the perfect conditions for bands to propagate a staunch and committed fanbase, solely from word of mouth recommendations, while Internet review sites carry increasing weight by virtue of their ability to survive in an environment where goliaths are so often cut down and exposed by disgruntled bloggers.”
There are some important lessons for organisations in all of this. The first is that social networking sites aren’t going to go away. The trends which drive them are among the strongest of current social trends. Social networking is already a significant part of life for particular, younger, demographics, which are already hard to reach through conventional media channels. This is likely both to deepen and to broaden; deepen because the penetration in younger demographics will continue to increase; broaden because behaviour by younger people tends to spread to other, older, technology users (as we saw with SMS, for example).
The second is that traditional organisational "command and control" models of behaviour aren’t effective in this world. It's almost ten years now since the Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com) said, presciently, that "markets are conversations". In the world of online social networking, this is truer than ever. Indeed, there's an illuminating essay by the American academic danah boyd (“Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?”) which contrasts the management style of the less successful Friendster site with that of Myspace, which is - so far - characterised by flexibility and dialogue, albeit around a core set of values about which the founder has been clear since the launch of the site.
Third, conventional media company attitudes to intellectual property don’t play well. When Sony’s MMORPG, Everquest, realised that its players were selling Everquest assets earned through their time playing the game, it responded by decreeing that these assets belonged to Sony, not to the users. The result was widespread anger among its players. In contrast, SecondLife has built up a competitive difference by being clear that its players own whatever they can create through their game play.
Finally, some of these social worlds are potentially volatile. Much of the attraction to users of the 'social sites', such as MySpace and Bebo, is that they offer a space where teenagers and young adults can test and shape their identities. This suggests that they could have very strong "cohort effects", as the next generation of young people steers away from sites which are strongly identified with their older siblings. The same thing which creates intensity of usage, and of attention, is also their Achilles heel.
Pool Version 2.0
© Andrew Curry / Through the Loop Consulting Ltd 1998-2006