Overview; Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months, from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008 to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And it’s not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day. Text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group. However, voice calling is still the preferred mode for reaching parents for most teens.
Morgan Stanley has released the 2010 edition of State of the Internet (pdf) report. The report primarily highlights the exponential growth of the mobile web in coming years. It hints that Mobile Will Be Bigger Than Desktop Internet in 5 Years and then takes a deep dive into mobile internet. The report shares deep analysis of the following:
1.Wealth Creation / Destruction is Material in New Computing Cycles – Now in Early Innings of Mobile Internet Cycle, the 5th Cycle of Last Half Century. 2.Mobile Ramping Faster than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think – 5 Trends Converging (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices). 3.Apple Leading in Mobile Innovation + Impact, for Now – Depth of App Ecosystems + User Experience + Pricing Will Determine Long-Term Winners. 4.Game-Changing Communications / Commerce Platforms (Social Networking + Mobile) Emerging Very Rapidly. 5.Massive Data Growth Driving Carrier / Equipment Transitions. 6.Growth / Monetization Roadmaps Provided by Japan Mobile + Desktop Internet.
The report is authored by Mary Meeker, Scott Devitt and Liang Wu and more is available about the report on GigaOm
David Eaves (@daeaves) a public policy and negotiation consultant was recently interviewed by Steve Paikin’s TVO programme The Agenda. Here’s the video where David talks in detail about Open Government, E-Governance and Government 2.0. Most of the examples are from Canada, but we guess the government and the governance is the same everywhere – i.e. there’s a need to be ‘open’
"Kevin Kelly writes that researchers at the Social Computing Lab at HP Labs in Palo Alto have found that social media content can predict real world outcomes. In their study, the researchers built a model that used chatter from Twitter to predict accurately the box-office revenues of upcoming movies weeks before the movies were released. When the sentiment of the tweet was factored in (how favorable it was toward the new movie), the prediction was even more exact. To quantify the sentiments in 3 million tweets, the team used anonymous workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to rate a sample of tweets, and then trained an algorithmic classifier to derive a rating for the rest. But predicting box office receipts may be only the beginning. ‘This method can be extended to a large panoply of topics [PDF], ranging from the future rating of products to agenda setting and election outcomes,’ the researchers write. ‘At a deeper level, this work shows how social media expresses a collective wisdom which, when properly tapped, can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes.’"
The HP’s Social Computing Lab focuses on methods for harvesting the collective intelligence of groups of people in order to realize greater value from the interaction between users and information. Their research includes collective intelligence (“wisdom of the crowd”), incentive design for accessing resources, social networks and their implications for information dissemination and collective attention.
More young girls are being exposed to console games, especially as their fathers introduce them to that world as a way to bond with them. In late November, president of Nintendo America, Reggie Fils-Aime presented several data points outlining the current gender breakdown of console play in the U.S. Reggie estimates there are 45 million people playing video games as the primary players in the U.S. Of those, Nintendo is estimating 26% are female, or roughly 11.7 million.
Of those, 80% are on the Wii, 11% are on the Xbox 360 and 9% are on the PS3.
* Wii – 80% = 9.3 million * X360 – 11% = 1.29 million * PS3 – 9% = 1.05 million * Total = 11.7 million Females
John Koller of Sony told us, "Before the holidays we made a big push in our advertising campaign by appealing to a wider demographic. Women see the benefit of having a game console that also works as a Blu-ray player, and that has definitely boosted our sales into the dual-console households."
And David Dennis, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 spokesperson believes that, "Certainly social networking functionality like Twitter and Facebook appeal to a female audience. Studies have found that in general, most social networks have more female users than male, including Twitter (about 59% female) and Facebook (about 57% female). In addition to Facebook and Twitter, there is a lot of functionality in Xbox LIVE that appeals to women. With Xbox LIVE parties, users can connect and share movies, music, photos and gaming experiences with friends on the same couch or across the country. Women are an important audience for us, and we’re offering a variety of entertainment experiences that will appeal to them."
Wanda Meloni ( Twitter : @wandameloni ) is a market analyst with M2 Research. Before starting her own research and strategy consulting firm she was president of DFC Intelligence and worked as an analyst at Jon Peddie Research. She tracks gaming and entertainment as well as the tools, technology and development pipelines. She has been quoted in multiple publications such as the Wall Street Journal, London Times, NY Times, SF Chronicle and Computer Graphics World. She holds an MBA in Strategic Marketing and International Business and speaks several languages. (Bio from the Gamsutra blog profile)
The study “Chronic Diseases & The Internet” conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project studies the relationship and importance of Internet in the lives of critically ill. According to the study people with chronic health condition are less likely to use the internet but those who do are surely benefitted by the availability of health information, self-help groups and online communities. The usage gap is not the factor of interest, it’s the problem of access. Because logically a critically person is more likely to access health related information on the net compared to a healthier one. Download the full pdf version of this report from this page
When other demographic factors are held constant, having a chronic disease significantly increases an internet user’s likelihood to say they work on a blog or contribute to an online discussion, a listserv, or other online group forum that helps people with personal issues or health problems.
Living with chronic disease is also associated, once someone is online, with a greater likelihood to access user-generated health content such as blog posts, hospital reviews, doctor reviews, and podcasts. These resources allow an internet user to dive deeply into a health topic, using the internet as a communications tool, not simply an information vending machine.
Claire Cain Miller on NYTimes citing this report writes a great piece "Social Networks a Lifeline for the Chronically Ill". In this article Claire talks about various social networks available for such patients and some self-initiated online activities of people with chronic conditions. One such example is of Amy Tenderich, who has diabetes, writes a blog and manages the social network Diabetic Connect from home in Millbrae, Calif.
The connections and the links in social media carry multiple meanings – from intimate relationship to casual chit chat or just common interests. These connections allow flow of information and indicate a user’s influence on one another. The report “Measuring User Influence in Twitter: The Million Follower Fallacy” (pdf), a collaborative research paper by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabrıcio Benevenuto, Krishna P. Gummadi presents an analysis of twitter data and comparison of influence: indegree followers), retweets and mentions. The investigation highlights the dynamics of user influence across topics and time and comes up with interesting observations:
1. Popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions.
2. Most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics.
3. Influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic.
More details on dataset and data sharing plan can be found on the project site http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/. The project used a dataset of 2 billion follow links among 54 million users who produced a total of 1.7 billion tweets
Adi Avnit- @dotmad had suggested something similar last year through his blog post- The Million Followers Fallacy. He practices what he preaches and not got into “follow and be followed” game on twitter, in last 8-9 months he has just followed 100 or so more additional people. In the blog post he describes how “The Reach” (follower count) can be manipulated and how it doesn’t mean that people are actually engaged with you, listening and passing along the message.
But why is this influence thingy such a matter of great research and study. ? Well our Marketer friends believe that certain messages have a great chance of spreading if they are sampled and passed along through key influencers in the society. And the challenge is that, this is really very difficult to identify or attribute in the offline world, whereas online connected ecosystems like Twitter now allow you to do that.
The traditional view assumes that a minority of members in a society possess qualities that make them exceptionally persuasive in spreading ideas to others. These exceptional individuals drive trends on behalf of the majority of ordinary people. They are loosely described as being informed, respected, and well-connected; they are called the opinion leaders in the two-step flow theory (Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955), innovators in the diffusion of innovations theory (Rogers 1962), and hubs, connectors, or mavens inother work (Gladwell 2002). The theory of influentials is intuitive and compelling. By identifying and convincing a small number of influential individuals, a viral campaign can reach a wide audience at a small cost. The theory spread well beyond academia and has been adopted in many marketing businesses, e.g., RoperASW and Tremor (Gladwell 2002; Berry and Keller 2003).
In contrast, a more modern view of information flow emphasizes the importance of prevailing culture more than the role of influentials. Some researchers have reasoned that people in the new information age make choices based on the opinions of their peers and friends, rather than by influentials (Domingos and Richardson 2001). These researchers argued that direct marketing through influentials would not be as profitable as using “network”-based advertising such as collaborative filtering.
In yet another study Henry Jenkins talks about Media Viruses and Memes. Though it talks about the spreadability of media or content, it can be applied to brands and marketing as well. In the connected world i.e. on the social networks brands themselves are acting as influencer through evangelism and whatever that they are doing there if that content, media or message if that itself is not spreadable, it won’t be passed along no matter what their follower count it. Thus looking at both these studies will help a better understanding of who is the influencer, what is influence and how to influence. Here’s the video if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead’
Like the gene, the meme is driven to self-create, and is possessed of three important characteristics: 1. Fidelity — memes have the ability to retain their informational content as they pass from mind to mind; 2. Fecundity — memes possess the power to induce copies of themselves; 3. Longevity — memes that survive longer have a better chance of being copied.
Some of the things that you will find in this report
Of the roughly 250 million websites about 80 million are .coms. Even after the collapse of the .dom bubble, the number of domain names grows by an average of 668,000 a month.
The .coms alone account for some $400 million in economic benefits to businesses and consumers and that figure will likely double in the next ten years.
Despite high-profile failures in the dot-com bubble burst, typical survival rates for these new businesses were actually higher than normal and spectacular success stories have followed.
Only about 25 percent of the world’s 6.7 billion participate in the dot-com economy but is changing – 73 million Chinese became Internet users in 2007 alone.
In order to sustain the progress that has been made in empowering consumers, spurring innovations and boosting productivity, the report urges:
Adoption of policies that allow for the deployment of technologies, like wired and wireless broadband, mobile payments platforms, health IT, and other Internet platforms.
Removal of regulatory and legal barriers to the emergence of new e-business models.
Creation of incentives for companies to invest in Internet-enabled business practices.
Deb Lavoy, a product strategist writes that there are 3 types of collaborations and they do not mean the same thing. According to her, "collaboration refers to a cluster of 3 types of activities – they are often interdependent and linked, but they are distinct in what they can achieve, and what is required to enable them".
1 Creative Collaboration.
2. Connective Collaboration – its not the wisdom of crowds, its the aggregated wisdom of individuals.
3. Compounding Collaboration – Standing on the shoulders of giants.
She throws light on this subject through intelligence community, semantic analysis, knowledge management and other others aspects of community.
Understanding information sharing is also crucial to collaboration and specially the online collaboration. Though not directly related, the following suggests a relation. In 2002, a study conducted by Sanna Talja -"Information sharing in academic communities: Types and levels of collaboration in information seeking and use" (pdf), suggest types and levels of ‘information sharing’ in relation to document retrieval in academic communities.The finding does the following classification of information sharing:
1. Strategic sharing: information sharing as a conscious strategy of maximizing efficiency in a research group.
2. Paradigmatic sharing: information sharing as a means of establishing a novel and distinguishable research approach or area within a discipline or across disciplines.
3. Directive sharing: information sharing between teachers and students.
4. Social sharing: information sharing as a relationship- and community-building activity
