Monday, May 17, 2010

Cell Phones, Social Media, Teenagers, OMG!!!

Some pretty crazy statistics which have just come out of the US, via Flowtown, re mobile phone usage among teenagers. Key findings from the research as follows:

* 75% of all teenagers in the US now have a mobile phone
* 35% of all teenagers send over 100 text messages a day (!!!)


While these findings are US based its worth acknowledging these results in the context of mobile phone penetration (all ages):

*106% mobile phone penetration in NZ
*87% mobile phone penetration in US

Its funny how cell phones (as a bona fide form of media) have become a 'life tool'. In the same way that you wouldn't leave the house without your wallet or your keys, you wouldnt leave the house without your cell phone.

Another piece of research which I stumbled across whilst browsing Digital Buzz Blog was around Mobile Phones and their influence on Social Media.

Key findings:

* 25% or more than 100 million Facebook users access from a mobile phone, and those who do, are more than twice as active on social networks compared to people accessing from a computer.
* The 35-54 age bracket is the most active mobile social user.
Alot of resource is going into these studies, with strong evidence suggesting that the use of social media, and particualry Facebook, is really in the realm of an older demographic. This should be a bit of a slap in the face to a lot of big corporates who continue to view Facebook and social media as only for teenagers.

Thats all for now...

Sunday, May 16, 2010

Facebook and Privacy - NZ view

There's been a significant amount of international attention about the amount of private data held by both Facebook and Google in the past few months. The recent announcement of Facebook's Open Graph API had web owners delighting in the possibility of rich customer data available for mining, insights and *shock/horror* one to one communication in the form of email, mobile and physical location.

So do New Zealanders care? According to Google Insights, it would appear so. In the past year, the top 'rising search' relating to privacy was 'Facebook privacy', with growth of 250% over the previous year.
Furthermore, when tracking the search phrase 'privacy' and 'facebook delete', we can see a fairly close correlation between peaks of public interest - particularly in the past eight weeks. Over the past few weeks the NZ blogosphere has been abuzz, and the mainstream NZ media has picked up the ever evolving story. There's now a well meaning but misguided status update doing the rounds in Facebook.

Whilst this setting is turned off by default, the small print below doesn't discount the opportunity for your data to be shared if they are one of your friends - and that depends on the security settings consumers apply to their friends, not to the third parties.
It will be interesting to watch where this goes. Personally, I think the majority of Facebook's 1.6M New Zealand user base will be apathetic to the privacy settings and most advertisers are ethical enough to respect these as the potential consumer insights at a macro level open up a whole new world of targeting. However the worldwide controversy (Facebook had an emergency meeting last Friday to discuss their response) are likely to see the product and privacy settings evolve further.