As a junior high student, I had pen pals all around the world. Of the ones that remain from that group of two dozen, two are in the U.S. and two are in Canada. I think how different this may have been with a social network that we could access rather than waiting for letters to arrive in the mail, though I have to admit, that was part of the charm of having a pen pal. Two of these don’t have a computer, so we still send letters through the mail.
As the fastest growing online media, social networking or “member communities” have seen a growth rate of twice any other online sector at 5.4% globally, according to Nielsen’s “Global Faces and Networked Places” report issued earlier this year. While one would expect this to come from youth logging on, they are nudged out by the 35-49 age group at 24.1% with 18-34-year-olds a close second at 22.8%, and almost one-third of the Facebook audience is now 50 and older. Maserati in Italy now has a fan page on Facebook. At this point, users access social media primarily through a desktop or laptop computer.
Unlike other media and the World Wide Web as a whole, this is not an open book for advertisers. User-generated content communities experience tremendous push back to the idea of paid messages on their network. MySpace, which has greater global reach and an emphasis on entertainment, along with a greater percentage of youth users, has been able to gain acceptance of advertisers, with most of them coming from the entertainment industry such as Virgin and media companies such as Vodafone.
It is important to recognize that outside of the U.S., there are many domestic networks and in the countries of China and Japan, the top three social network sites are domestic. According to Mielsen, in Brazil, Orkut leads, with Facebook barely a blip on the user radar. It will be interesting to watch how this evolves in a landscape of global connections.
It will also be interesting as the youth on these sites mature, to see what happens with regard to diplomatic relations among countries. Each generation has said that the future of the world lies in the hands of the next generation—regardless of implications for marketing, perhaps the greatest impact social networks will have is on how we understand each other from a cultural perspective.
NOTE: To access the Nielsen report, you can register on Nielsen.com. The registration is free.
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