A long time ago, and what would seem like a galaxy far far away to anyone born in the last 15 years, there was life without social networks. Oh there were computers for sure, they’ve been around now for so long that even I can’t remember what life was like without them. There was also the internet, but there was a time when the internet was something else, something pre-internety. This was a bit of a glory time for us oldie geeks when we used our Commodore 64′s to dial up into subscriber bulletin boards and join IRC chats back when these things were shiny new applications hot out of programmers ovens. Ah what a time that was. I remember running up a 300 (Australian) dollar phone bill on a weekend when my bulletin board service was having a one cent per minute special from Thursday midnight until Sunday midnight. I was living at home with my mother at that time because I was a teenager and that’s when I first learned the meaning of, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Just a few years later in the beginning half of the 1990′s internet service providers began offering domestic internet subscriptions to home users. Almost overnight anyone and everyone could have their own email address, and with the release of the first version of the Mosaic internet browser in 1993, surf the web. Consumer internet services quickly developed and took off like wildfire; the first internet revolution was under way.
This first incarnation of the web would be what historians would call pre 1.0 (one dot oh) 1. Websites in the first half of the 1990′s were a pretty basic affair, and the whole concept of consumer web services was still more an ideal than a reality. To anyone browsing sites back then the internet wasn’t much more than a few streets of multicoloured side show attractions. The ‘net sure didn’t look like an information super highway so much as a one big construction yard.
Internet evolution though has always occurred at very high speed and these beginning days were no exception. Early sites that were displayed as fixed content, basic box layouts were quickly replaced by more sophisticated sites that could modify their content in real time resulting in a richer user experience. Internet browsers themselves became more sophisticated as the technology inside them expanded to support better consumer side presentation and server side information exchange. By the time we arrived at the year 2000, internet 1.0 was a reality. We were all enjoying services such as online shopping, getting our weather and favourite sports updates whenever we wanted at the click of a mouse, and dipping our toes into a new way to consume media content. These early years of experimental digital media use whet our appetites for the possibilities to come. Instant gratification would soon be a powerful force in both the production and consumption of content media.
And then a few years later came Facebook 2. Pretty much from out of nowhere and it took the world by storm. You know something is really big and popular when they make they a movie out of it. That plus the fact that it’s recognised – rightly or wrongly – as a monopoly in its business space. Facebook in and of itself isn’t what is interesting to this discussion, it’s what it brought to the world that is; ubiquitous globally adopted online communities. Facebook is about people being connected to other people; about people sharing their lives with other people; about people looking for justification and acceptance of their lifestyle which they present to other people. When you look at a typical Facebook profile most people have something filled in for music, books, television, activities, relationship status, along with a whole bunch of photos. People no longer share mementos via postcards anymore, they post their life online and bask in the comforting glow of their friends real time interactive feeds.
The big trend that’s emerging now is for people to post about lifestyle purchases they make, such as shoes, clothing, cosmetics, books and music. Of course there are many other products that people write status updates about but these lines of products tend to be the ones most popular in younger groups (we’re talking 18 – 25 here, the early adopters). And this is where right now we’re seeing one of the biggest changes in consumer attitude than could ever have been predicted; the desire for purchases to be made public by the individual consumer. I should also add that this is something really only seen in the “young” demographic. If you’re my age, you’re pretty much guaranteed to not do this, and not get why you would even want to. One of the new social consumer services, Blippy, allows users to post credit card purchases on their Facebook account. Now me personally, I’m one of these people that if any of my credit card purchases made it to a social network, I’d be raising legal hell with the company behind the card. However, it’s an attitude that will quickly be losing mainstream acceptance as this new wave of social consumerism rises with the social networking tide, which many tech pundits speculate isn’t anywhere near peaking.
Wherever you look there are signs that consumer sentiment is rapidly shifting. Once upon a time marketeers had control over the information that was disseminated about a brand. Information channels cost money and were manipulated by people in suits. The internet and social media changed all of that so fast that there are marketeers in suits sitting around in traditional advertising businesses that still don’t have a clue they just became obsolete. Product and brand information in the modern age is traded free between consumers themselves on a 24/7 basis. Marketing in digital space is now about harnessing this phenomena and putting it to work for you. The Old Spice advertisement campaign is the best example of this so far. A series of video ads that were first released on Youtube, which went viral and then were subsequently taken to TV. In industry circles it has been one of the most successful advertising campaigns in the last few years. Youtube itself has become a personal brand advertising and marketing channel that is so powerful, complete nobodies have become popular niche market personalities, with some achieving an almost household name status 3. While personal opinions vary, there is one thing these internet personalities have in common that makes them of big interest to product brand companies; the number of visitors per month they clock up. Internet personalities that have subscribers to their channel above 100K have a deep reach into a consumer market. Getting them on side with product endorsements has huge appeal and comes relatively cheap when stacked up against traditional media channels of TV, radio, magazine, and cinema. We’re seeing this move now with cosmetic and fashion companies paying for product placement on the sites of young self made reviewers. It’s probably no wonder why, if an ordinary individual has the chops to build up a following of a few hundred thousand, it’s a good bet they’ll know how to pimp your product and make it sell.
So what does this mean to us oldies? (In this context, anyone over the age of 40). Well probably not much. After all, we’re not actually a group that counts in this new social networking wave. No, after the numbers have been crunched by the marketing group it turns out that our generation are far too conservative in their online habits, and far less likely to be swayed into joining early adopter social consumer services. Ironically the group that led the internet revolution have become middle aged and very staid in their online habits. Research shows they also no longer go to the cinema 4 and no longer buy luxury goods at the same level that they did ten years ago. Growing older has meant growing safer and becoming nostalgic in buying trends. Once habits have been set, they don’t really change over time. That’s not true for everyone, but it is true for the very large majority of older internet users. These are all signs that the next wave of social technology won’t see much adoption in my group. It could actually come to represent a digital cultural divide between the age groups in much the same way music is to the last generations.
Whether your an early adopter or digital curmudgeon it’s pretty clear that at some point sooner or later depending on where you fit you’re going to be hearing a lot more about social consumerism, and by all accounts it’s going to be huge. The entrepreneurs that get there first are going to make a lot of money, along the way they are going to push a paradigm shift in areas of marketing, advertising and consumer relations. All in all it’s going to be as big as the last wave that brought us here. All you have to do is keep up.
Andy.
- While hardcore internet historians will be eager to point out that the internet has existed since 1969 with the invention of the DARPA network. It wasn’t until Mosaic first hit the scene did consumer internet use take off. Before Mosaic the internet was the provenance of the military, government and large corporations. This pre-internet wasn’t much more than a cornucopia of networks and protocols which for non specialists was completely useless. Mosaic changed all that by making this laboratory internet easy and accessible, thereby driving broad consumer adoption and the creation of a new industry around internet services. ↩
- I’m glossing over huge amounts of internet evolutionary detail. If anything I’m doing you all a favour. Internet history is a bit like the history of China, there was tons of stuff happening everywhere in parallel all the time. To do it any justice you’d have to write several books. But who has the time, and who would want to read it? ↩
- Gregory Gorgeous and Chris Crocker are two examples respectively. ↩
- Which is another post entirely but GQ magazine ran an article essentially saying Generation X aren’t going to the cinema anymore because nobody makes anything worthwhile for them to watch and as a result have become a demographic that no longer count in Hollywood studio decisions. This is why there is a flood of movies that appeal to 18 – 25 year olds; they are the biggest consumer group that actually do get off their arses and pay for a seat at a cinema to watch a film. ↩
The Social consumerism, the new social networking wave by Mentalechoes, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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