Hartman Group On Social Media, Technology, Culture and Consumers
Play, work, learning and consumption have converged in the
spaces and practices of new social and mobile technologies. Millennials, Gen-Xs and Boomers—seemingly everyone has a Facebook presence. The more adventurous (or geeky) have also taken up Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare or Screener, with over 500 million active users on Facebook1 engaged in gathering an unimaginable number of friends. Smartphones and tablets are nearly ubiquitous. Friends, information, contacts, products and opportunities are but a few keystrokes away. Smart mobile technologies, now pervasive, are quite visible actors in all facets of social life, bringing new practices and experiences to consumers’ shopping, cooking and dining activities. If social media and smart technologies are seemly everywhere, why do companies and marketers so often miss the mark in building successful consumer relationships via these widely adopted tools and practices? Gaps in understanding the practices and purposes that drive social media use have led to a number of ambiguities and assumptions. While there is room for more knowledge about what need social technologies fill for consumers and how companies can better serve these needs, a more pressing concern is to better understand how social technologies are helping to reshape consumer culture and, perhaps, consumers themselves. Obvious activities that go on in social media are status updating; political debating; the pursuit and nurturing of existing, lost, and new connections; and information sharing. Beyond these communicative activities, digital and smart technologies are helping to recalibrate our cultural and consumption spaces and thus, the consumer experience. This white paper lays out a research agenda to identify actionable insights to guide companies in 1
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics (May 29, 2011)
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Technology is a cultural
making informed decisions about the impact of technology on their businesses and how to make use of these technologies in building productive consumer relationships. We at Hartman Group see the need to more precisely understand the emerging—and continually transforming—cultural landscape of technologically facilitated consumer experiences, practices, and expectations.
practice —it informs our ever yday
There is no doubt that technologies such as social media are changing cultures of work, leisure, business, shopping and so on. These changes are coming from a number of directions, and researchers of all stripes are trying to make sense of this new world. Distinctions are made between Generation X, Generation Y, Boomers and seniors about their adoption and use of these technologies; however, there is little consensus on what is going on as consumers and technologies meet. It often seems that change is in the hands of technological wizards and the young, ignoring the role that users and “elders” have played in creating these technologies. Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg working in his college dorm room, but the site runs on technological gadgets, concepts and platforms devised by Boomers or seniors, most of whom remain active in their fields. Steve Jobs of Apple comes to mind.
activities, as well as our orientation to the world.
{*
How do companies make sense of all this change and opportunity?
Technology and Culture A number of misconceptions frame understandings of technology. First is a tendency to view technology as merely tools, and the second is to presume that these tools effect social changes independent of the humans or cultures that create or use them. While this might appear to be a distinction best left to academics, it, in fact, frames the terms of the conversation. Technology is a cultural practice—it informs our everyday activities, as well as our orientation to the world. Our values, interests and capabilities play a large role in what kinds of technologies are created and adopted. Specific technologies are conceived, tweaked and abandoned in the context of social, political and educational values, beliefs and practices. Current social technologies are part of a long trajectory of humans and technologies interacting. That said, our technologies are getting ever more complex and the pace of technological change now seems exponential rather than incremental. This pace is one aspect of technological culture. Humans are complicit in that change, whether we are primary creators, early adopters, or resisters. Cultural practices, beliefs and intentions inform not only what technologies we develop, but also, the character of our relationships, how our human capacities develop, and what we continue to value. The Internet, perhaps the defining technology of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, is hard to locate as a concrete tool—we can’t touch it, pick it up, or move it. Most of us can’t even conceptualize its size or scope. Yet, this technology has transformed cultural practices by blurring formerly distinct boundaries in concepts of geography, place,
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identity, time, connectivity and social relationship. Just as platforms converge, social identities and boundaries are also being reconfigured even as they remain fluid. Both local interests and global possibilities converge or are challenged in everyday interactions. We think, learn, work and form relationships through technologies that provoke or support desires as well as anxieties and frustration. Speed, trendiness and features of particular technologies get a lot of press, but the emotional and cultural aspects of these technologies are perhaps more significant. We use social media because they fill a need, yet these needs will vary just as individuals, communities and cultures vary. Contemporary social technologies tend to be described through their functionality or the activities they facilitate. Facebook offers the ability to visibly amass hundreds of friends and to keep these friends up to date on one’s status. Twitter is where we follow 140-character bites of news or celebrity updates. YouTube allows anyone to share videos on most any legal or socially acceptable topic. And LinkedIn provides an online network for professionals. Each technology offers new ways to connect with the world, and each presents new challenges. Common to all is that they are online, social, interactive, participatory, emotional, aesthetic and ethically framed experiences. A participatory consumer culture sits within this larger culture. These social media are also the spaces in which we negotiate or make sense of significant cultural changes such as: •
Globalization vs. localization
•
Collisions of Eastern vs. Western worldviews
•
Political and religious differences
•
Sustainability vs. unfettered progress
•
Leisure vs. a 24/7 culture of both at-work and online activities
•
Collaboration vs. individualism
•
Tradition vs. the new
•
Urban vs. rural values or lifestyles
Media and market research accounts often make it seem that technological culture is evenly dispersed and that obvious and countable activities tell us everything about the value of technology in people’s lives. Yet, differences in usage are sometimes more attributable to conditions and distributions of technological literacies, access or variations in cultural beliefs and practices. Privacy concerns, stereotyping, and class or gender constraints around the availability of time (such as who has leisure time and who does not) are also significant factors in technology adoption or activity levels. Social constraints have an impact on why and
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how we use a given technology. Consumers increasingly drive the transformation of conventional business practices, yet how and why new practices gain widespread social traction among consumers are often either presumed or misconstrued.
Research perspectives Marketers, educators, politicians, technology developers and consumers have varied interests in knowing how and why technologies are used. Everyone though, seems to be fascinated by the demographics of social media use. This fascination has spawned a cacophony of online and media opinionating and forecasting about who is adopting the latest technologies. It seems fair to say that much of what is claimed about social media use comes from large-scale surveys (often by phone), surface-level database analysis, assumptions or media hype. Surveys allow broad generalizations by separating people, their cultures and their technologies into discrete units. As a result, findings are quite specific, even if claims are applied broadly. The Pew Internet Project is an example:
Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. In 2006, 28% of teens ages 12-17 and young adults ages 18-29 were bloggers, but by 2009 the numbers had dropped to 14% of teens and 15% of young adults. During the same period, the percentage of online adults over thirty who were bloggers rose from 7% blogging in 2006 to 11% in 2009.2
Pew’s survey might be accurate in what it describes, but of what value is this information? It tells us about a specific technology—blogging—but provides no context as to why these individuals (or groups) are blogging. We also find out that young people are blogging less, but again, not why. The only thing we know about these bloggers is their age group. We know nothing at all about gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, or a host of other variables that are in play as technologies are introduced, adopted, talked about, become part of everyday practices or are cast as curiosities, obstacles, toys for the young and so on. Without knowing much more about who is blogging or not blogging, why they do or don’t engage in this activity, and in what contexts, we actually know very little.
‘Evidence’ or Assumptions Humans have a need to sort objects and people into categories. The categories themselves are often based on assumptions or stereotypes. One pervasive assumption is that
2
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx
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Social media use happens
categories such as gender, age group and ethnicity are, in fact, adequate descriptions of a population. Categories tend to mask some differences, yet emphasize others.
in the context of ever yday,
Forrester Research, whose analysts have steered some of the most influential discussions about the implications of digital technologies for marketing organizations, describes its North American Technographics Survey as “the largest and longest running survey of consumers, second only to the U.S. Census.” It tracks technology adoption and consumption practices, examined through a quantitative analysis of groups, attributes or behaviors. Common generational categories become explanations of how technologies are adopted and used as seen by recent Forrester Research categories:3 •
comfor table cultures rather than in generic demographic
Gen Yers live and breathe a digital social life. In almost every online or mobile behavior, Gen Yers lead the adoption curve…
•
categories.
Gen Xers are the masters of maximizing the functional benefits of technology. In many activities, Gen Xers closely rival Gen Yers in adoption…
•
Boomers remain middle of the road on technology adoption. …They do lead on the amount of money spent on technology…
•
Seniors occupy the fringes of a digital nation. This group of consumers has seen the biggest changes to the digital world around them. But don’t be fooled; this doesn’t mean they don’t like technology.
Demographic categories such as age, gender, or ethnicity are isolated to help marketers better target consumer motivations and interests, but the success of these efforts would seem to depend on these generational groups indeed being homogenous rather than composed of diverse individuals, even as other research suggests heterogeneity is the new normal. The Hispanic Market Advisors informs us that Hispanics are embracing social network sites and connecting with people who share the same values, ways of thinking and worldviews.4 This is a much more telling demographic analysis than that contained in the Forrester categories. It suggests that social media use happens in the context of everyday, comfortable cultures rather than in generic demographic categories. Activities are another way that people are grouped. The following graphic from Forrester portrays participation by degrees of engagement. As the illustration notes, people might engage in more than one of these activities, telling us what people do, but little else. Most social media consumer research seems to cover the same territory and demographics, with each study focused on specific demographics, technologies and activities. The common thread is that consumers are described by age, gender, activity, ethnicity, and, sometimes, educational level or occupation.
3
http://www.forrester.com/Products/MarketResearch/Consumer/NorthAmerican
4
http://www.hispanicmarketadvisors.com/articles/the-importance-of-hispanics-in-the-social-media-age.html
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FIG 01. Groups include consumers participating in at least one of the indicated activities at least monthly.
· Post ratings / reviews of products or services · Comment on someone else’s blog · Contribute to online forums · Contribute to / edit articles in a wiki
CRITICS
37%
· Use RSS feeds · Vote for websites online · Add “tags” to web pages or photos
COLLECTORS
20%
· Maintain profile on a social networking site · Visit social networking sites
JOINERS
59%
· Read blogs · Listen to podcasts · Watch video from other users · Read online forums · Read customer reatings / reviews · Read tweets
SPECTATORS
70% INACTIVES
· None of the above
17%
Source: http://www.paulallen.net/how-do-people-use-social-media-from-forrester-research
Demographic research documents participation by groups, but it is hard to find research that digs deeper, either by being more creatively insightful about consumers or devising ways to get at how consumers’ cultures and technology practices intersect. If we acknowledge that technologies can’t be separated from cultural practices, it should follow that consumers’ interests, contexts and technology practices are highly entangled. As such, we should be wary of broad generalizations about consumers’ social media use, but this is largely what happens. Perhaps the most outstanding assumption in technology-culture research is that consumers all have the same values and worldviews. Dr. Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist at Intel Research, conducted an extensive international study to address a disconnect between Intel’s designers and the users of their technologies in countries such as India, Malaysia and Indonesia. She visited 100 homes in 19 cities and found that “in some places, ‘it’s harder for some forms of technology to get over the threshold of the home’ — not simply for economic reasons but for religious ones as well.”5 Bell’s research highlights how Western designers and researchers often make incorrect assumptions about other cultures. Mainstream consumer research around technology follows this path when it makes broad inferences about women, Hispanics, Gen Xers, Boomers and so on. A 2009 BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners study is an exception, at least in part. It goes into greater depth to understand the contexts of women’s social media use. The study is based on two samples: a general population sample of women and a BlogHer 5
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/technology/for-technology-no-small-world-after-all.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm
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network sample and paints a picture of the “State of the Social Media World” from women’s perspective. Some of its findings are that:6 •
Women are continuing to adopt social media and blogs
•
Blogs are a source of information and advice
•
Traditional media such as magazines are being replaced by social technologies
•
Women bloggers lead in social media use
Within the demographic of women, other factors analyzed were age, education and income. When the study was featured in Small Business Trends, the headline announced that “42 Million U.S. Women Use Social Media: Blogs Most Influential,”7 which favorably portrays women’s blogging. A different view of women’s blogging was featured on Time.com (March 10, 2011). “Women Post More on Facebook to Boost Self-Image” highlighted an academic study that found that women who posted most on Facebook did so because of a greater need for seeking approval from others. This was most evident in those who posted photos most frequently.”8 Clearly we should be skeptical of overly broad claims.
Hopes and Fears A great many hopes and anxieties surround technology. Marketing research is in part driven by hopeful hype. Forrester’s technology use study, for example, states that “the digital attitudes and behaviors that Gen Y and Gen X are cultivating now will follow them as they age and will only be multiplied in the generations that follow them.”9 This is a seemingly benign statement, but it does assume that these digital behaviors will be beneficial over the long term and that people, especially young people, are predictable. Another assumption is that the role of a given technology remains the same over time, which is often not the case. As a case in point, the mechanical clock was invented by Benedictine monks in the 12th-13th centuries to help them regulate their prayer schedules. The irony of this technology is that what began as a spiritual aid has become a primary monitoring tool of Western society, illustrating the twists and often unintended turns our technologies take as they intersect with culture. Research done outside consumer market research circles reveals some significant tensions that influence consumer technology use as well as over what this research reveals.
6
2009 Women and Social Media Study by BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners; p. 23
7
http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/05/42-million-women-use-social-media-blogs.html
8
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/10/study-women-post-more-on-facebook-to-boost-self-image/#ixzz1IympLHTL
9
http://eon.businesswire.com/news/eon/20100922005173/en/consumers/market-research/marketing
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Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer and Stanford professor, suggested in a November 2008 interview with Charlie Rose that consumer research has been limited in its vision:
Most companies look at what consumers create, co-create and share with the world as some kind of free resource to be exploited in whatever way they can, but the winners in the future will be the companies that can create ecosystems in which all the participants are valued, rewarded, promoted and empowered… Anyone who thinks that social media is about influence, popularity or an audience is sorely mistaken and business models built on that will be shaky at best.10
Clay Shirky, another academic and popular media proselytizer, in his book Here Comes Everybody, has argued that people’s embrace of social media reflects a turn back towards earlier values of community and collaboration.11 In contrast, Sherry Turkle, also a popular academic, based at MIT., has studied human intersections with technology for 30 or so years and sees a different reality. In Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, she argues that we are becoming increasingly dependent on or enamored of our technologies yet increasingly disconnected from each other. With too much Facebook time we disconnect from those around us.12 A discussion about Twitter during an On the Media broadcast with host, Bob Garfield, and David Carr, who covers media for The New York Times (April 23, 2010)13 illustrates the winding path that accompanies a new technology’s adoption. At first, Twitter provoked befuddlement and yet is now viewed as a tool for making sense of the world. BOB GARFIELD: Well, there is something kind of hilarious about people constantly interrupting their lives to transmit 140-character factoids and random banal thoughts to people who must interrupt their own lives to receive them. Or anyway, it was hilarious way back in 2009 when The Daily Show made fun of it… DAVID CARR: It’s a way that people use to make sense of a very complicated world. BOB GARFIELD: A real time reflection of the Zeitgeist. DAVID CARR: Well, Zeitgeist plus information. It can get you ahead of the news cycle…
Despite their competing visions, these researchers and commentators suggest that our perceptions of technology and consumers are inseparable from culture and that this culture is in continual flux.
10
http://experiencecurve.com/archives/lawrence-lessig-on-charlie-rose-provides-hints-about-future-of-business
11
Amazon book description; http://isbn.nu/9781594202537
12
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 2011.
13
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/04/23/01 …
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Claims and Evidence Var y Just as it is next to impossible to find universal agreement about the benefits or deficits of technology, it is also difficult to pin down who is doing what and how often with a given technology. Research on how people use social media is inconsistent. While the Forrester survey identifies older generations as kind of “middle of the road” on technology adoption, an eMarketer report, “Baby Boomers Get Connected with Social Media,” highlights Boomers’ increasing use of these technologies.14 The following graphic shows how users are commonly measured by their use of different technologies. FIG 02.
Social Networking Sites Used by US Social Network Users, by Generation, May 2009 (% of respondents in each group) Facebook
MySpace
61% 65% 76% 73% 90%
65% 75% 57% 40% 23%
9% 14% 18% 13% 17%
0% 9% 13% 13% 4%
GENERATION Z GENERATION Y GENERATION X BABY BOOMERS WWII GENERATION
Note: n=1,000; read chart as saying, 90% of social network users from the WWII generation use Facebook. Source: Anderson Analytics, “Social Network Service (SNS) A&U Profiler,” provided to eMarketer, July 13, 2009.
Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Research published the study “The Social Habit – Frequent Social Networkers” in June 2010.15 Some key findings included: •
Social media use is increasing dramatically
•
Frequent users tend to be young females
•
Those with mobile access are more frequent users
•
Frequent users update their status most often (having “implications for wordof-mouth marketing and search”)
•
Frequent users are more likely to follow brands or companies
What we find is that consumer-oriented technology research is largely focused around the demographics of consumers’ use and adoption of specific technologies. Culture is rarely looked at in any meaningful way. A large shortcoming in consumer research is that it doesn’t go very deep into these consumers or their motivations. Consumer studies 14
http://www.emarketer.com/Report.aspx?code=emarketer_2000649
15
http://www.edisonresearch.com/home/archives/2010/06/the_social_habit_frequent_social_networkers_in_america.php
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treat consumers and their technologies as static and easily categorized. Because culture is so underdeveloped in this research, the energy and dynamism of both technology and consumer culture has been hard to capture.
Cultural Perceptions (and misperceptions) Looking outside market research we find more insights about technology, culture and users. For example, an On the Media segment that aired in April 2010 focused on how an increase in the number of languages used online might result in many separate internets.16 Opening the Internet to multiple languages on the one hand increases cultural diversity but might also allow people to stick closer to their own communities. Research and the media tell us that Millennials are digital natives: they are constantly texting, posting, tweeting or gaming on their mobile phones; however, Millennials are not all the same. Non-market-based research is often better at examining these kinds of differences, across communities there are often quite different levels of technology use, literacies and interests. Ezster Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern University studies these matters through her Web Use Project. In a recent talk titled, “Digital Natives or Digital Naïves?” she argued that we think that young people are all more savvy than everyone else in their use of technologies: they’ve grown up with the technology, they use it all the time, and they are quite conversant with the web and social media. Hargittai says there is little evidence for these assumptions. Her research has found instead that social circumstances and contexts play a large role in Millennials’ technology use and literacies.17 Hartman Group’s own recent study, “Culture of Millennials 2011,” found that the stereotypical “Millennial” does exist but represents only a small part of the Millennial population. Huge socio-structural differences (such as between high school kids, college kids, 23-year-old single professionals and single moms in their late 20s) often trump broad generational forces or generalizations. And even at the aggregate level, Millennials’ purported leadership when it comes to using newer “technology” is uneven, with mobile behaviors around popular culture more salient than the adoption of Web-based commerce. Although this review cites only a smattering of studies, it does capture the controversial and unsettled nature of consumer research on social media use.
Emergent Technologies, Practices and Relationships The new social technology landscape would be better served by thinking of technologies less in terms of what they can do, and instead, how they become part of an ecology 16
http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2010/04/30/06
17
University of Illinois; April 2011
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Technology is think ing,
of social practices. These technologies often support multiple uses and practices. For example, the smart phone is at its most basic an object that allows talking and texting on the go. But the phone also allows one’s online social network to be similarly mobile— friending, tweeting, status updating, blogging and video capture are no longer confined to the desktop. New apps emerge daily, bringing innovations such as Google’s Wallet that has the potential to reorganize of our relationship to both cash and credit cards.18
but both are enhanced through active experience.
As the locus of contemporary communication and community building, the small space of the smart phone contains the possibility of our ever-expanding social and consumer networks. This same phone—because of how it brings together mobility, connectivity, and information—is changing the both the spaces and practices of shopping. Purchasing is increasingly done in the consumers’ personal space, which might be at home, online on the go, or in a traditional retail space. The smart phone, as one example, is foregrounding a new relationship to retail, the traditional store, and consumer/brand relationships. Understanding how these new spaces and relationships form and evolve is both an art and a science. Blanket friending practices by companies are premised on a view that consumers will somewhat blindly follow “their” brands. However, trying to influence consumers via blanket social media pronouncements is not unlike trying to herd cats. A dog may “like” you just because you asked, but a cat builds relationships based on its needs and desires that might be quite evident to the cat but far less so to the foolish human that takes it for granted or expects affection without a proper offering. The cat goes about its business quite independently until you meet it on the correct terms, with its desired treat. Social media reflect or help to change both cultural and individual values and identities. If social and mobile technologies are more than just tools or billboards, what are they and how should they be understood? The possibilities are numerous, with some more useful than others. Hartman Group takes the position that technologies are not simply tools and they do not “do” things or change cultures independent of their designers, users or cultural environment. The new field of science and technologies studies, (which brings together perspectives from sociology, cultural studies, philosophy and, often, education) has built a strong case for thinking about technologies as social, in that they are participants in the shaping of social practices, identities, and relationships. Technologies have an “interpretive flexibility” in that different cultural groups will often have differing practices around the same technologies.19 Moreover, technologies, their users or designers, and their cultures or institutions are constructed through inter-relationships that are continuously produced and performed in day-to-day practices and conversation.20 And these relationships are also interactive and multi-directional rather than fixed and
18
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/may/27/business/la-fi-mobile-payments-20110527
19
Pinch & Bijker, 1987
20
Law, J. & Hassard, J. Actor Network Theory and After, 1999.
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There is an ar t to engaging in
hierarchical. Social technologies may provide nearly ubiquitous access to information, but any assumptions that knowledge is simply transmitted are misguided. Social media offer an opportunity to rethink the consumer/company relationship. While there are many views of how knowledge is built, three are most relevant for thinking about how social media might be harnessed to enhance this relationship:
social media. I ts not about your products
1. Rather than transmitting information to consumers, as traditional advertising
or ser vices, its
excelled at, new technologies are best viewed as shared spaces where knowledge is co-constructed in social encounters. Of course, different
about building
technologies offer different opportunities. Whereas Twitter seems well-suited to the dissemination of snippets of information, other media are more about
relationships.
building relationships, whether through status updates, discussions, collective opinionating or public commenting/reviewing. 2. In a similar vein, these technologies excel in fostering what educators call distributed cognition, meaning that knowledge and understanding are distributed across individuals and social groups. Distributed cognition is a way of understanding how, for example, casual reviewing or commenting is a communally shared process of knowledge building across a social network. 3. Finally, John Dewey, one of the most famously pragmatic educational philosophers, argued that we think with and through our technologies, and our thinking advances in concert with our engagements with ever more complex technologies. Technology is thinking, but both are enhanced through active experience.
It is no longer useful to say that technologies change things, without acknowledging that these changes are outcomes of social practices, learning, and distributed knowledge and experiences. Change is not determined by technology, or for that matter, by corporate or institutional dictates. Through social and networked technologies, cultures and values are shared, negotiated, re-evaluated or contested. The active interplay of culture, technologies, and users supports or suppresses relationships of trust and reciprocity. The social technology challenge facing companies lies in figuring out how to effectively build consumer relationships through informed and sensitive engagement with what social media offer today, yet recognizing that these technologies are themselves always in flux, as are the cultures they inhabit. The early 21st Century is about technologies that spark new models and platforms for forming and conducting relationships. Vicki Elam, writer of the Traveling Wine Chick blog posted the following regarding relationships in social media:
I’ve ranted about it many times and still I’m amazed that a lot of people do not get it. There is an art to engaging in social media. Its not about your products or services, its about building relationships. Whether it’s online or offline networking, it’s all about interaction. (http://www.vickielam.com/blogging/
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social-media-the-art-of-engaging/)
Anyone mildly conversant with Google search can find a great deal of advice on how to build and retain relationships online. Few of these outline any research or evidence to back up their advice. Therefore, we ought to be asking on what basis advice can be trusted to produce results. The following news feeds culled from several marketing sites emphasize this relational aspect of social media: March 10, 2010: “Conversations will be your gateway to dialogue where relationships will begin.”21 April 6, 2011: “Relationships and bonds of friendship … are built on a lot of trust, and contrary to popular belief (or Charlie Sheen), it doesn’t happen overnight. It happens by continually being of value to the other individual.”22 May 11, 2011: “Click-stream data from customers of Dell and two other major brands show that while social media affected their purchase decisions, the companies’ Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts factored little.”23
Additionally, having built websites and Facebook presences, retailers are increasingly encouraged to install interactive kiosks into the retail environment. For example, Jim Dudlicek, writing in Progressive Grocer (May 10)24 says that:
As more shoppers seek the convenience of online shopping, retailers will need to enhance the in-store experience for tech-savvy consumers looking to get more out of their brick-and-mortar shopping trips.
The question however, is what this enhancement will look like. As social, mobile technologies make the retail space less necessary, what new need or experience will retail offer? If consumers can get convenient shopping at home via their computers or smartphones, why would they need or want this same experience when they venture out to the store? Companies need to consider how their retail (and online) spaces might be incrementally and organically recalibrated as the result of technological, spatial and human interactions within their environments. Another open question is how trust or reciprocity are built and tuned via social technologies. It is hard to conceive how casual reviewing and commenting sprouted on social media sites independent of humans’ conventional social assessment tools (the tenor of a voice, eye contact, facial expressions, or body language. Yet casual commenting and reviewing are now widespread practices. Who among us does not go online to
21
http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-social-media-monitoring-tools-to-build-relationships-and-links-38243
22
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2040791/building-solid-relationships-social-media-communities
23
http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2040791/building-solid-relationships-social-media-communities
24
http://www.progressivegrocer.com/top-stories/special-features/center-store/id32693/steering-shoppers-to-the-center/)
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check others’ comments before purchasing online, going to a retail store, selecting a new restaurant, or settling on a new recipe? Amazon.com may have begun as a convenient and price-conscious space to buy books, but it thrives today as a premiere social media space of casual commenting and reviewing. In these virtual spaces, commenters and audience (as well as companies) may have never met. Yet, despite few traditional means of assessing potential trust, people do rely on strangers’ recommendations of not only books, but also, which brands of packaged foods, which computer or mobile technology is most reliable, or how to proceed with a medical diagnosis or treatment. How is it that a social media technology can transform basic transactions into complex social and ethical negotiations across geographically and culturally diverse strangers?
Framing a New Research Agenda Hartman Group aims to get beyond speculative advice regarding how and why social media can build better consumer/company relationships by producing concrete knowledge about a number of open, yet under-asked questions. Research on consumer culture and social technologies begins with the premise that social media enable people to do what they love: communicate and form social groups. The lack of attention to culture and contexts, however, limits what we know about why and how social media is integrated into people’s lives and thus, how it is reshaping consumer culture. Hartman Group sees an exciting era of new, dynamic opportunities made possible by new social technologies as companies and consumers interact in new ways and in new kinds of spaces. There is, however, a growing need to get beyond the assumptions, hype and myths about how social media is used and about the consumer practices and cultural shifts that are emerging.
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A HARTMAN GROUP SYNDICATED STUDY
Social Connections 2011 Hartman Group’s Social Connections syndicated study will shed light on where the cultures of social media and technology and foods & beverages intersect. The study will uncover opportunities, highlight perils, and make strategic recommendations on how stakeholders within the food and beverage industry can effectively engage consumers and influence path to purchase in a fast-paced, ever-evolving digital world. KEY TOPIC AREAS
AREAS OF EXPLORATION
In 2011, through the Social Connections study, Hartman Group will build a foundation upon which to probe deep into topic areas and develop the baseline for longitudinal tracking data. The social media and technology topic areas are designed to uncover the five “Ws” of social connections: Who, What, Where, When and Why. These topic areas fall under three broad categories of social media and technology:
In today’s rapidly evolving digital marketplace, it is imperative to understand the emerging behaviors and issues surfacing among consumers. As a thoughtstarter, this study will focus on questions such as the following. Early study sponsors have the benefit of including their own questions into the study design as well as purchasing proprietary questions (contact us for cost estimate).
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Share (learn, recommend, comment)
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Choose (products, brands, stores, restaurants)
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Use (multiple media platforms—online, mobile, social, video—devices,
Understanding the Broad Culture of Social Connectivity and Food •
Social Media Behavior
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Social Media Marketing & Shopping Behavior
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Technology
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Experience
protocols)
The study will look at the distinctions between on-the-go, in-the-moment behaviors and at-home and at-work social media and technology behaviors.
For a detailed list of questions and methodology, contact: Blaine Becker, Sr. Director of Marketing & Business Relations (425) 452 0818, ext 124 blaine@hartman-group.com
HARTMAN GROUP, INC 3150 RICHARDS ROAD, STE 200 BELLEVUE, WA 98005 tel 425-452-0818 fax 425-452-9092 HARTMAN-GROUP.COM
Copyright © 2011 The Hartman Group, Inc