Social Media Summit: What Is the ROI of Social Media? Part 2 featuring Harvard Fellow danah boyd

Speaker: danah boyd (all lowercase, stet) Microsoft, Harvard Fellow
http://www.danah.org/

Core differences between adults and teens?

Youth went to these sites (MySpace etc), social hangout place when they can’t leave the house
    Gossip, jockey for status, great efforts to showcase selves to ppl they know, not everybody
    Spend a lot of time lying to the system not to their friends
   
Process of social grooming, social stroking → small talk, water cooler, it all just happens online now

Teens will project out rather than converse, it’s “about me”

You want to know about someone

Teens say 25 things that entertain them “now”
Adults list things that happened in the last 25 years

Teens/adults see the media differently

Median age of Twitter is 31, it’s going higher, teens not engaging in the site

Twitter is all about being public: this who I am and what I stand for, don’t care what ppl think

Teens don’t have that kind of freedom w/o ramifications

User group: white, affluent

Take-away: You should design for intended audience, but you don’t always get the target group

Things morph out in the wild

Your early adopters will set the tone, techies aren’t necessarily the best population