At the Search Insider Summit in Park City, we tried something new that turned out to be a fascinating experiment in Millennial behavior. We invited 5 college students to get on stage and just tell us how they used technology in their day to day lives. It was moderated by Michelle Prieb from Ball State University.



Some of the key things I heard in the anecdotal comments:

80% plus of all video watched is consumed online

These students live with a computer, generally a laptop. Some don’t even own a TV. Therefore, it makes sense that the primary distribution channel for video would be online. Watching TV was said to be “going out of their way”, which is an interesting metaphor. It used to be that “going online” felt like a journey somewhere, where as “watching TV” was just absorbing our environment. If Steven Pinker is right and you can understand how the mind works by the metaphors we use, the students choice of words indicates they’ve flipped this attitude. Online is the environment and the TV lives somewhere outside that environment. Again, this ties in well with everything we discovered about Digital Natives in The BuyerSphere Project.

The other interesting thing about consumption of online video is the ability to time shift to meet their schedule. Even I, well advanced into Digital Immigrant status, find myself appreciating the flexibility offered by digital video. I’m probably consuming between 30 and 50% of my video through an online connection. That’s a fundamental shift in viewing behaviors, and like so many other things, it means the traditional revenue models are shaking and crumbling.

Speaking about crumbling revenue models, here’s another area where marketer’s savvy is severely lagging market adoption. Few marketers have had the appetite to experiment with placing ads in online video offerings, which means the ad inventory is paltry, to say the least. We quickly get sick of seeing the same boring ads over and over again on Hulu (a strong favorite amongst our panel) or other video sites. Our Millennial panel was quick to use words like “boring”, “annoying”, “irritating” and “hate”. As one Summit attendee said to me, it’s the “dirty little secret” that the effectiveness of these ads is hindered by the company they keep. There’s little that’s creatively interesting or, lowering the bar further, not out and out annoying about these ads. We ignore them because we need to maintain our sanity and the same UPS ad being seen for the 27th time does not capture the loyalty of a fickle market.

Another interesting fact was how they found videos. Like most viewers, they had a few shows they were dedicated to and would go directly to Hulu.com or another similar site to watch them. But when it came to viral video, they depended almost completely on word of mouth, filtered through Facebook. Twitter was not a factor in WOM recommendations (only one of the five even used it regularly).

Facebook is the one site they can’t live without

The panel was asked if they could pick one and only one online destination for a month, what would it be. All chose Facebook.

Facebook plays a huge part in the lives of these Millennials. They spend anywhere from 2 to 8 hours a day on it. As I said, it has become their native environment and their main point of contact, but with some important qualifiers (see additional points later in this post). It was fascinating to see how these students had incorporated Facebook into the structure of their social network. This goes beyond being a home page or portal. It  is almost more an umbilical cord, the primary point of connection with the outside world. Through this pipeline comes a steady stream of recommendations (viral content, video, face-to-face social events), updates, gossip, rumors, news, personal messages and other social lubricants. In fact, much of the everyday stuff of our lives that we take for granted as social animals came delivered to this group via Facebook. It’s no wonder that everyone is looking at how to make a buck on it. More about that later in this post.

Whenever I talk about the differences between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants I usually use Facebook as an example. There are always a group of Immigrants in their 30’s, 40’s or 50’s who protest – saying they are also frequent users of Facebook. But it’s an order of magnitude difference. Again, this is not so much about usage as it is about attitudes towards technology. Fervent Facebook Fans in the Digital Immigrant camp may visit the site a few times a week, even once or twice a day – but these Digital Natives had Facebook open all the time, for several hours a day. Again, this is not a destination you visit, this is an environment you live in. And that seems to be the crucial difference.

Facebook is primarily used to maintain the “weak ties” in their social networks

A few comments from the panel provided clues as to how they weave Facebook into their social network. “I know everyone on Facebook” and “I use it to keep in touch with people I don’t care about so much.” 

Mark Granovetter in his ground breaking work on social networks back in the 70’s discovered that our social networks are made up of dense clumps of close friends and family, bound by “strong ties”, and these various social clumps are connected much more loosely by “weak ties.” Weak ties are what you use to maintain contact with acquaintances. But, as Granovetter showed in some fascinating experiments, those weak ties are vitally important in the spread of news and gossip, as well as fuelling word of mouth recommendations, getting job referrals, calling in favors and even product recommendations. And it’s exactly these kinds of ties that our Millennials are maintaining through Facebook. They don’t need it to stay in touch with their close clusters, because they see them every day. They use it to stay in touch with more distant family, people they went to high school with and even old boyfriends and girlfriends – the people one panelist said “I don’t care so much about.” This creates some interesting social dynamics.

The social network of teenagers is vitally important. This is when they start to sharpen their skills as social animals, so their friends become disproportionately important to them. They can’t believe their best friend in high school won’t be their BFF (which my daughter tells me stands for Best Friend Forever) and even if they attend different colleges, it is important to “stay in touch”. Not coincidentally, the concept of Facebook was spawned by people going through this very phase in their lives. The question is, as people move on with their lives, starting families and making the inevitable adjustments to their social network, will the importance of Facebook start to wane?

They get their news online, if at all..

I’m not so sure whether this is a result of the adoption of technology or just a symptom of where our panelists were in their lives, but they seemed to have little interest in the outside world, or at least, news of the outside world as delivered through traditional media channels. Again, they relied on news spread through their online social network, delivered through Facebook. And this was the one place where they were more apt to turn to Twitter and real time search tools like OneRiot and others. They didn’t make it a priority to set time aside to “be informed”, whether it be watching TV news or reading a newspaper. One panelist did do this, but the rest seemed content to let news filter in through their online channels.

In general, this seems to reinforce my previous thoughts about the erosion of the “destination” model of news publishing and our shift to a “just in time” news economy, powered by Google and real time search.  If this shift marks a cross-generational trend, the demise of standard news outlets and publishers that rely on outmoded revenue channels might be a lot sooner than even I expected.

There’s a delicate balance to what’s acceptable and what’s not when it comes to commercial content on Facebook

So, if Facebook becomes the environment for Millennials, the revenue opportunities must be vast, right? Not so fast. You see, we have this tricky little thing called social norms to consider.  These are the unwritten rules of behavior necessary to keep groups functioning smoothly and they use our concepts of reciprocity and fairness as their underpinnings. Game theory has shown that groups generally stabilize around rules that ensure all members benefit from a “tit for tat” approach.  Although one member might think that they can reap greater benefits by consistently taking advantage of all the other members, this isn’t a sustainable strategy. The group eventually wises up and shuts down this weakness in the group’s structure.

In any group, social norms dictate what’s acceptable and what’s not. This is true whether we’re talking a church prayer group or a street gang. So, it’s no surprise that these rules of conduct are also emerging in our online groups. The challenge comes when there are pressures by the caretakers of the group to generate revenue. Logically, if you have a group of people gathering to talk about things, it makes sense to try to steer those conversations down commercially viable paths. But, as Facebook learned in trying to introduce advertising vehicles, including the astoundingly ill-thought out Beacon, there are several social norm landmines you have to step around.

The Millennial panel made it clear that they’re okay with non intrusive  ads that don’t cross the line of what is socially acceptable, but marketers seem to have a tough time staying on the right side of that line. The panel universally condemned ads that use rich media to interrupt, ads that take over the screen and interstitials that lodge themselves between the user and what that user really wants to do. They also showed remarkable savvy about what is an ad on the page, how to avoid them and even about more advanced targeting strategies. It comes down to a cat and mouse game, with these users getting better at ignoring ads and advertisers becoming more desperate to catch the user’s attention. It became clear that user intent seems to make the big difference, with sophisticated behavioral targeting seeming to be the best way to identify potential intent (short of search, where intent is explicitly stated).

Millennials Don't Spend a Lot of Time thinking about Privacy

Privacy was a non-issue with the panel. In fact, they had spent very little time thinking about it. If privacy got in the way of online functionality, there was no contest - functionality would always win.

It seems that a surrender of a certain degree of privacy just seems to be the price of entry into a more functional online world. The Orwellian implications seem to be more concerning to the prior generations.

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