Is Social Media shrinking the digital divide?

In the age of the super information highway, the "Haves" whirl around the Internet faster than the "Have Nots" and that's called the digital divide. But a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that the gap is closing.

Respondents living in households whose annual household income is $20,000 or
less, saw broadband adoption grow from 25% in 2008 to 35% in 2009.

Respondents living in households whose annual incomes are between $20,000
and $30,000 annually experienced a growth in broadband penetration from 42% to
53%.

By comparision, the nation average for broadband access currently stands at 63% and there was relatively little growth in broadband access among the nation's wealthiest households. Between 2008 and 2009, broadband adoption for households with income of greater than $75,000 grew from 84% to 85%.

Clearly, we may be shrinking the digital divide, but we have acres of room to go and this is where social media comes in. Beyond the hype, the applications and visual media on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter provides a reason for non-information workers and their kids to have/need high-speed Internet. Accessing most of this information via dial up is a flat out pain in the neck.

A little background on why we became a fast speed nation.

Many have argued that Napster had more to do with increasing broadband subscription rates than any application before or since. With the emergence of Napster and its huge multi-mega-bit files, people abandoned dial up in droves, not wanting to wait hours to download an album when broadband access could reduce wait times to minutes.

Once the critical mass of broadband users flocked to the Internet, companies and their marketers could move away from text heavy Web sites to graphically pleasing multi-media sites. For a fun example of then and now, compare NASA's home page circa 2000 with today's fun site.

For the end user, faster browsing speeds meant exactly that, and jumping from site to site was a breeze, not a huge time suck. If you landed on a bad page, you could instantly jump off to a new direction. Cruising the Web went from a rush hour traffic jam experience to a rocket-propelled tour of the World Wide Web.

You can't put toothpaste back in the tube, and according to the Pew Project, you can't go back to dial up. Their research shows that when times are hard, people will cut their MTV and cable packages before they sacrifice the speed of a broadband connection.

So what has changed in the past year to warrant a better than 25% increase in broadband access among the nations poorest households? Well, the economy to be sure, but as it has gone south, broadband access has climbed, seeming in definance of the recession.

So again, what is different? You guessed it, millions of people signed onto Facebook and Twitter, which saw year-over-year gains of 253% and 1043%, respectively.

Like Napster ten years ago, social media is changing how people use the Internet. To date, marketers have focused on how to make money using social media. The real question is how do you make money on all of these people who are new to broadband.

Or is that what Fan Pages are all about?

Why Social Media is like 1973 again, minus the bellbottoms

Most people in marketing and PR can think back to a time when the family living room was a place families gathered as a group to watch television and listen to music.

Back then, just about anyone in America regardless of age could sing the lyrics to any number of Jackson 5 tunes. In the same way, just about anyone could sing the theme song to Gilligan's Island. These were touch stones, the foundations of the American experience like baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet. Since the 1970s, none of those institutions is the same.

Beginning in 1973, baseball's apple was tarnished with free agency, strikes and steroids; the apples we eat are either organic, genetically modified or driven here from South America; and despite a brief though unsustainable respite fueled by the sale of SUVs, the U.S. auto industry has never recovered from the 1970s oil crisis.

Following a general loosening of restrictions on cable television, HBO (then known as Home Box Office) launched in 1972, delivering uncut movies into homes across America and television has never been the same.

In 1972, All in the Family delivered a 34.0 rating, meaning one third of all the people in America watched the show and 54 percent of the television sets that were on tuned into that show. If you didn't watch it, you couldn't TiVo it and watch the show later, but you heard about it in school, by the water cooler or on the bus to work.

By comparison, the most highly rated show in 2009, American Idol, captured only ten percent of the U.S. population.

Simply put, network television doesn't deliver audiences like it used to. And now that more people DVR or TiVo their favorite shows, watching those shows without commercial interruption, the audiences are falling faster.

It's been mentioned before, but it bears repeating here, while newspapers have grimly reported their own demise, television taken a more "if we don't talk about the pink elephant in the room, maybe nobody will notice" approach.

But all is not lost for advertisers. Even though audiences have shrunk, niche cable programming has delivered more targeted audience. Advertisers can feel comfortable knowing the eyeballs they are buying on Lifetime's movie channel will certainly be interested in perfume or hair products. Every cable channel delivers its own audience. Social media is a lot like that.

Each medium brings its own audience, but more importantly, it is a self-selecting audience that wants to be there. People join fan pages on Facebook and MySpace because they want to be part of something and find out more about the company. They follow companies on Twitter because they want to be in touch at all times.

It's important to remember that social media is new, just like the Internet was before the Netscape browser that made it easy for the masses to navigate through the wild World Wide Web. It seems some companies were with us from the outset, Amazon and eBay come to mind. Others came on strong later, knocking off more established competitors--hello Google, where have you gone AltaVista?

When I hear people talk about effective social media it's always in terms of case studies, things that have worked in the past. That's because the landscape is changing and we are still writing the rules for social media.

A year ago, it would have been impossible to predict the rise of Twitter. Two months ago, everyone had to have a presence in the Twittersphere. Today, its growth has stopped. Tomorrow remains a mystery. Will everyone ride the Google Wave?

The point is that for communications professionals, we have hit a bend in the river. What is will happen in three or four years is largely an unknown. As we try to negotiate what is a fast moving river, where everything changes at Internet speed, some of the stuff that worked when we through it against a wall yesterday will not work today. An example of this can be seen in how the rules of email marketing evolved due to the rise in spam. How will Twitter react to its own spam slam?

A better question for communications folks is, what is the new Twitter and how will we use it?

If you like to learn on the run and rewrite all the rules, it's never been more fun to be in this game.

Smartphones help life work balance

In a previous post, I noted that smartphones sales have defied current market forces and sales have climbed, despite the ongoing recession. There are some obvious reasons for this, not the least of which is that cell phone contracts expire after two years, and conveniently for the carriers and and cell phone makers, is about the life expectancy of the average phone. Throw in a little bit of smartphone envy created by good marketing and you have the solid recipe for upgrading cell phones every two years.

You also have to look at how human beings are hard wired genetically. We have an inbred need to communicate, to be linked to our friends and family almost all the time.

A recent article in the Times noted that smartphone marketers have taken advantage of this impulse and smartphones have moved from a "nice to have" to "must have" for everyone from corporate corner office types to pre-teens wanting to be cool.

One of the byproducts of having a smartphone is anywhere, everywhere accessibility, and that's 24/7. In the same way that email, WiFi and the laptop made it possible to take your office almost anywhere, smartphones bring an even greater level of accesibility because you don't have to lug around a big laptop case or wait for the machine to power up. While some complain that accessiblity comes at a price because workers are expected to respond to email in more places and more often, I argue the opposite.

Smartphones give their users unlimited mobility. You don't have to lug around a laptop to review a critical email that means you can go to a kid's recital or soccer game without guilt. And downtime in doctors' offices or on commuter trains can be used productively.

If you watch current entertainment, there's a fallacy that Americans aren't supposed to be hard workers, the most successful people almost always are the hardest workers. That's one manifestation of the American dream that does hold. We live in a meritocrary, and smartphones aid workaholics in their quest to achieve some sembalance of a work life balance.

Now, if you want to talk about smartphones and their contribution to the digital divide, well that's the subject of another post.