I want to wax quixotic about my job a little bit. As I’ve explained before, one of the projects I’m working on “starts from a simple enough assertion: People want to be better at their jobs. My goal is to deliver a product that will help satisfy that desire.” Part of my task is discover if this product needs to include the social networking technologies that are collectively called Web 2.0. Let’s do some investigating and find out.
Last week, BusinessWeek published a chart of who is participating on the social networking sites, and how they are participating. The data is not too surprising: people using social network sites are young. Here are some of the details:
- Content creators are between the ages of 12 and 26.
- Critics skew a little older on the chart, but few exceed the age of 40.
- Hardly anyone is a collector: they don’t use RSS, they don’t utilize tagging, etc.
- The percentage of joiners is huge, with 70% of 18-21 year olds signing up for some social networking site, 51% of 12-18 years old, and 57% of 22-26 year olds. Only 15% of 41-50 year olds have joined a social networking site.
- The percentage of each age group that counts themselves as spectators is high across the board, ranging from 59% in the 18-21 year old market to 19% in the 62+ demographic.
- Only 17% of 18-21 year olds consider themselves completely inactive in the social networking scene, compared to 42% of the 27-40 year olds, and over half of all web-using 51-61 year olds.
Aside from the fact that social networkers are young, what might all this mean for a person who would build a social networking site?
Well, if you’re site depends upon original content created by your users, then you’d better be aware that most of your creators are going to be between the ages of 12 and 26. For a site that focuses on career development, there’s very little that your average 19-year-old kid is going to be able to contribute to your community, simply by virtue of not being old enough to hold a professional position.
(Of course, you could focus your site on the entry-level market, which would mean your whole market is part of the social networking revolution, but then you’d only wind up with a social echo-chamber, with no “wise old elders” around to give sage advice to those who need it the most, those just taking their first steps into the world of business. On the other hand, with 41% of 27-40 years old and 31% of 41-50 year olds counting themselves as spectators, it might be possible to develop a site that is positioned as the young’s place to seek wisdom from their elders. The trick is to turn spectators (those who view) into critics (those who comment, rate, and review). Then you can have the youth market creating your content and the older markets commenting and reviewing that content. The simple version of this site gives the younger generations the opportunity to question those who have come before them. But in order to work, it must convert the spectators into critics. The site has to, literally, invite the older market to actively participate. It’s just an idea.)
Perhaps the largest concern, however, might be that only 29% of 27-40 year olds and 15% of 41-50 year olds have joined a social networking site. If you’re interested in a site that focuses on career development, these are the people you want to talk to the most. They are the ones who have enough experience to even consider such a thing as career development. They have matured beyond the stage of needing a job to the stage of desiring a career. Their concerns go beyond the paycheck, and reach into the topics of insurance, retirement planning, corporate culture, corporate ethics, etc. Their views are mature and their opinions are often more valid. How many people want to hear career advice from a 22-year-old kid who only applied for his current job because he didn’t want to go back home after college?
If you’re going to build a site focused on career development, then you have to know from the start that your ideal network simply isn’t social enough yet. The next question is why? Once you answer that, you can proceed to the final question: Are you brazen enough to think you can change their ways?
19 Comments
Kyle, what were your thoughts on An Inconvenient Truth?
I thought it was amazing…in a “scare the shit out of you” kind of way.
This is my second time watching it. The first time I saw a really crappy version (filmed by a dude with a cheap video-camera in a movie theater), but this time I saw the DVD. While I got the gist of it the first time, the charts and numbers were now more than blurry little pixels, and so the effect was greater.
If I can connect this up with the post I just wrote about Sicko, the healthcare documentary by Michael Moore, and my question as to whether my family should move out of this country…
One of the places I would love to go is Ireland (having done no research on the place). But then I started thinking about what Gore says in The Inconvenient Truth, where he is describing the way the ocean’s current works, and how, way back when Canada was a huge glacial lake and the glacial dam broke and dumped all that cold, fresh water right onto the current, turning it off and sending Europe back into the Ice Age, and how Gore then says, “Hmmm, is there any other giant slab of ice that is melting that could do this again?” and the map shows Greenland. If most of this shit could go down during our lifetime, do I really want to be living in Ireland when it does?
So yeah, it scared the shit out of me. Again.
Kyle that senerio, the day after tomorrow senerio, is unproven. Way too many variables.
Unproven, sure. But scary as hell nonetheless.
Well so is a giant meteor slamming into the earth, or a radioactive lizard eating Japan. Either way if you want to live in Ireland don’t let an ice age stop you, and believe you me if that does happen I am sure vermont will also be in the shitter.
True…the chance of this happening (a shutdown of the thermohaline cycle) is unknown, largely because there are so many variables.
However, the existence of so many variables is exactly why we need to take action to avoid this scenario. The climate system is similar to a pencil balancing on its tip…a tiny push in any direction could lead to major unbalancing.
Even if we don’t know how all the variables work together (and we likely never will), do we want to put ourselves in the position of finding out what happens when the climate becomes unbalanced?
Poultney, VT:
Killarney, IE (closest city to the highest peak in Ireland):
One of these is going to be underwater. The other…well, it might just be really cold.
Of course, with global warming, they say Vermont is going to have the climate of North Carolina in the next hundred years. Since we only had winter between mid-January and April this year, you might say we’re almost there.
they say a lot of things.
Dovev, I agree although I think the climate is a little more stable then a pencil on a tip. I think it has already proven to be remarkably resilient considering all the crap we have done to it. If it were a pencil on the tip it would have fallen over a long time ago. I think it is more like an elastic band; we keep on stretching it more and more. This makes the elastic band less likely to snap back as well as it once did, and then at some point it will either break or not resemble the what it once did.
Justin…I really don’t think we can call the climate system resilient. The amount of time humans have been able to affect the climate system (through burning fossil fuels) is VERY brief (140 years, which is a blink of an eye when you consider how old the Earth is), and yet we’re already starting to see noticeable changes in the climate.
The problem with sitting around and waiting to find out if you’re right about how much the “elastic band can stretch” is that we’ll never fully understand the variables influencing the climate system. There are three things we can be sure of:
1. Carbon dioxide has an insulating effect on incoming heat from the sun
2. There hasn’t been this much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 650,000 years
3. Man-made carbon dioxide has skyrocketed since 1865.
4. Global temperature trends have steadily risen (with slight dips) since that time
These are all FACTS. So how can we sit around and say the earth’s climate is resilient, when the facts point to definite warming trends?
I guess my problem is with semantics on an analogy. When I think of a pencil on its tip I think that when it falls we are talking global environmental destruction. I think with the elastic band as we stretch it we damage it but it rebounds a little but never back to where it started. At some point we may end up at a global environmental destruction, but I think (hope) there is more flexibility.
I hope there’s flexibility too. However, the problem is that climate impacts are largely irreversible…once we experience things like arctic melt and rising sea levels (already happening, by the way), we CANNOT undo these things. This, unfortunately, does lead to global environmental destruction. I’m not trying to be a doomsayer here…in fact, I’d love it if I were wrong about this. But facts are facts, and it’s time to get serious about this stuff!
50 years ago it was time to get serious about this stuff. If you are right and we have already pushed the pencil over what would be the point of getting serious now? Slowing down the inevitable? Kinda like grooming a dead dog?
That is the absolute worst thing I’ve heard about this freakin’ issue. And what’s ridiculous is you’re a smart guy, smarter than most of the people I’ve met, and that’s what you’re saying.
You want to play the fiddle while Rome burns. That’s just sad, man.
Kyle get off your soap box.
I didn’t like the pencil tipping analogy and that is the reason why, it leaves no hope.
No…I’m saying that the pencil hasn’t been pushed over yet, but we’re getting very close to doing so. I do not want to be around when that happens.
What have you heard to make this appear inevitable?
However, the problem is that climate impacts are largely irreversible…once we experience things like arctic melt and rising sea levels (already happening, by the way), we CANNOT undo these things. This, unfortunately, does lead to global environmental destruction.
Irreversible-already happening-lead to global destruction.
This is getting out of hand the only thing I had a problem with was the analogy of the pencil, thats it.
Fair enough.
I thought you were saying we shouldn’t do anything about the issue because it was already “too late.”
My bad. I apologize.
I do not believe it is too late but I think it will be very hard to stop and reverse things.
If you didn’t like that you don’t want to hear my “recycling is a scam” rant.
All the more reason to get started now.
I’m interested in the recycling rant…provided you can back it up with real information.