16.4 Current Trends in Electronic Media
Learning Objectives
- Determine popular trends in social networking.
- Describe the concept of membership-only websites that cater to specific audiences.
- Explain the use and appeal of electronic applications.
What do your former high school classmates do for a living? What does your favorite celebrity think about the current president’s administration? What do other professionals in your field think about industry trends? Which restaurant do your coworkers frequent? Before the turn of the century, these questions would most likely elicit blank stares, but thanks to the exponential growth of electronic media—social networking in particular—people can now keep track of past and present contacts via the Internet, sometimes in exhaustive detail. As social media continues to grow in popularity, marketers, advertisers, and businesses have looked for ways to use this transformative technology to increase revenue and improve customer service. Meanwhile, social networking sites have expanded into commerce, connecting businesses and consumers via third-party sites so that people can bring a network of friends to partner websites. Facebook Connect , for example, enables a consumer to visit a partner site such as Forever 21, find a pair of jeans on sale, and broadcast the information to everyone on her Facebook network. If a few Facebook friends do the same thing, the information can create an effective viral marketing campaign for the partner site. A more secure version of the ill-fated Beacon (see Chapter 11 “The Internet and Social Media” ), Facebook Connect extends the Facebook platform out of the social network’s walls, creating one giant network on the web.
The development of smartphone applications, which allow users to access or post information regardless of their location, compounded the current trend toward immediacy (instant X updates, instant Google searches, instant driving directions from Yahoo! Maps ). For example, a person shopping for a particular product can instantly compare the price of that product across an entire range of stores using the Android ShopSavvy app, while someone new to an area can immediately locate a gas station, park, or supermarket using iPhone’s AroundMe a pp. Industry insiders have coined the term nowism to describe the instant gratification that users can now achieve by engaging with real-time content on the web. Sparked by social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the real-time trend looks set to continue, with companies from all types of industries jumping on the immediacy bandwagon.
Social Networking Continues to Grow
The growth of social media over the past few years has been exponential; according to Nielsen, Twitter alone grew 1,382 percent in February 2009, registering 7,000,000 unique visitors in the United States for the month. By February 2010, Twitter had 75,000,000 registered users and between 10,000,000 and 15,000,000 active tweeters (Gaudin, 2010). Meanwhile, Facebook has more than 400 million active users worldwide, according to its website, with each user averaging 130 Facebook friends. In February 2010, Facebook was declared the web’s most popular site, with users spending an average of more than 7 hours a month on the site; more than the amount of time spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and MSN combined (Parr, 2010).
Initially conceived in 2004 as a website for students to keep in touch over the Internet and get to know each other better, Facebook has since developed into the world’s largest social networking site. In addition to connecting friends and acquaintances and enabling users to share photos, links, and multimedia, the site (along with other social networking sites such as MySpac e) has branched out into social gaming, a rapidly growing industry that allows users to download free games through the site and play online with friends and family members. Appealing to a wide demographic—including people who rarely play video games—social games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars are free to play, but generate revenue for developers by offering additional bonuses or virtual goods for paying players. A recent survey found that most of the revenue generated by the social gaming audience comes from a small percentage of players (around 10 percent) who spend money on social networking games. Out of that 10 percent, just 2 percent of people, described as the “whales” of the social gaming industry, spend more than $25 a month on social games. Inside Network founder Justin Smith, who coauthored the survey, said, “It is clear that people either spend a lot of money or spend nothing (Takahashi, 2010).” The games, which primarily appeal to the female over-40 demographic, are designed so that Facebook users can spend a few minutes playing several times a day. In the United States, 55 percent of social network game players are women, and the average age is 48 (Johnson, 2010).
Other continuing trends in social networking include microblogging on sites such as X, which rapidly became the source of the fastest information on the Internet. The site acts as a personal newswire, passing on information about shared world events as they affect people in real time. For example, when an earthquake shook Los Angeles in 2008, people began tweeting personal accounts from their homes 9 minutes before the Associated Press picked up the story. In 2009, citizens of Iran bypassed government censorship by tweeting news of the election results across the world. Organizations such as the Associated Press communicated with Twitter users to receive information about the resulting protests and demonstrations (Santana, 2009).
An Excess of Apps
In April 2009, Apple celebrated the 1 billionth download from its App Store. Launched in July 2008, the online venue for third-party iPhone and iPod Touch applications initially offered consumers 500 apps, ranging from shortcuts to websites such as Facebook and eBay to games and useful online services. Although competing smartphones such as the Treo and BlackBerry offered similar application facilities, Apple’s App Store quickly became the most successful platform for mobile software, averaging around $1,000,000 a day in iPhone application sales during the first month of its existence (Morrison, 2008). Under a revenue-sharing agreement, the company keeps 30 percent of any income generated and gives the other 70 percent to third-party app developers. By April 2011, the App Store offered around 350,000 applications, aiding iPhone and iPad users with numerous daily activities, ranging from identifying an unknown song, to finding a nearby gas station, to matching the color of a photograph taken by the iPhone with a database of paint colors. Unlike many commercials that exaggerate a product’s abilities, Apple’s tagline “There’s an app for that” does not miss the mark.
