TEENS +SOCIAL MEDIA

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presented by:

Emily ReevesDirector of Digital Innovation & Insight PlanningJuly 22, 2013

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Key Takeaways For Today

• Embrace the technology

•Accept that the channels change constantly

•Think about privacy differently

• Educate rather than reprimand

•Monitor respectfully

A Look At The Digital World

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Where Teens Fit Into All Of This

@Reeves501@StoneWard

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Currently Favored By Teens

Facebook

• Facebook has a minimum age restriction of 13 years old to create an account. But last year 78% of parents helped create their children’s Facebook pages and 7.5 million users are under the age of 13 and lied about the age associated with the account.

• 94% of American teens still have a Facebook account, but they’re using it less, and using it more carefully.

• More than half have tightened down their privacy settings and regularly delete or edit previous posts.

• But even with tightened privacy settings, teens have realized that Facebook is more like a family picnic than the private party they want it to be. They still share photos and use Facebook messaging, but they are increasingly turning to newer social networks to fill the function of traditional status updates.

Source and Source

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Currently Favored By Teens

Micro Blogging

• While teens do seem to understand privacy much better now than in the early days of social media, they still have a desire to put themselves out there in a public way.

• That’s where microblogs like Tumblr and Pheed come in. The culture that has evolved on these sites is more slanted to creative self-expression than Facebook’s life-casting (telling all the mundane details of your day).  

• Both are deeply skewed towards mobile use, and there are tons of clever and thematic blogs, think Texts from Hillary or Reasons My Son is Crying. Neither are particularly teen-oriented, but there are clear differences in style and content between a Tumblr and a Facebook feed.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Currently Favored By Teens

Twitter

• Twitter saw a doubling of teen users last year.

• And young people use it more publicly than they do Facebook; while teens with Facebook accounts typically keep their postings private, visible only to their friends, only 24% report keeping their tweets private.

• Since Twitter feels more instant than Facebook, it’s a good one to consider if your musings are topical and timely.

• Increasingly, the hot sites among the younger set create private networks, ones that automatically restrict who can see your updates, like Path, which limits your friend list to 150 people.This built-in privacy makes everything feel more personal.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Currently Favored By Teens

Image Sharing

• Instagram is pretty good for photo sharing, especially if you like using their funky filters. Teens thought that it great, until mom and dad showed up there, too.

• So then came Snapchat, a way to send pics that self-destruct after being viewed. Except that assuming what you send will really disappear is fraught with peril, since the recipient can grab a permanent screen shot of a picture before its deleted. Still, Snapchat is hot – to the tune of 150 million snaps a day – for good reason: it is a fun way to share casual, goofy pics that aren’t meant to signify deep meaning in your life. Just remember that, as with anything you post digitally, “deleting” may not really mean it can’t come back to haunt you.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Currently Favored By Teens

Messaging/Chatting Services

• To save money on texting fees, teens these alternatives: Kik and WhatsApp have bitten into Facebook messaging, especially here in the US. Teens send an average of 60 texts per day.

• Kik: It is rated 17+ in the App Store. You need to know someone’s username to start an online chat. However, many teens are using Instagram to share their Kik username. If you look at some of the comments on some pictures in Instagram, you will see some that say “Kik me at” or “my Kik name is”. So, what is going on here is that these people are using Kik Messenger to have online chats. Comments on Instagram are public, the chats on Kik are not. This is where the danger lies. Make sure Instagram accounts are set to private to avoid strangers starting conversations with kids on Kik.

Source, Source and Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Currently Favored By Teens

Messaging/Chatting Services

• WhatsApp: Yet WhatsApp already has more users than Twitter and in June crossed the 250 million active-user plateau. On its biggest day, 27 billion messages were sent with the service. Part of the popularity is that it works on whatever device you have — iOS, Android, et al. — but another significant part is the company’s anti-advertising stance.

Source, Source and Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

The Good

• Teens who use social media are more sympathetic to other people: 55% of teens from the ages of 13 to 17 said that Facebook and Twitter opened their eyes to what others are experiencing.

• Engaging with kids on social media sites helps strengthen the bond between parent and child. A study found that teens who were the most connected to their parents on Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media felt closer to them in real life. Those teens were also less likely to be depressed, delinquent or behave aggressively.

• Building networks and connections at a young age can help with college admissions and job searches later in life. If they are careful with content.

Source and Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Zach Sobiech

• Last December, cancer patient Zach Sobiech posted a song he wrote for his friends and family onto YouTube as a way to say goodbye.

• The song, "Clouds," ended up inspiring thousands of people across the country, and his family started the Zach Sobiech Osteosarcoma Fund to support research into the rare form of cancer Zach suffered from.

• “'Clouds' was originally written for just my family and others who I love, but it’s meant to raise awareness for childhood cancer because I often think it gets forgotten about," Zach said.

• Zach passed away May 20, 2013 and the song had 3 million views at the time.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Minddrive

• In May, a group of high school students from Missouri who are involved in an after-school program called Minddrive -- a non-profit that inspires at-risk teens by focusing on electric car design -- built a car fueled entirely by social media.

• The teens restored an older car and programmed it to be powered by social media interactions like hashtagging #MindDrive on Twitter and Instagram, liking their Facebook page and watching their YouTube video.

• The students then used all of the social fuel they accumulated to drive from Missouri to Washington D.C. in order to meet with elected officials to raise awareness about the benefits of this innovative kind of education.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

The Bad

• Young girls feel they have to be on display with social media.

• Professionals say social media has a more powerful influence on teenage girls than traditional media because it is so pervasive and interactive.

• Comments from peers are of the utmost importance. A lot of the commentary is very appearance focused.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

The Ugly

• Sexting

Source

Embrace Technology

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Why You Should Embrace It

• There are positive aspects to social media: it gives introverts an outlet to express themselves, it teaches kids how to talk to each other, and education can be infused into the channels.

• If you don’t use it and understand it yourself, you cannot talk to the kids about how to use social media properly and the dangers of using it improperly.

• It can be fun.

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How You Should Embrace It

• Every couple of months, Google “what apps are teens using” and do a little bit of research. Download those apps and use them yourself.

• Develop a network of adult “testers” and all agree to download these apps and use them among that group to understand how users interact with each other on that app.

• Invite a guest speaker every six months to come in and educate your faculty on the latest apps.

Accept That Channels Change Constantly

@Reeves501@StoneWard

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You Will Never Know Everything

• Something new comes out every day. By the time you hear about an app, your kids may have been using it for six months and have now moved on to something else.

DON’T GET OVERWHELMED.But, go learn about these now:

InstagramSnapChat

KikWhatsApp

TumblrPheed

Think About Privacy Differently

@Reeves501@StoneWard

@Reeves501@StoneWard

What Is Privacy?

• Teens are using more social media and sharing more on those platforms. Key findings indicate social media-using teens are not very concerned about third-party access to their data on the sites, are more likely to use a range of social media sites if they have a large Facebook network, and are participating in social media differently depending on race.

• More generally, teens are more focused on their social privacy and managing the boundaries of their information sharing from their peers and from other adults in their lives — their parents, their teachers. To the extent to which the advertisers are accessing the information that’s shared on social media sites, that’s not something that’s top-level concern. There are different experiences and different levels of awareness among teens.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

What Is Privacy?

• Teens care a lot about privacy, but they’re not thinking about government agencies or corporate marketing. They’re thinking about people who hold immediate power over them — parents, teachers, college admissions officers, military recruiters, etc. These are the “third parties” that they care about and that they work to manage their privacy in light of. But typically journalists and adults focus on how teens’ data can be used by marketers. In this sense, teens and adults are equally clueless and ambivalent.

• Increasingly the newer platforms are appealing to teens, because they’re new and they’re providing a way for them to compartmentalize their interactions with smaller groups of people, more interest-focused. There are some interesting differences around platforms that seek to be a fundamental part of daily life and logistics and communications and those that are maybe more focused on creativity and self-expression.

Source

Educate Rather Than Reprimand

@Reeves501@StoneWard

@Reeves501@StoneWard

You Already Know This

• Teens are losing out on the ability to learn about and read social cues. They cannot learn to read non-verbal behavior properly if most of their interacting goes on in the virtual world.

• Your teens need to learn how to deal with free time without staring at a screen. With less screen time,they will have more opportunity to learn how to relax and use leisure time.

• Social media creates excessive drama. This is because positive messages are read as more neutral than they are intended to be; neutral messages are read as more negative as they are intended to be and one can only imagine what happens with messages that are intended to be negative.

• Teens need to learn to be present in the moment. They lose the ability to interact mindfully in the moment.

• Teens are more aggressive and sexual when they feel anonymous and are communicating electronically. Things can get out of hand very quickly with both cyber-bullying and sexuality, as we are painfully aware.

Source

@Reeves501@StoneWard

You Already Know This

Source

But Your TEENAGERS

Do Not

Monitor Respectfully

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@Reeves501@StoneWard

How To Monitor

• Learn about these technologies first hand. There is simply no better way than to have a profile yourself. It will also enable you to "friend" your kids and monitor them on line.

• Let them know that their use of technology is something you want and need to know about. Share a bit about your daily social media use as a way to facilitate daily conversation about your kids’ online habits.

• Talk with parents about what their kids of similar ages are using for social media.

• Suggest that parents check chat logs, emails, files and social networking profiles for inappropriate content, friends, messages, and images periodically.  And recommend that they be transparent and let your kids know what you are doing.

Source

Summary

@Reeves501@StoneWard

@Reeves501@StoneWard

Summary

• With the influx of individuals in their 30s, 40s, 50s and older joining and becoming more active on Facebook, teenagers are becoming less active or less willing to share as much on the platform. They feel it’s “less cool” and also don’t want their parents to see everything they share.

• Photos, Photos, and more Photos: Teens love to take and share photos, especially on apps like Instagram where you can play around with the filters and make them look unique and fun. Teens feel they can have just as good of a conversation on Instagram as they had on Facebook through the comments under pictures.

• Privacy? - Teens although caring about not having their parents see their content, are sometimes more carefree with what they share. Some pictures show more than they should; they share contact information; and connect with as many friends and celebrities as possible – because they can.

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Questions?

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THANK YOU.

Emily ReevesDirector of Digital Innovation & Insight Planningereeves@stoneward.com@Reeves501@StoneWardwww.stoneward.comwww.waitingfortheelevator.com