Yesterday I started pondering my use of Twitter. Of course, I use it to promote my blogs, but its more than that. It's almost a way to break up my day. I'm the type of person that needs to skip around from project to project and in between, I check twitter to see what everyone else is saying/doing. My usage typically increases when (a) I don't really have a lot going on at work or (b) ironically, when I have too much going on and am completely stressed out. I would think that the first situation is true of many people that use twitter (in regards to the latter, I just have an odd working style...).
I would suspect the same is true of most working professionals. Statistics show that Twitter is overwhelmingly used during the week and the primary uses are as a networking tool or the promotion of content. All this made me realize that it's probably a misguided venture for colleges to start using Twitter to recruit students. Many know that teenagers, for the most part, don't use Twitter but they all assume that they will gravitate over to it eventually. I was the same way. When I first found out about Twitter at SXSW 2007, I immediately went home and registered a username for the last place I worked at so that I could get the URL I wanted. I wasn't sure how I was going to use it yet, but I figured it would be better safe than sorry. But now I'm not so sure of its potential. I think that assumption that teenagers will eventually come around is kind of like adults in the 17th century assuming that children were just smaller versions of adults and thus fundamentally dismisses what its like to be a teenager.
One teenager, 17-year-old Will Johnson, has identified quite clearly what he thinks the problems are with Twitter's adoption by teenagers and has developed his own tool based on the concept to appeal to his age group. As he writes in his blog:
To examine why Twitter has seen such little adoption among teenagers, one has to be familiar with social structure of an average teenager’s life. A teenager keeps a tight knit group of friends, perhaps more so than any other age group, and has little reason to communicate outside of this group. Tools such as Facebook have seen such success because their founders realized that teenagers want to communicate with their friends and only their friends, not the entire world.
Unlike Facebook, Twitter was built by adults in Silicon Valley, for adults in Silicon Valley. The combined effects of the more open “social graph” of an adult, with contacts spread throughout business and personal life, and the highly open culture of the Valley led to a tool with an ultimate focus on complete openness...
For a communication tool such as Twitter to become truly popular among teenagers, it must be built from the ground up with them and their concerns in mind. It must be entirely focused on small groups of friends, allowing constant and smooth communication between them while keeping outsiders safely out of reach
I feel like we've gotten to the point in higher ed where every technology is viewed as "the next big thing", if not the next killer app, simply because of its existence and because we, as somewhat geeky adults think its cool. That completely misses the point of why technology is adopted in the first place - it meets a need. Back in the day, MySpace met a need for teenagers. Now Facebook does. I'm not so sure Twitter does now or ever will since they seemed more concerned with getting infrastructure in place than coming up with any sort of business model. In a lot of respects, Twitter has yet to define what it is and if the tool itself is that far behind the curve, then why would we expect widespread adoption of it?
This reminds me a lot of Second Life. A little over a year ago, Second Life was the "next big thing" in college admissions. I did a presentation at eduWeb on technology and recruiting where I dubbed that the "Second Life Syndrome". Second Life didn't meet a need and was thus never adopted by the audience that recruiters hoped it would be. A lot of schools spend a lot of time and money building elaborate Second Life virtual tours, which was proved a waste when no students showed up.
This stuff really doesn't take a lot of work or research to figure out. I had an intern that summer and I asked him what project he would want to do if he could do anything. He said he wanted to build a Second Life campus. I said "Ok...but before you get started, I want you to do some research on the demographics and Second Life and then come let me know if you think its still a good use of time." By the end of the day, he had come back to me and said he changed his mind - teenagers wouldn't use it and we moved on to the next item on his list.
The moral of the story is this: a little research into motivations and demographics can go a long way. Just because a technology is there and people use it doesn't mean its around for the long haul or is an appropriate medium for a mass audience. Maybe I'm wrong - maybe teenagers will be flocking to Twitter to talk to colleges over the next few years. But I really doubt it.
7 comments:
The second Second Life Syndrome, eh?
Great post, particularly the teenager's comments on the social networking needs of teenagers.
I've been so pounded by the social networking hype that I was almost beginning to think that there might be something to it, but last month I visited my niece and nephew in Oregon (both are college students) and assumed that they were totally wired in. But when I asked them, neither were using Facebook or MySpace and had only "heard of" Twitter. That was eye opening.
In our technological domains, we tend to lose sight of those students who have priorities other than adopting the latest technological "thing".
I think it's a poor assumption to think that all students are as technologically informed as we are, who spend our entire lives immersed in technology. There are plenty of students out there still with only marginal computer skills. It would behoove us to remember that.
I think that we all tend to forget that we are very early adopters of technology and just because we do it, that doesn't mean everyone else does it too.
I think you hit it with the "social networking hype" because, really, that's all I view it as. I think using social networking as a marketing tool is beneficial, but in very limited circumstances but it's gotten so hyped up in the minds of people by early/excessive adopters of it over the past few years that all sense of prospective has been lost. Rarely can those people hyping it actually show any sort of ROI on what they're doing, nor (kind of like twitter) can they illustrate any sort of business plan for putting it into place to begin with.
Kids have better things to do than hang around twitter all day. Ahhhh to be young again ;-)
Karlyn, I think colleges are just using Twitter the wrong way.'Course, I work at a Law School (redesign imminent, I swear), so our demographics are different, but we will not be using Twitter to reach out to potential students.
Instead, we're planning on using Twitter to provide a record of daily life at the school (from a couple students and a couple profs) that we can put as a widget on our admissions site, giving potential students a glimpse at the day-to-day life as part of the overall admissions experience.
Will it work? I dunno, stay tuned. :-)
Interesting Aaron...I think that's a perfectly good use of it, but why not just blog at that point? I mean, can you really get a good idea of daily life from a 140 character post? As much as I argue with him, I'll give Brad Ward this - he put the twitter widget IN his student blogs, which I think makes a lot of sense.
I think you CAN get a good sense of daily life from 140-char posts -- after all, I've learned a whole lot more about my fellow higher ed webbies from the cumulative effect of dozens of tweets a day than I have from reading a weekly blog post.
I like Clive Thompson's take on the way Twitter builds a social "sixth sense": http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson
Also, on a practical level, I think we'll be a lot more likely to get students and faculty willing to write out a couple of sentences than a couple of paragraphs. And, for whatever reason, the powers that be are much less nervous about 140 character rants than endless blog posts.
But how many times a day do you read twitter? I just don't think its realistic to think an average user would come back often enough to be able to follow the story. I'll anxiously await how it goes for you, as goodness knows I could be completely wrong.
Ah, see there's the difference between what Thompson says and what we're trying to do: we're actually not trying to tell a story, at least not one that occurs over a period of time. Rather than a narrative, we're going for an impressionist snapshot, comprising the aggregation of several tweeters.
So for example, Prospie visits the site for the first time and sees in our widget that Student A is hung over from last night's Wine Mess, Professor B has filed an amicus brief in a soon-to-be-famous court case, Student C is on her way to a Latino Student Association meeting, Professor D is grading Con Law exams. Right there Prospie has a 10-second glimpse into the daily life of the school. When Prospie returns to the site two weeks later, it doesn't matter that she hasn't been paying attention to everything that has happened in the meantime -- she gets another 10-second glimpse that contributes to that sense of what the school is all about.
I still don't know if it will work, but I think it will work better than expecting prospies to follow along like a soap opera. :-)
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