when Generation Y want to look their best and present the best image in Facebook and other social networks, what are the implications for social marketers and brands wanting to engage?
This is a tongue in cheek, thought starter presentation, presented at Social Media Club Sydney SMCSYD Social Personas event.
Youth Superficiality Study Authenticity and Superficiality amongst Generation Y by Ipsos MackayMethodology: Online survey, respondents recruited from I-view panel Target: Australian adults aged 22 to 28 years old (quota at 67%) and aged 35 to 40 years old (quota at 33%); mix gender, recruited nationallyNumber of interviews completed: n=627Survey length: 15 mins Fieldwork: completed between 1 to 12 July, 2010This slide refers to Usage and perceptions of social mediaFacebook usage, behaviour, and online personaFacebook online persona: real, aspirational, extension or alter ego? How different is the social media self from the ‘real self’?
Paris Hilton is the poster girl for superficiality and becoming famous by doing very little
Tweetingtoohard.com enables users to submit and vote for the most outrageous examples of narcissm on Twitter. Attention, whether negative or positive feeds the superficiality and narcissm
Status Anxiety meansthe more we have the more we feel deprived & anxiousWe like to compare ourselves to those we identify withAnd the more people we compare ourselves to, the more we have status anxietyGen Y are the most connected generation – they compare themselves to the most people including celebrities
This is from Facebook’s own research – they asked people the reasons they became a fan and “liked” a page.No surprise that the second most popular reson was “because a friend did it”Great for highly identifiable brands – but what about low interest/engagement brands?
With 6 million visitors a month, YouTube is not far behind
User Generated Content is not nirvana anymore – especially considering what happened in Austrlalia with Toyota’s Yaris-gate (very few people entered a UGC competition so the ad agency got a their production house to create an entry, with dubious incestual subtext, which then artificially won the competition)Couple of tips for marketers wanting crowd sourced content - don’t make the entry mechanism too hard- make it the sort of prize that money can’t buy
Pepsi Australia are running the kind of competition which helps Gen Y look good to their friends. The challenge for the winner will be whether they talke $50K in cash for themselves or take 3 of their mates on a trip to the UK to participate in a money can’t buy $85,000 value trip including a driving lesson from the Stig
With 500 million Facebook users globally, this translates to 6 Facebook “likes” per day by each user.
This Samsung ad speaks directly to what the research found, playing into Gen Y insecurities to look good in their profile pics. It does so with creativity and humour.