The news this morning is full of a report from Morgan Stanley on teenage media habits – written by a 15-year-old intern, it dismisses Twitter and describes online advertising as pointless. Morgan Stanley seem to be promoting the report heavily, although I’m not entirely clear whether this is from the viewpoint of it being a lucid piece of analysis or more of “look! a little person! how quaint!”
The report has turned up on the Guardian website, and while it might be a fairly impressive piece of work for a 15 year old, most of the conclusions are not overwhelmingly suprising. Teenagers don’t read newspapers, they’re “very reluctant” to pay for music and they see adverts as annoying distractions. This is hardly earth-shattering, and wouldn’t have been earth-shattering at any point since the word “teenager” was invented. It’s a long time since I was that age, but me and my contemporaries were hardly huge newspaper consumers and were the generation that was allegedly killing music with home taping.
The more suprising conclusion was about Twitter. “Teenagers do not use Twitter,” Robson wrote. “Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless.”
This directly contradicts my experience of teenagers using Twitter. The teens of my aquaintance are voracious Twitter users – a quick random sample of 5 taken this morning show them having produced over 20,000 tweets between them in a 3-month period, and far from using texts to update the service, they’re using the web on both browsers and phones as well as API-based clients like Tweetdeck. In fact, their use is more akin to public IM – there’s a huge amount of direct conversation between individuals going on, which suprised me given that the asynchronous nature of Twitter doesn’t lend itself to that kind of usage particularly. They’re also sophisticated enough to be integrating Twitter into other services such as Facebook and Tumblr – which is where you need to look if you *really* want to see the kind of content-creating behaviour that this demographic gets up to.
Where Morgan Stanley’s “analysis” falls short from my point of view is that they’re taking the experience of one particular individual, and extrapolating from that. It would be an interesting starting point for future research, but these aren’t evidential findings any more than my anecdote above is. And in any case, I suspect that a 15-year-old who spends the summer writing reports for Morgan Stanley is far from a representative sample of typical teenagers – so while there’s some interesting anecdotal findings here, I’m not sure it fully-deserves the breathless praise that’s been showered on it. Full marks to Morgan Stanley’s PR people, though – there’s been acres of free publicity which is ultimately worth far more than the 15 minutes of fame that’s come Matthew Robson’s way.
Agreed, this information can only be used for directional purposes. I thought the BBC article on Walkman vs. iPod a couple weeks ago was written much better than the Morgan Stanley report.
Perhaps we can get Robson and Scott Campbell together and create the world’s leading teenage technology analyst firm. “Forrtner” or “Garrester” perhaps?
This is an object lession in how investment banks produce “research”; it’s just that this time, they were honest about it. This is, after all, the industry whose attitude to sub-prime mortgage debt was like saying “look, the most weight I’ve ever put on in a year is half a stone, so I’m just going to eat cheesecake for breakfast”.
you could also say that the kind of teenagers that you are dealing with tend to use twitter more than the average teenager?
when i look at a lot of “geeky” teenager i know, they are all using these kind of tools. the “not so geeky” teenagers… well have the same reaction as the 15 yr old morgan stanley guy
social networks like facebook (or other regional version) does seem to be very popular among both geeky and less geeky teens
the thing that interests me is: why do the teens that you know, use twitter? what do they want to get out of it? is it just a replacement for their facebook status updates fused with instant messaging? or are they also building their personal/professional brand and to crowdsourcing as many “adults” do?
I’d agree 100% about the flaw in the report. But if I had to pick a personal experience to extrapolate from, it would be a 15 year-old smart enough to get an internship at Morgan Stanley.
The methodology might be problematic (to be put it lightly), but his conclusions are spot on in my experience. I have never met a teenager that avidly used Twitter for purely social purposes, and of my generation, I know only three peers who use Twitter. All of them also have the general number of friends/followers and posting frequency he put forth.
I think you’ve hit on the key problem here – our experiences are completely different, and neither of us knows whether it’s simply anecdotal, or an accurate reflection of reality. And it’s a huge oversimplification to assume that *all* teenagers behave similarly – they’re just as varied as us adults, if not more so.
I’m also going to disagree with which personal experience to extrapolate from – I’d guess that someone of that age getting an internship with Morgan Stanley will have family connections, so they’ll be London-based and from a top-tier socio-economic group. Both of which means they’ve got relatively little in common with *most* UK teenagers.
What the lad wrote shows an unusual degree of initiative, though, so let’s hope he enjoys his 15 minutes of fame…
Yes as Tim says, “neither of us knows whether it’s simply anecdotal, or an accurate reflection of reality. And it’s a huge oversimplification to assume that *all* teenagers behave similarly – they’re just as varied as us adults, if not more so.”
This is just like the whole digital natives debate and also the taditional vs. trendy teaching debate. Unless this is all based on sound research it cannot and definitely should not be taken seriously. The problem is the bandwagon jumping we have seen wth this already – tabloids get hold of it and it turns into ‘fact’.
Angela MacFarlane of Bristol Uni has pointed out strenuously that the whole concept of digital natives is constantly over-played. What percentage of children have internet-connected devices at home and spend significant amounts of time on them using web 2.0 type applications? If you read some of the media you could imaging that it’s over 90% – all children are internet savvy, they seem to say. I bet the picture is rather more complex than that.
However, it’s what grads the headlines, on or offline which soon gets perpetuated as the ‘truth’. This really does nothing to help anyone.
Bit triggered by Tim’s remark about the socio-economical background from the teenager, it made me think about the correlation vs. causality discussion around the use of social networks and tooling.
Two examples: when you look at the users of Facebook (when I look at around me in the Netherlands and in Belgium, not based on scientific research but just gut feeling) is that Facebook users tend to be more “worldly”, more highly educated than users from local social networks (netlog in belgium and hyves in the netherlands). A simple explanation could be that people that didn’t do higher education, tend to stick around in the region where they’ve grown up, know less people from other countries (private or work) and thus tend to have a more local group of friends and have more benefit from the local social networks.
I know it’s a huge oversimplification, but I wonder whether there has been done some research on this (academic, not commercial), because that creates a whole different set of dynamics for advertisements, wdiget/apps usage, need for integration with other networks, etc etc.