Every teen (that isn’t locked up in a Waco training camp) has some form of self-publishing technology entrenched into their daily lives. Every college student in North America, and increasingly around the globe, has some active engagement with the new commons - Facebook and their facsimiles. Let’s face it, online self-expression and conversation is embedded into the social fabric of the next gen local consumer.
But this is way beyond being just a teen thang. Niche sites, built around points of passion - like Flickr, Dogster, and a growing legion of social/community sites - are teaching consumers of all ages the fun and reward of self-publishing.
This is more than opinion content - it’s about constructing your personal and community identity. It’s human nature to enjoy applause and interaction. People are increasingly comfortable in expressing themselves online, and are becoming more and more engaged in this social dynamic.
what you say, you are
There is a “stack” formulating every day from your online self-expressions. Beyond the “who you are” layers, the consumer is showing increasing propensity to publish and contribute to online group behavior around their interests, and to publish their experiences. Stumbleupon, delicio.us, and YouTube are great scaled examples of the user logging, tagging, and generally opening up their lives to others.
Blogs represent the most involved form of personal publishing with usage stats that are undeniably mainstream. Last I saw, the blog count is hovering around 75 million, and while still skewing “young” (54% of bloggers are under 30 years old), this is not a teen thing. In blogging, the consumer has made a concerted effort to set themselves up, learn a tool, and probably connect with their personal network to visit the blog page.
It is instructive to review the table below, from Pew’s study of bloggers (11 2006). The observation I’d make is that many of the primary motivations of bloggers are driven by life experiences and a desire to help others with useful information. Personal publishing isn’t the domain of geeky teenage angst, this is a serious shift in mainstream consumer behavior.
careful what you say
Open Social and Facebook promises to lead to the atomization of personal publishing - what you publish can be distributed in whatever way you want. The traditional model of publishing “within a social site” will give way to publishing that can be dynamically connected together and “traced” into social groups. This should ratchet the blogging trend even further into mass market behavior around “life experience publishing”.
the silence of the advertiser
In a comment akin to “no man is an island”, I’d say “every business is a consumer”. The trend towards self-publishing is not lost on a person just because they are a busy-as-heck small businesses. The future generation of SME’s who grew up on these social tools will undoubtedly assume an active role in online publishing. The remaining question is really around HOW MUCH of today’s market will open up to self-publishing, and if so, how can we help?
I certainly don’t view business self-publishing to shift to majority behavior in the coming years. However, we also should fess up to the fact that we’ve done a poor job of giving them the tools to make it productive and easy, and we’ve never asked or suggested that they do it themselves.
If we continue to dismiss the relevance and viability of active business participation, we’ll risk watching another sliver of the growth opportunity erode away. We need to encourage participation for and with the advertiser.
At the end of the day, what these millions of new consumers will expect is an interactive experience with local merchants and professionals. And, consumers in this generation will reward the advice and openness of businesses with loyalty and referral marketing value.
assisted online living facilities
I like the “assisted self-serve” concept - get the advertiser started with new products, but then turn participation tools over to them and encourage their use. Training wheels are needed, but assuming they don’t want to get on board gets more dangerous every year.
