Hobby Horses
Returning to my google reader feed after two weeks’ paternity leave I discovered that the biggest research and social media story while I was away is… a lot of Twitter users don’t actually use it much.
This seems to have caused an enormous amount of excitement so I feel confident that the exclusive consumer findings I am about to present will set the blogosphere alight in similar fashion:
GASP! Most people who form bands never end up recording anything!
HORROR! The median number of visits to gyms made by people who put “Join a gym” on a new years’ resolutions list is one!
SWOON! 10% of professional footballers earn 90% of the total wage bill!
Was there really anyone who didn’t think Twitter was subject to the same kind of participation inequalities as the rest of social media? Or the rest of the web? Or the rest of real life? Apparently so, given the fuss this has caused.
I reckon it’s because people in marketing circles often have a somewhat weird view of social media. They spend so much time thinking about how this brand or that one can use it that they see social media only through a frame of usefulness.
But usefulness isn’t the point of social media.
Social media is fun. It’s enjoyable for its own sake, like hanging around in the park or the pub is. It enhances other leisure activities (by making it easier for people to come together, talk and do stuff) but it’s also a leisure activity in its own right - sometimes creative, sometimes competitive, sometimes just….social. The clue is in the name!
Let’s think about what considering social media tool as a leisure activity - a hobby - does to our perspective on it. What would it have in common with other ones? In fact, let’s go further, and think about each tool as a hobby - in the same way that the enormous grab-bag of “sport” includes everything from cricket to kick-boxing. Here are some parallels I find useful.
Most people who try a hobby don’t keep it up. The barriers to trying leisure activities are usually low, but only a minority stick with an activity - usually they drop it because they don’t find it particularly satisfying or don’t feel they are good at it. Same goes for social media tools: high churn rates are far more likely than not.
Most people have more than one hobby, and go through several in a lifetime. Social media discussion tends to focus on competition - can Twitter kill Facebook? Can Wave kill Twitter? Who killed Bambi MySpace? In some ways this is helpful, in other ways it’s like assumng baseball and basketball can’t co-exist, just because they’re both sports. Consumers are likely to pick up on, and drop, different social media services at different times according to how much fun they’re getting out of them. They may also have several on the go at once.
The hobby supports participation at a variety of levels. In the UK, the Football Association isn’t just structured to administer the professional league and cup competitions - it exists to support the sport at every level from pub amateurs to £100k-a-week superstars. The superstars and the pub team get a similar kind of pleasure from the game on one level, but have a completely different experience of it on another. Social media is the same - the satisfaction of creating and publishing content holds steady no matter how large your audience actually is.
The individual’s enjoyment of the hobby is largely independent of the hobby’s overall health. If I enjoy playing chess, and know other people who enjoy it too, then whether the sport is thriving or declining, and how big it is, isn’t of much direct interest to me. Similar things apply to social media - the patterns of participation you get looking at a ‘big picture’ view (as in the Harvard article) actually have very little impact at the micro level.
It’s actually quite hard to understand the appeal of a hobby unless you’re involved in it. This one - and its social media parallel - speaks for itself I hope. I would dearly love not to have to argue about Twitter or blogs or anything else with people who’ve got no actual experience of using them.
Hobbies do you good. I said the point of social media isn’t to be useful - but of course it is useful. Its usefulness is a side benefit, like keeping fit or intellectually agile or making friends might be side benefits of other types of hobby.
Because social media makes group organisation so easy, and network effects so dramatic, we tend to focus on that element of it, and so it’s easy for articles like the Harvard one to shock the community when they should have been predictable. But it’s just as fruitful to spend time thinking about the social media experience at the individual level, and hobbies provide a useful frame in which to do that.
