Younger people have their own information gathering patterns

New research commissioned by Forbes Advisor tells us that 24% of younger people use social media instead of traditional search engines to find things online. Other recent studies, including some that aren’t US-focused like that one, have said the same. Google even flagged this trend two years ago.

While this latest research tells us a lot about what is happening, it doesn’t dive into why this is happening. So here’s my two cents on the matter.

I think there are three trends at play here.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com

1. Each new generation breaks from the information gathering patterns of previous generations

When some people read the headline ‘Is Social Media The New Google? Gen Z Turn To Google 25% Less Than Gen X When Searching’ their first thought is that the younger generations are “doing it wrong”.

I disagree. I think all generations break from the information patterns created or established by older generations. This is particularly true on the internet, where things change very quickly.

I’ve been on the internet for a very long time so I’ve seen the same hand-wringing about (then) youngsters doing things wrong when people started getting most of their news and information from:

• blogs instead of newspapers,

• then social media instead of blogs,

• then micro-blogs (like Twitter) instead of more established social media (like Facebook),

• then news aggregators (like Apple/Google News) instead of official news media apps or websites,

• then closed networks (like WhatsApp and Discord) instead of more open ones (like YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit), and

• now TikTok instead of YouTube or search engines.

This has happened before. And it will happen again whenever a new, hot technology is ready to be embraced by the next generation.

2. The commercialisation of the web

Other than Wikipedia, the majority of news and information gathering sites on the web are commercial in nature. As a result, many of them will:

• use clickbait headlines,

• publish junk articles,

• run low quality ads,

• host poorly disguised sponsored content, and

• not keep their editorial arm separate from their advertising arm (if those two arms were ever separate in the first place).

Young people see this and they don’t trust the organisations that do it.

There is also So Much Crap out there. Do some research about, say, which air fryer to buy and you’ll have to wade through a dozen highly SEO-optimised and commercialised best-of lists. And by ‘commercialised’ I mean the list-makers will have taken ad money from brands for inclusion or a higher ranking in those lists.

It’s no wonder people are turning towards first-hand knowledge sharing and more personal recommendations from real people on platforms like TikTok.

And yes, many of those TikTokkers won’t declare their biases or sponsor lists, so if you focus too narrowly on just what one group has to say, you’ll end up in an information bubble. But, hey, at least it’ll be a bubble of your own peers and the people you relate to :) But more on breaking out of information bubbles in a minute.

3. The enshittification of Google

Google used to be a great search engine, but it let its advertising arm bully its search arm into jamming more and more ads and sponsored content into the search results, making its crown jewel far less useful than it used to be.

Google also isn’t doing as good a job as it used to against the sheer volume of low quality content the web is now filled with. The irony, of course, is that by making it super easy for anyone to host automated Google Ads on their website, Google itself enabled (and continues to enable) the existence of all this junk web content. Now if Google wants to make lots of money through its Ads business, it has to keep directing people to the crappy websites on which its own ads are running.

The end result is that Google makes tonnes of money while we get low quality search results. So it makes sense why people (especially younger people) are trusting big tech companies less and less over time.

Photo by Marvin Meyer

Word of mouth always wins

Given those three trends, you can see why a good proportion of younger people the trust results and recommendations they get from their peers and influencers more than what they get from other sources. And since more of their peers and influencers are currently on TikTok, that’s where they’re going to find the information they seek.

(Even the older generations that primarily use Google for their search needs understand the power of personal, word-of-mouth recommendations. That’s why so many of them include the search parameter “site:reddit.com” in their queries because they know they’ll get much more trustworthy and far less commercially-biased results from forums like Reddit.)

Will this trend away from search engines continue? Where will we go from here? I don’t know. But what I do know is that (a) nothing ever dies completely and (b) patterns are cyclical. Take radio, for example. It didn’t die off when television was introduced. Younger people listen to a lot less radio than older people do, of course, but it still has a place in our information ecosystem. And over the years parts of it have even made a comeback in the form of podcasts, which a good proportion of younger people do listen to.

So while youngsters might continue to move away from large, generic search engines like Google for their information gathering needs, it’s not like those search engines will ever go away. The balance will shift, the flow of advertising money will adjust, and a new equilibrium will be reached.

You can’t do any of this without good media literacy

The one thing that will never change is the need for continuously-updated media literacy for all generations. Without that you won’t know if what you’re reading or learning about is accurate – or at least accurate enough for your purposes.

Fortunately, it’s not that difficult to look a little wider and find a whole range of voices on a particular topic. And if you’re online for long enough and you’re even halfway decent at spotting patterns, you’ll learn about people’s biases (commercial or otherwise) relatively quickly. There was even a meme on Tumblr about this a few years ago that went something like: “me, sitting on my Casper Mattress, eating my Hello Fresh meal, using NordVPN to connect to my Better Help therapy session” :)

Media literacy goes a long way in helping people form an informed opinion (or at least a slightly less uninformed one) on how much to trust each of their information sources. Basically, it doesn’t matter where we get our information from, as long as we all keep our ‘bullshit meter’ plugged into our information gathering chain.

Responding to bad faith comments on social media

There are five main ways to respond to bad faith comments on social media. Depending on the situation you’re in, you’ll need to take one or more of these approaches:

1. Ignore

2. Engage

3. Argue

4. Smack down

5. Peel away

Why am I writing about this now?

Over the last few weeks I’ve seen a bunch of people do a less than impressive job at handling bad faith comments on multiple social networks.

I’ve been participating in (and later managing) online communities for over twenty-five years now. So I figured I should share this list of tried-and-tested approaches because less experienced folks might find it useful.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

1. Ignore

You can’t ignore bad faith comments, especially in smaller communities and especially if it’s the first comment on a post. If you do, you risk people thinking the commenter’s assertions are the majority view. So you have to publicly challenge what they’ve said, and ideally as quickly as possible.

The only time you ignore bad faith comments is when the bad faith commenter goes on and on, and you know that all they’re trying to do is waste your time. So, if you can’t block or ban them, you have to ignore them.

(Don’t feel that when you’re ignoring bad faith comments you’re taking a passive approach to the situation, by the way. The whole point of bad faith comments is to muddy the waters of the discussion and to waste people’s time. By ignoring their repeated comments, you’re actively not doing what the bad faith commenter wants you to do. This is a good thing!)

2. Engage

If you earnestly engage in bad-faith comments, then the bad-faith commenter has ‘won’. That’s because their whole point was to waste your time.

That said, your first response should probably be an earnest reply. This is just to verify the bad-faithedness of the original comment. Sometimes people aren’t good at expressing themselves online. If you start by responding openly you can check if they meant well but spoke poorly.

Photo by Afif Ramdhasuma on Unsplash

3. Argue

You only argue with bad-faith commenters if you have the time and if you enjoy doing so. Trolls and shit-posters live for this kind of thing. (Absurdist shitposting on bad faith comments is probably my favourite approach.)

4. Smack down

If done right, a smack-down response will end the conversation from your end. Any subsequent reply from the original commenter will just make them look worse.

It is important, though, that you stop responding after you’ve delivered you smack down. You have dropped the mic; you should not pick it up again.

Also, a smack down doesn’t have to be an angry or antagonistic retort. You can be funny, wry, sarcastic, indignant, or something else entirely. You just have to say something that will make any subsequent replies from the bad faith commenter look whiny and slightly desperate for attention.

A word of warning though: smack downs do tend to make bad faith commenters angry, so be prepared for them to lash out or worse. People have been doxxed when trying to smack down bad faith commenters online.

Photo by Daniel Thomas on Unsplash

5. Peel away

The ‘peel away’ approach takes time and finesse but is fun. You basically keep asking the bad faith commenter to explain why they’re saying what they’re saying. Once you’ve peeled off enough layers, the absurdity of their argument becomes apparent to everyone.

(This is also a good approach for when people make sexist and racist jokes. You can always respond to those with “wait, why is that funny?” and take it from there.)

This is not the easiest approach to take though. It takes time and it has the potential to go off the rails. So maybe leave it for seasoned community members and managers to execute.

Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash

Which approach do I take?

My first response is usually an earnest one, especially if this is first time I’m hearing from someone who I don’t know.

Then, based in the response to that — and on how much time I want to dedicate to this discussion — I either go the smack-down or the peel-away route.

After that I ignore all further responses from the bad faith commenter.

I do continue to respond to other comments on the post, by the way. And I have had cases in which a bad faith commenter has chased me around the rest of the comment thread trying to get me to engage with them again. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this for a long time and I find it super easy to ignore people like that :)

Do you have a preferred approach?

What do you think of my list? Those might be the fine mains approaches, but there are several others. What’s worked for you in the past?

And what’s the first thing you do when you see a bad faith comment?

Let me know.

What People Want From Social Media

Thomson Dawson published an article on Branding Strategy Insider a couple of weeks ago called 'Social Media Marketing Is An Oxymoron'.

In it he argues:

There is no place for marketing in social media.

Think about being at a party having an enjoyable conversation with someone of like mind, then some annoying person interrupts your conversation to tell you how great they are and why you should engage with them. This is basically what most "social media marketing" really is.  People hate being interrupted.

While I agree that people hate being interrupted by companies who are trying to talk to them or sell them something, I don’t agree with his generalization because I think the situation is a little more complex than that.

You are the Product

I think people understand and accept that, when companies provide them with free online services (such as an account on a social networking site), those companies aren’t doing this out the goodness of their hearts. Even Governments don’t provide services for free (yaay, taxes!) so there’s no reason to believe that any company would.

Instead of paying money for those services what people give these companies in exchange is:

• information about themselves and their relationships with others online (referred to as their ‘social graph’ – a term coined by Facebook),
• information about their interests and where they spend time on online, and
• their attention (so that third parties can market stuff to them via advertising).

The Silicon Valley way of putting this is:

If you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

And people are more or less okay with that ‘product’ – that online version of themselves – being sold to companies. They know that, in turn, those companies will use this opportunity (i.e. the time they spend on various social media platforms) to sell stuff back to them. If this sounds familiar that’s because this is essentially the advertising-based free-to-air TV model (though with more sophisticated ad targeting).

So people expect to be marketed to on social media.

Not the Whole Story

But, that’s not the whole story because, sometimes, people don’t just expect to be marketed to, they want to be marketed to.

They want companies to sell them the stuff they want, when they want it, where they want it. In addition, they expect to talk to companies about their products and services – both before and after purchasing.

What People Want From Social Media

The way I see it, people seem to want five broad things from companies in the online and social media space:

1. Information

This includes things like product information, contact details, terms and conditions, sizing charts, and so on. People look for this information on websites and Wikipedia pages and they search or ask for it on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and forums. They also discover products on sites like Pinterest.

2. Help

This covers everything from help with product information (when you’ve just entered the market for that product) all the way to customer support (after you’ve bought the product). People look for help on websites or they ask for it on Facebook and Twitter. And, depending on what the company offers, people might also ask for help over the phone, via Skype, or using live web chat.

3. Deals

This includes things like exclusive or early sales/deals, as well as prizes or other kinds of loyalty rewards. People look for deals on websites, in mailing lists, or on company/brand Facebook Pages and Twitter streams. These people aren't the most brand loyal but they do drive a lot of sales.

4. Connection

This covers a whole bunch of engagement, participation, and ownership needs that include a continuing two-way dialog; input into what companies do and how they operate; and a general sharing of thoughts, ideas, and values. People look for this connection on company blogs, on Facebook and Google+ profiles, and, in smaller chunks, on Twitter. The people who engage with companies in this way are generally the most loyal and are often the company’s strongest advocates. Or, in the case of engagement via Kickstarter, they’re also the company’s founding members and/or financial investors.

5. Jobs

For a specific group of people who are in the job market, what they want from companies also includes job offers, engagement with HR teams, and information about the company and its culture. People look for this information and engagement on websites, via Google searches, on blogs and forums, on LinkedIn, and, increasingly, on other social media platforms (i.e. not just on LinkedIn).

It All Comes Down to Targeting

What it comes down to, then, is the idea of audience targeting. Companies need to have different approaches for engaging with different audience groups. And, if an audience group is receptive to being marketed at, then companies should jump right in.

For example, if was on a message board talking to people about a specific kind of computer that I wanted to buy in the next six months, I’d be more than happy to hear from a company representative about a product they sell that’s in this category. On the other hand, I would be upset if I was marketed to when I wasn’t looking for that kind of communication or engagement.

So, if companies get that targeting aspect right, then ‘social media marketing’ is a completely valid concept.

We’re Still Not There Yet

Sadly, a lot of companies are terrible at this kind of communication. They continue to treat ‘social media’ as just another advertising channel though which they talk at people.

Which, by the way, reminds me of this fantastic cartoon from Hugh MacLeod:

I guess it’s this kind of misinformed approach to marketing via social media that prompted Dawson to write his article in the first place. And, in that, I agree with him completely. A lot of companies still don’t get it right and that really needs to change if they want to make the best use of the social media opportunity that they are currently wasting.

How these companies need to change is, of course, a whole other massive topic. Fortunately, it’s a topic that will keep people like me – people who understand both marketing and social media – employable for at least the next few years :)