Teach your Children Well

While we have opened up the vast power of Emerging Media, the onerous task of providing guidance, direction, and advice still falls on parents. And this task has become much more difficult than ever before. Not only is there no road map to parenting, but new media is evolving daily at such a fast rate, that many parents are trying to master it simultaneously with their children's access. And in this race, parents cannot win. Our children just absorb media like a duck to water.

If fear is baked into our DNA at birth for protection and survival, the flip side is that so is trust and innocence. And so while we want to foster those glorious, short lived days of childhood innocence, we must also teach them caution.

In the continuing musical dialogue of William, Chris and Kati, I give you a classic - CSNY "Teach your Children Well". The song may be from the 70's but the lyrics are timeless.

 

Now "Do not talk to strangers" has become "Do not talk, text, or communicate via Internet or cell phone" with people you do not know"

So how do we encourage learning, exploration, and engagement in this new emerging media world without subverting their freedoms, destroying their joy of discovery or exposing them to harm? To protect children and their privacy, the FTC enacted and enforces the COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). While this act protects Children under 13 by the law, the FTC also provides some really helpful tips for parents and educators on how to teach, monitor, and encourage healthy and safe interaction on the web and on social media sites.

The FTC Report Protecting Kid’s Privacy gives you a good guide to follow on the web, and the Social Networking Sites: Safety Tips gives great tips for Tweens and Teens.

A few of their pointers include:

• Check out sites your kids visit
• Take a look at their privacy policy
• Be selective with your permissions
• Remember that once you post information onlie, you can't take it back

and one of the tips for your tweens and teens:

• Flirting with strangers online could have serious consequences

As parents and marketers, teaching our children safe interaction with emerging media is not only an obligation, but a ethical mandate.

Be safe out there,

Cyndi

Welcome to the Multi Cultural United States

Today, the U.S. Census is expected to announce that the Hispanic population in United States will top 50 million and will account for most of the nation's population growth over the last decade.


Today in a Reuters report, D'Vera Cohn, a senior writer at the Pew Research Center think-tank, which has analyzed data from 48 states so far tallied, said  "This is a population that's young, whose growth is driven increasingly by births and not immigration. It's a population that's expanding into virtually every county of the country, and growing especially sharply in states where Latino's had not been a presence a decade or so ago."

Additional studies provide compelling reasons why the Hispanic youth will become the most important demographic segment in the United States -- maybe more important than the Boomers. According to the Selig Center for Economic Growth at University of Georgia, Hispanics control more disposal income than any other minority group in the United States. And, the Department of Labor’s Survey of Consumer Expenditures shows Hispanics spend more than non-Hispanics on groceries, telephone services, clothing and gas.  

Because the fastest-growing segment of this U.S. Hispanic population is younger, and therefore grew up in the US, should we assume that they are more acculturated?  If so, companies will need to determine how to create multi cultural messaging and marketing that blends their Hispanic heritage with American iconic and cultural mores. But Hispanics are not a homogeneous group that can just be treated equally across 50 million consumers. Nielsen’s study of acculturation levels among Hispanics shows widely different perceptions among Hispanics of being “American”.

One thing we know for sure is that the U.S. Census report will show that the United States in 25 years will look remarkably different than the one 25 years ago.

Cyndi

Email is Dead, Long Live Email

OK, so many of you think that I am being a little too hasty in writing a Eulogy to email in B2B. Since I definitely respect your opinions and your input, I wanted to rethink this entry on my list and reconsider.

Is Email really dead, or is it just "Maturing" like a good whiskey?
 While web based email usage is definitely declining in favor of mobile email, email still has a commanding presence, and is still used by most businesses as the primary method of communication.

According to a recent comscore study, "in November 2010, the number of visitors to web-based email sites declined 6 percent compared to the previous year, while email engagement declined at an even greater rate. During the same time period, the number of users accessing email via their mobile devices grew by 36 percent as an increasingly complex digital environment influenced consumers’ communication habits."

In addition, Target Marketing Magazine's 2011 Media Usage Forecast shows that 2011 use of email as a delivery method for customer acquisition is actually estimated to increase from 81.5% to 85.5%.

So clearly, email has a commanding presence as the #1 preferred channel of communication which delivers the strongest ROI. But what also is noted is that Mobile marketing is up to 50% from 34% in one year, while email is now stable.

The Comscore study also shows that web based email usage in home, work, and universities is declining among all age categories except the 55+. Perhaps this is an indicator that the 55+ age group are slower to adopt mobile technology?

Web-based Email Category Usage for PC-Internet* November 2010 vs. November 2009 Total U.S. – Home, Work and University Locations Source: comScore Media Metrix
	% Change Unique Visitors	% Change Total Minutes	% Change Total Pages
Age
Age 12-17	-24%	-48%	-53%
Age 18-24	9%	-10%	-14%
Age 25-34	1%	-11%	-15%
Age 35-44	1%	-14%	-18%
Age 45-54	-6%	-12%	-16%
Age 55-64	16%	15%	9%
Age 65+	8%	17%	13%

So, what does this mean?
Traditional web based email will continue to decline, while mobile based email will continue to grow. Technology convergence will continue and businesses and consumers will ultimately rely on one mobile device.

Will it happen overnight? No, but take a look at the increasing amount of spam you see in your inbox, and consider the prevalence of firewalls and spam filters in the office. This is limiting businesses ability to reach active, engaged and interested business people at their place of work.

And who controls your mobile device? The company? The office?

I say, it is you.  

So for the time being, web based email maintains it's top spot, but in time, I believe that it will yield its prominence to mobile, and live content and successful, along with its mature traditional friends -- direct mail and telephony.

Cyndi

Emerging, Enduring or Dead?

Wouldn’t you love to be a futurist and predict which of the “emerging media” of today will create an enduring and lasting place in our evolving media toolbox?

If I had a crystal ball I could look ahead at the many current forms of “emerging media”, but since I am just a mere mortal, I decided to apply some research and progressive thinking instead. So before we start, here is some explanation of how I arrived at my categories: 

1.  I differentiate between Media and Technology. Media is a communication medium while technology enables our ability to communicate. In some cases, I have labeled these developments both a media and a technology

2.  Truly Emerging to me means that there is not enough experience or data to determine the impact of this media yet. These media or technologies are generally classified in the "other column" in research, or show very rapid, exponential growth patterns.

3.  Enduring to me means it isn’t really an “Emerging Media” any longer and has already been embraced into our culture, our behavior, and our marketing strategies. These media and technologies are either growing or have stable usage

4.  RIP means to me that their impact and usage will continue to fall until they are either relegated to inconsequential media, or abandoned altogether. They are stagnating in low percentage usage or are showing declining usage among key demographic and consumer sectors.

To start off, recently reported Nielsen Research answers this question, if all of Internet time was condensed into one hour, how would Americans spend their time? This helped me separate the relevant and enduring from the emerging

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/what-americans-do-online-social-media-and-games-dominate-activity/

Then help me decide which media and technologies are on their way to the graveyard of irrelevance, I looked at usage or adoption change over time:

Top 10 Sectors by Share of U.S. Internet Time
Category	Share of Time June 2010	Share of Time June 2009	% Change in Share of Time
Social Networks	22.7%	15.8%	43%
Online Games	10.2%	9.3%	10%
E-mail	8.3%	11.5%	-28%
Portals	4.4%	5.5%	-19%
Instant Messaging	4.0%	4.7%	-15%
Videos/Movies**	3.9%	3.5%	12%
Search	3.5%	3.4%	1%
Software Manufacturers	3.3%	3.3%	0%
Multi-category Entertainment	2.8%	3.0%	-7%
Classifieds/Auctions	2.7%	2.7%	-2%
Other*	34.3%	37.3%	-8%

So, the big "Aha" to me was email. Is it dead or isn't it? A lot of talk centers around whether email is used more or less. Change is not really about volume, but about context and content.

OK, so let's look at my categorization:

TRULY EMERGING	MEDIA	TECHNOLOGY
Short films	X
Widgets		X
In Game Advertising	X	X
Smart Phone Apps		X
Crowdsourcing	X
Micro Lending	X
Mobile Giving	X	X
Location Based Messaging	X	X
ENDURING
Web Sites	X	X
Video Ads	X
RSS Feeds		X
Podcasts	X
Vcasts	X
Blogs and Vlogs	X
Bluetooth		X
Social Networking	X	X
Texting		X
RIP
Email	x
Banner Ads	x
Chat Rooms	x	x
Micro Blogging

In the weeks ahead, as I learn more from each of you and from the IMC Course, I hope to add or change these categories, and provide some thought provoking rationale for my choices.

Did I leave anything out? Am I wrong in thinking that the ever popular micro-blogging already has one foot in the grave? Let me know your thoughts.

Get Engaged, Stay Active

Welcome!

I hope that you will follow, contribute, and engage with me on this Blog dedicated to the fast evolving world of emerging media and how it impacts us professionally and personally. Today's marketing landscape keeps changing, and it is hard to keep up with all of the tools and technologies available to us as IMC marketers. 

While this Blog has been created for my IMC course, I plan to keep the Blog active and create an interactive community where like-minded marketers can decipher all of the emerging media  and make sense of it together.

Why Does Social Media Matter?

While emerging media includes so much more than just social media, our lives have been forever altered by the Social Web, and it has become a "must" for all marketers. The impact of social media is so great that it has been coined "Socialnomics" -- and for good reason. Check out the video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhPgUcjGQAw&feature=player_embedded

There is no doubt that social media has allowed us to become engaged and active particpants in the many-to-many conversations and interactions between consumers, marketers, educators, and sellers. In fact the speed of emerging media adoption in our society is exponential.

I "grew up" in what has now been called the traditional media world, but it was the cutting edge emerging media not too long ago. As a direct and database marketer, our roots were in the data, and our toolbox was print. But the impact of digital media has completely changed the landscape of how we apply data to the practice of marketing. 

According to the 2010 Infotrends study Capturing the Cross Media Direct Marketing Opportunity, marketing spend is being allocated more and more towards online and electronic media, and those of us in Traditional media need to adapt or die.

I intend to survive and thrive. I hope you will evolve with me.

Cyndi