twitter

Pew's study on Social Media and Young Adults has some really interesting findings: teens don't blog or tweet. According to the study, 14% of online teens blog. This is down from around 28% just a few years ago. As for Twitter, only 8% of people 12-17 use the service.

The study also found that 93% of young adults go online, with 63% of those using the internet daily. This is comparable to only 38% for those over the age of 65.

So what does this mean? We know that teens use the internet, regularly. We know they are active on social networks - they post comments (83% of online teens say they've posted comments on a friends' pictures), they communicate (although less teens now say they use social networking to contact friends), and more. They do not, however, create that much content.

Only 38% of teens share content in general, 21% remix content, and once again - only 14% blog. For adults, the numbers are even worse. The difference comes in the fact that the numbers for adults have come up in recent years. Teens, on the other hand, created more just a few years ago.

Some, such as Ben Parr, have come to the conclusion that teens just don't have the life experiences needed to create quality content. They are simply consuming. Even though I am a teen, I tend to agree with this rather negative view...Most teens are not interested in creating content. Instead, they are simply consuming.

Members of my generation are consuming more information in a day than one might have come across in a lifetime in centuries past. They're reading, watching, and listening. The number of teens who simply USE the internet (93%) are huge. These young people will be heading into college and jobs with a new and unique outlook, gained by exposure to such huge amounts of information.

Overall, the study is interesting, but there isn't much to feel bad about if you're a teen. The fact we're able to consume so much more content than previous generations means we will be creating much more high quality content of our own in the future.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that while an older audience is moving to Facebook, Twitter is becoming younger.

Martha Irvine, an AP youth beat writer, wrote a story on this development a couple days ago, finding that while a significant number of youth are moving to Twitter, many of them are doing so grudgingly believing that Twitter updates contain too much minutiae for their tastes.

"Quite frankly, I don't need to hear if someone stepped in dog poo on the way to class or how annoyed they are that they lost their favorite pen," says Carolyn Wald, a University of Chicago junior who has not joined Twitter and rarely posts status updates on Facebook because "I don't want to assume that people want to hear those things about me, either."

One explanation for this surge is the increased availability of wireless devices for youth today. The study reports that the more wireless outlets youth have, the more probable it is that they will tweet.

Just found about a digital upgrade concerning NCoC's upcoming conference on September 9. The conference is fully booked, I think, but they are opening up for questions via Twitter and you can follow it all via live stream. I'm really looking forward to this event; they'll be capping it off with a naturalization ceremony, a very moving experience. Tune in on the 9th! Details below.

The National Conference on Citizenship is taking place on September 9 from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. in the Library of Congress. This year, NCoC looks forward to expanding beyond the Conference walls to allow individuals who cannot join the event in Washington DC to participate online. Through the utilization of several forms of social media, virtual attendees will be able to watch conference programming, as well as submit questions and comments online. We’ll be streaming the event online and every time the conference opens for questions, our “Twitter Correspondents Desk” will make sure we take one that was submitted online. Follow @NCoC on Twitter to participate and get linked to the event live stream. Go here for more details.

A great website was started as a means of connecting progressives on Twitter called TweetProgress. According to the site the plan

"was hatched up by @jgilliam, @myrnatheminx, @jdp23 and @ginacooper to bring more progressives on Twitter, and better connect the ones who are."

A while back we did a quick hit about how Twitter is old ... er .. more middle aged... people who live in urban areas. And Politico did a piece about how more GOP elected officials are on Twitter. This is sad.

So the Folks at TweetProgress decided to fix it. Tracy - aka @myrnatheminx - was the co-founder (along with Jon Pincus) of the hashtag #p2 which basically stands for progressive 2.0 and simply serves as a much shorter tag than something like #topprog or even #tcot but helps us keep tabs on progressive tweets that should be retweeted. The website is a catalogs of all progressive tweeters who might want to be linked to other progressives.

"We want to help progressives find each other on Twitter and coalesce around progressive issues and actions," TweetProgress co-founder Tracy Viselli told The Hill. "There is a huge pool of progressives out there doing very cool stuff already on Twitter, but not everyone knows about what they are doing. We hope to use TweetProgress to do that."

The site went live just in the last couple days–against the intentions of Viselli and the site's co-founders. . .

"I think we've always seen ourselves as different from conservatives on Twitter," Viselli said. "First, TweetProgress is not built around there being an elite like [#]TCOT is. We want everyone to join the progressive fold and help us get our message across."

As you can see the real goal of TweetProgress is to allow newbie twitter folks to join and find mentors who are already established twitter'ers and can help them learn the ropes of progressive tweeting. Another goal is for #p2 folks to reach out to other progressives who don't know about all of the great work that is being done on Twitter to help progressive activism.

While more GOP elected officials might be more prominent or more noisy on Twitter, TweetProgress is banking on the millions of other users who just don't know the impact they can have if they join the cause.

I think this is a great opportunity to also bring more young people to twitter. While so many young people prefer facebook or myspace as a means of updating their status, you can download apps to your iPhone for Twitter and you can sync your twitter account to your Facebook account so it feeds directly into your status update. That way you don't have to navigate that detailed interface while going 80mph down the highway... ... not .. that I've done that..... .... ....

If you work with a cause, an organization, or candidate I wrote a few weeks ago about some of the most successful tweeting campaigns I've been grateful to worked with. And Kevin Bondelli's All Inclusive Guide to Twitter can be found here too. And if that isn't enough of a ringing endorsement of why you should join Twitter or join TweetProgress... then the coolest thing is that Al Gore signed up for it.

• Ezra Klein has "One Flowchart to Rule Them All" - a simple chart effectively explaining health care reform.
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• Campus Progress says it's time for the internet generation to save itself.
• At Sinclair Community College, the focus is on jobs.
• CIRCLE notes that non-college youth are less likely to volunteer.

A listserv I'm on has had a very interesting thread about Tweeting recently beginning with a piece from Politico that says more GOP electeds are on Twitter than are Democratic Elected Officials almost 2:1 - 100 to 56 according to Tweet Congress.

"A total of 261 Dems are ignoring the new technology (Claire McCaskill ain't one 'em) compared to 119 non-Tweet R's."

This broke into a discussion that questioned the demographic of Twitter and its usefulness to the political youth movement as well as its effectiveness for advocacy and/or outreach.

According to the Nielson Wire

"Twitter’s footprint has expanded impressively in the first half of 2009, reaching 10.7 percent of all active Internet users in June. Perhaps even more impressively, this growth has come despite a lack of widespread adoption by children, teens, and young adults. In June 2009, only 16 percent of Twitter.com website users were under the age of 25. Bear in mind persons under 25 make up nearly one quarter of the active US Internet universe, which means that Twitter.com effectively under-indexes on the youth market by 36 percent."

What Jason Pollock from The Youngest Candidate remarked was that early adoptors of Twitter were already middle aged, where early adopters of Facebook and MySpace were in their teens and 20's. Twitter was more of a technology phenomenon when I began using it, but it has grown from there to become more of the social network people see it as today.

The major focus for me has been with search engine optimization. You hear this thrown around a lot but, essentially it means that the more sites you promote your blog posts to, the more ways people are able to find it, and the higher it will climb in a google search.

My example to the list was something we orchestrated earlier this year during the Kansas Legislative Session. A number of my friends were early Twitter adopters, and have talked it up so significantly that everyone we know is now on Twitter, creating a predominantly progressive following on the site in Kansas. So while nationally there might be more GOP elected officials on Twitter than democrats, in our state, progressives dominate the pool and use it constantly to promote progressive blogs and bloggers, causes, and candidates, while also waging major hits online to GOP electeds at the federal and state level.

We suffer from a profound lack of transparency in our state Capitol. There are no video or recording devices allowed inside the chamber or committee rooms. If you want audio you have to go get the day's tape and search for the quote you want. Then basically put the audio into a video that just features the member's photo. It sucks. But, this past session we had progressive lobbyists and bloggers live tweeting the legislature and committees with our offensive network of retweeters prepared to spread the word.

Early in the session then Governor Kathleen Sebelius (now Secretary of Health and Human Services) had proposed solutions to the budget difficulties Kansas, like many other states, was having. The GOP lead legislature wasn't interested in pushing the Governor's plan and as such threatened to shut down the government. We knew there was going to be a throw-down throughout the day and had primed our group to be prepared to Tweet and drive traffic all day about how the GOP didn't care about regular people in Kansas.

It began early with a few blog posts on Kansas Jackass , and a clever name PayCheck Gate. Then the tweet storm began. For a few hours we tweeted and encouraged other to do so about the controversy, we encouraged people to call elected officials, we crossposted blogs, and everything had the tag #ksgop.

People made fun of us, asking why we were promoting progressive values like getting paid all while labeling it with KSGOP? It seemed silly. Until about three o'clock that afternoon when a google search for KSGOP reveled our blogs as the #1 search. Second, was the thread on search.twitter.com for our hashtag, and third was the KSGOP's website, which by the way, is www.ksgop.com.

So, while I agree that there are limits and flaws to organizing with Twitter, you can build a powerful social media advocacy movement that young people can participate in via smart phones and sometimes while at work or in class. Further, it doesn't require youth to give money, write a letter or email, or make a call. You can create the movement, activate it, then do a process story about it followed by fundraising around it's success. You can use it to tear down and build up, depending on your agenda or your org's strategy and goals.

Best Practices

Many of you have heard me say that my real job at Mixed Media is to just cause trouble on the internet all day. But its something everyone can learn, develop, and foster if they have the time and energy to do so.

My suggestion, particularly to those organizations or campaigns working in the states or in specific cities that are smaller (like Atlanta vs Chicago and NYC) is to do a workshop for your members on Twitter. Show them the practical applications, how they can use it to help, and network them in with your movement. Use it to promote small things first like blogs or news pieces. Watch via search.twitter.com or BackTweets how the branches of the tree work, if it's not working build your base with more workshops, or consider doing blast emails or facebook messages asking folks to RT @Whoever or change their status update.

Your result will be a following much more powerful than someone who has 40,000 friends - it will be hundreds of people that will retweet and advocate for your causes.

You can build local and regional movements quickly and easily then use them to promote your organization, have friends help cultivate small donors, promote online outreach, and give your members some form of consistent participation that they feel is meaningful without having to donate money all the time.

Twitter - USE IT! If you ever have any questions feel free to email me - my information is on the about page.

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Bill Maher's recent comment that "Twitter didn't save Iran. Iran saved Twitter" has sparked some debate about the use of social media and its relevance to important issues and events.

Personally, I don't think Maher's comment hits the mark. Twitter wasn't a service that needed saving, nor is it alone responsible for helping promote Iranian protests. It would be more accurate to say that Iran helped the general public realize Twitter's potential, and that Twitter is one component of a new media toolset that is enabling activists in oppressive regimes to communicate where state-run media dominates.

The situation in Iran shows the world that the communications game has changed. It isn't Twitter or Facebook specifically, but the general principle of online and mobile communication.

Mashable created a social media timeline of the Iran Election crisis. It shows how a wide range of online tools have played a role in getting the stories of Iranian protesters to the outside world. These tools range from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to Flickr and even Wikipedia.

The essence of the matter is that previously if a country expelled all foreign journalists and had a state-run media, the world would have no way of knowing what was happening within its borders. The emergence of online and mobile technology has turned every person with a camera, cell phone, or computer into an amateur journalist; on location and with unfiltered access journalists have never truly enjoyed.

While it may be a while before these new media tools can change the game everywhere (Africa is still largely left behind, and they could use it the most), the Iran election protests have shown the world what online organizers have known for some time now: social media has fundamentally advanced the way we communicate and coordinate.

We haven't said anything much (see Craig's post here) here about the Iranian election, and the use of Twitter to organize protests and evade government censorship of what is happening in Iran. That's our bad, because there is definitely a generational component to this. Millennials in Iran (if there is such a thing, maybe better to say our Iranian contemporaries or peers), are a big part of the opposition, and university dormitories are being stormed by state militia. The political actions and the tactics of Iranian youth are well within the scope of this blog.

That said, I don't know that I could say anything that hasn't already been written - and written well - by others. So here's a reading list of some of the best reporting and information resources I've located on the topic:

• Jon Taplin has a great, short post outlining how this differs from other student uprisings in Iran during the past decade.
• Via Boing Boing, I found this fantastic compilation of traditional and social media resources covering the protests.
• Today's New York Times has the latest, and best, traditional media update on the situation.
• Mashable! has a great primer on how to follow developments in Iran on social media.
• Deanna Zandt talks about the significance of Twitter influencing mainstream media coverage of the Iranian election.
• Alison Fine recognizes the power of Twitter, but also cautions about its limits.
• Nancy Scola at Tech President has done invaluable work looking at the role of Twitter in the Iranian elections, writing about everything from State Department intervention in a Twitter maintenance update, to the role of geolocation for tracking sources and cracking down on opposition bloggers.

• A new iPhone app could help charity fundraising.
• A Twitter maintenance update that would have shut down efforts by Iranian protesters was rescheduled after an uprising among the Twitterati.
• Kos explores the GOP's "empathy" problem with Millennials.
• The 80 Million Strong National Summit gets some press.
• The GW School of Political Management wonders if politics is "recession proof." To find out, they video-interview a number of experts.
• Can a young republican candidate jump start his parties efforts courting Millennials?
• The Economist finally catches on (and becomes the gazillionth news outlet to make The Who reference), noting that The Kids Are All Left.
• Republican strategist Mike Murphy looks at the demographic trends and foretells an ice age for the GOP.