Adam-Jackson

There’s a report from Morgan Stanley that’s circulating the inter-webs today about teens and there’s a line that focuses on Twitter.

Teens don’t use Twitter because no one is reading their tweets. Twitter is totally different when you have thousands of people following you versus only a handful of your co-workers.

Twitter is very popular right now to pretty much everyone in the world. Seriously, because if you listen to the radio, browse the web or watch TV, it’s there in your face. This is because organizations that have something to say, promote, market or sell love Twitter because it is an enabler for promotion! Let’s take a step back because this is very important.

Twitter’s value has two levels. The first is information from the collective. The collective group of people, devices and companies that are “twittering” can be indexed, searched and tested to analyze trends. Things like current events, freak occurrences and opinions. I love data where I can analyze how many 21 year old boys in the 94102 area code saw Transformers 2 and what they thought about it and then take it one step further and see if they thought Megan Fox was hot or not. This is valuable to me and very valuable to large corporations.

The other level of Twitter that people experience or use more is the ability to receive things that they’ve subscribed to (similar to RSS but with a little less commitment). I can subscribe to 5 celebrities, 5 blogs, a news service and the CEO of Zappos and loading Twitter.com shows me exactly what all of those entities are up to. I can then reply, retweet or share those posts with people that follow me. This is the 2nd level of value but wait, no one follows me. Now what?

Well, this is where we go back to the article about teens not using Twitter. Let me first address something. Ever applied for a job, internship, college or group and get denied? Our egos get a little hurt but looking back I realize things I didn’t get accepted for usually were because I wasn’t qualified. Without meeting this “teen” at Morgan Stanley, I have to pose the question, “Why in the hell is a 15 year old boy working at a highly respected firm like Morgan Stanley and why in the hell did someone at MS decide his report was something the company endorsed?” He may be a prodigy and maybe 5 other associates looked over and checked it but I’m a bit ticked off that this made it to The Internet and had the Morgan Stanley seal of approval. Ok, back to my original point.

My friend, @DanielBru wrote this post on TechCrunch. He makes the argument that teens aren’t using the network because they feel unsafe. Here’s a quote:

Anyone can follow your status updates. It’s a completely open network that makes teenagers feel “unsafe” about posting their content there, because who knows who will read it.

I disagree. There may be some percentage of 13-19 year old kids that feel that way but there’s also a percentage of kids who don’t have a cell phone, don’t actually like technology, don’t browse the web and don’t have any other friends that are on Twitter (a standard catalyst for social network growth is having a friend invite you). I actually feel it’s something completely different and yes I think that teens, who are usually very quick on adopting the hottest networks actually aren’t using Twitter as the 15 year old from MS reports.

I was very lucky to have first hand experience with all of this. I’ve always been a shareaholic or over-sharing kind of person. I started blogging at 12, starting using Myspace in August of 2003 (when it came out) and adopted Facebook as soon as it was open to the public in 2006/2007. I joined Twitter in December of 2006 (when it was only 7 months old and I was only 20 years old. Looking back I wasn’t interested in current events, financial markets or what companies were up to. I had no clue who was the CEO of AT&T or GE or that GE owned 70% of Universal Media Group which owns Universal Studios and NBC. I was too young to remember ENRON and didn’t notice rising gas prices until i turned 16 and started driving.

I was a typical southern teenager except I had a few extra passions like technology, blogging and social networking but I was a minority in my school and 1 of three kids who carried a laptop to school. Twitter was odd to me because I was following people I knew from the Internet but had never met, there wasn’t much other value in it then simply knowing what a person had for lunch (back in 2006) but I was still drawn to it. Teens are generally more concerned with getting school work done, passing classes, making it to football practice and getting laid. I think they’d like to maybe make some money with a part time job and get accepted to a good college, well some of them want that. My point is, Twitter doesn’t fit the conventional social networking formula which is:

1. Add tons of info about yourself
2. Add a bunch of friends you know from school
3. Upload more stuff about yourself (photos, info, data, contact info).
4. Chat with friends and check out their stuff
5. Upload more stuff about yourself.

On the exterior, Twitter seems to meet that formula but tweets don’t really count as “stuff about yourself” like photos, AIM or MSN handles, blog posts or emails. It’s very simple and almost too simple to the point where teens just don’t see the value in it and maybe find it as a big time sync. Sure you can simply SMS your updates into Twitter but you’d be surprised how many kids in middle-America or the southern states don’t have cell phones until they can pay their own bills (16+) and many more who don’t have a data coverage or text message plan to afford messages like that. Where I come from, kids do pre-pay plans for their phones and texts are 10-30 cents a piece and that adds up when you’re spending $1.50 a day just to Twitter to 3 people who follow you from Science class.

At what point does Twitter become relevant to young people? It becomes relevant when shit starts to matter to you. Sure stuff matters when you’re young but not “adult stuff” If you’re 14, it’s not apparent to you that 10% of America being unemployed affects you or that car companies are going under or that print-media publications are folding and going under. Hell, you probably only knew one Michael Jackson song from when the DJ played it at your school dance. Yeah that’s just how it is when you’re young. I love reading tweets from CEOs are large companies or getting Dell Outlet coupon codes via Twitter but what 14 year old gives a crap about that?

If I was 16 and growing up as a normal kid in Kansas and I had a Facebook account with 50 friends I go to school with, that would be all that I needed and every time Facebook added a “Twitter-Like feature” like status updates, replies and more that would only keep me more happy with Facebook because it’s a compliment to the larger picture. Twitter, to a new user is just like Facebook status updates and if I, as a kid, already have that in Facebook why should I switch?

Teens don’t need Twitter yet and that’s okay but one day they will and I’d rather run a company that interests people between the ages of 21-65 than a network like Myspace that loses its audience as soon as they turn 18. The Backstreet boys weren’t popular as their audience grew older and I feel Myspace may experience the same fate.