Online Social Systems: Flirting Is Popular
January 16, 2009
Jemima Kiss, writing in the Guardian, crafted a fetching headline: “Facebook Is… A Place for Flirting, Says Research.” You can read the original story here. She snags one of the Pew Internet and American Life studies and highlights this “finding”:
One in five users of MySpace and Facebook have admitted they use the Web sites to flirt, according to new research on US social networking trends. Most networking activity, around 89%, is focused on contacting existing friends, while 57% use sites to make plans with friends and only 49% use them to make new contacts.
For me, the key point is that 20 somethings arrive at their job already connected. Pew Internet’s own news release on this study and its findings provides another interesting factoid here:
The share of adult Internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now…
Let me think through what’s going on in my addled goose mind. More adults are jumping into social networks. Some of those adults are using these sites for recreational purposes. Three out of four young people in the 18 to 24 age group are connected. An organization now faces the distinct possibility that its policies about Internet access may need revisiting. The de facto use of social networks, if the Pew data are correct, is for recreation. An organization that deploys its own social network must make certain its assumptions about the use of the organization’s social network align with the usage habits of its 18 to 24 year old staff. The older workers embracing the social network may require coaching to reduce their concerns about security. At a time when budget pressures are rising, a social system–for example, social search with collaboration built in–may incur costs that the licensees’ have not anticipated. Vendors and consultants pushing social search and related systems pooh pooh the concerns that I am considering. I don’t anticipate social system cheerleaders altering their sales pitch in the near term.
Stephen Arnold, January 16, 2009
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