Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert | Hacker News Reader

Twitter is not for teens, Morgan Stanley told by 15-year-old expert

guardian.co.uk

28 pointsandyking37 comments

I didn't know anybody (but me) who read a newspaper when I was 15 either. That was 22 years ago now.

Turns out 15-year-olds have never read newspapers. This revelation may not be enormously useful to them.

The percent of teenagers and young adults reading online news is on the rise, though

... as long as the article has not more than about 3-5 paragraphs. I'm sorry, but I couldn't resist.

We have plenty of news. What seems to have gone missing in online news in general is deepened analysis. So, these youngsters sure have heard of all the news - but do they really get all the information needed to really understand what they heard of?

Personally, I have never heard of a "letter to the editor" that complains about a too long article in print. This is something I first saw and now frequently see on the Internet.

Fair enough, though it's worth noting that letters to the editor are carefully selected and edited while comments usually aren't.

I bet the New Yorker gets letters complaining about the length of its articles every month, they just don't subject their readers to them.

I did! I was a paperboy, dear god did that teach me about how trashy newspapers are and the shocking amount of people that read the very worst (The Daily Mail was by FAR the most popular on my round).

It's the same with everything else in life no? The large number of people who watch trashy TV, the large number of people who eat fast food, etc. Principle of least effort and all that.

I think the bigger news is that he managed to get someone listen to the painful truth about online advertising: that it's ignored or grudgingly endured with little actual chance of conversion. Moreover, people are actually learning to avoid looking at areas with ads (Banner Blindness: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fancy-formatting.html).

This is not new to web app creators, who long ago discovered that simply adding Adwords to a non-monetize-able service was not the key to vast internet riches.

But as soon as the marketing departments who buy online ads come to grips with this, it's going to be a(n even greater) shock to older content creators (e.g. newspapers) that have placed their hopes on online advertising as the easiest transition to a web-based business.

Of course, I don't have any better ideas, and solving that is indeed the million dollar question.

A 15 year old that got a job at Morgan Stanley is supposed to be the average teenager?

The "report" is extremely banal, with the only point of interest being the apparent reaction to it. That is, why exactly is the media pretending this is significant in any way?

Well, it contains the string "Twitter". (To be fair to the media, I don't think they're "pretending" it's significant - IMHO they, like Morgan Stanley, really have no idea anymore what's significant and what's not. Next stop - Nobel prize :))

It took a 15 year old "expert" to point out the obvious? What a world we live in

This brings to mind Bill Simmons' idea of a VP of Common Sense:

"I'm becoming more and more convinced that every professional sports team needs to hire a Vice President of Common Sense, someone who cracks the inner circle of the decision-making process along with the GM, assistant GM, head scout, head coach, owner and whomever else. One catch: the VP of CS doesn't attend meetings, scout prospects, watch any film or listen to any inside information or opinions; he lives the life of a common fan. They just bring him in when they're ready to make a big decision, lay everything out and wait for his unbiased reaction."

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/0605...

Sometimes, you just need someone not overly involved to root out when you are over analyzing things and missing the obvious. A 15 year old kid seems a good candidate for such a position.

When I was 15 I believed advertising didn't work.

I still 'believe' advertising doesn't work, but when I check out how much 'brand' stuff I own and consume I have to admit there is not much basis to my beliefs (this is probably true for most beliefs...).

If you don't think advertising works, seven words for you: The Most Interesting Man in the World.

This campaign has done insane wonders for Dos Equis and the ads aren't about beer. They're about some old dude with a beard.

I had to look up what you were talking about, so apparently there are still some wonders to be done.

It is true, I tried it at a bar once as an explicit tip of the hat to those funny commercials, and then found out I actually liked it. If not for those commercials I never would have tried it.

One interesting difference i see between Facebook & Twitter is that i've never seen someone being peer pressured into signing up to Twitter whereas i see it constantly occur for facebook. I too share the 15 year olds position, i signed up to twitter but hardly anyone i know in real life uses it and i'm not interested in celebrities.

From the relatively external POV (I don't care for facebook), this is just the 3rd round of the social pressure thing, the first two being friendster and myspace. Facebook is the first one that has really also dragged in older generations, but that's not enough to prevent it from ending up like the others. Sure, there's no obvious single replacement on the horizon, but the networks have switched platforms en masse twice before and there's no reason to believe they can't again.

In fact, now that all generations are getting acclimated to the concept of social networking, some of those new people will almost certainly start looking beyond facebook, and with interoperable web services this could result in at least a good chunk of the social web increasingly using focused components rather than one monolithic system.

A sample size of '1' and this guy is an expert ? One would hope that Morgan Stanley knows enough statistics to get a more representative sample, or god forbid a panel.

Of course, if they've managed to corner the one 15 year old whose friends are a perfect cross cut of their group then I stand corrected.

If you generalize from such a small sample size to a large number of individuals you are going to have to include some very large error bars around your 'conclusions'.

Here is the article on Bloomberg: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601204&sid=aG2U...

Sample size is the kid + his friends.

If you just choose a child at random, you are likely to get an average child. There isn't just one average kid, there are MANY, and a few weird ones.

This kid is from a certain social background and is likely to associate with kids from a similar social background, unless he is a networker par excellence and has contacts all over the globe with teenagers from every income level and education level.

There are untold variations on that, and each of those subgroups has their own 'averages', this kid is at best - and I'm not saying that he is, just leaving open the possibility - in the middle of his own subgroup.

Of course, but these are a bunch of middle-aged analysts we're talking about. Actually getting some first-hand information from teenagers is going to be a huge step up regardless of statistical bias.

any suggestions for items in a questionnaire? :)

"Without claiming representation or statistical accuracy, his piece provides one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen. So we published it."

From the actual report, linked by lucifer:

http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0...

classic interpretations of the Central Limit Theorem considers a sample size of n>29 to be "large"; so if this guy has 29 other friends, that's a "large" enough SS

So, a teen points out that many sign up to Twitter but few bother to use the service after the initial novelty wears off.

That reminds me of another fabled kid who pointed out that the emperor was walking around stark naked.

If I was a 15 year old, I think I'd find twitter completely useless too. I use twitter for professional networking -- almost everyone I follow or am followed by is a potential customer, vendor, recruit, or employer.

Though I can't recall where I read it, I recall reading another source that claimed that teenagers and tweens did not use twitter but instead were more enamored with direct texting.

It would be worth someone actually doing a study of this.

Probably a bad sample to go from for the report. Same as getting a "social media guru" who is 15 years old to tell you otherwise.

Twitter isn't liked by teens, but for other reasons outside the article.

I'd love to read one of these from the US.

It's from the UK. RTFA.

here it is: http://media.ft.com/cms/c3852b2e-6f9a-11de-bfc5-00144feabdc0...

"So?"

And yet NYT stock seems unaffected. Go figure.

Down 35% YTD is what you call 'unaffected'?

Unaffected by the kid's proclamations.

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