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Imagine This:
Fifteen-year-old Brandon Mendelson comes walking up to you. He’s tall, gangly, wearing an ECW denim jacket (bonus points if you know what that is), and is riddled with acne. He hands you a report about what his friends are doing.
It contains no facts. The report is riddled with random spelling errors, and the data set is limited to only his friends.
What would you do?
If you’re answer is: I’d look it over, I call bullshit. Not even my parents would do that.
Now Imagine This:
Fifteen-year-old Brandon Mendelson is interning at Morgan Stanley. I don’t know, maybe they liked the denim jacket. I ask them, “Hey, you know what my friends are not doing?” They release a report based on my findings.
This report, like the report in the first story, contains no facts or numbers. The grammar and spelling is slightly better, and the data set is still limited to my friends.
Would you believe it now?
Some in the news and tech media did. Suckers.
But Wait! There’s More!
Not only did some of them buy it, but Tech Crunch brought out their own sixteen-year-old to give us his take on the report.
The Main Argument:
Facebook is a closed network. It’s a network of people and friends that you trust to be connected to, and to share information like your email address, AIM screen name, and phone number. You know who’s getting your status messages, because you either approved or added each person to your network.
With Twitter, it’s the exact opposite. 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.
Uh. Wait.
Are we talking the same Facebook that has the default option for your status and other updates set to public (and thus visible to people not on Facebook)?
The same Facebook that Google and the others will be indexing soon?
The same Facebook that may or may not be looking into sharing your data with other companies for targeted advertising?
I guess we’re going to need to have a Facebook intervention if American teenagers think it’s a closed network.
So Are Teens Using Twitter?
Probably not, but that’s not really the point.
Both Tech Crunch and Morgan Stanley elevated two teenagers into the role of authority figures, and allowed them a large soapbox with absolutely no data to back up their points.
We’re only talking about them because Tech Crunch and Morgan Stanley are known brands. Otherwise, you would do to the post and report what you would have done to fifteen-year-old Brandon’s first report.
You know you would.
If Daniel’s post was written a month ago, he would be correct in his assessement. At least, as far as his friends are concerned. Who knows if it is true or not for other teenage Facebook users. We don’t have any data to work with.
Matthew Robinson’s only piece of data was the forehead-slapping “99% of teenagers have cellphones”. Really?
The Point
Make sure you dig deeper when you hear about stories and reports like this. You’re rarely getting the whole story, if there is even a story at all.
