Meeker, Social Media and Health

One Cog Blog follower Sarah Ivey from the Torontobased strategic consultancy Agents of Necessity was good enough to point out that the 2019 version of Mary Meeker39s magnum opus Internet Trends supports my thesisamp160 I have to admit I39ve never got the whole way through a Mary Meeker deckamp160 I tend to get stuck on that ridiculous chart that compares time spent with a medium with ad spendamp160 Her point being that the more time you spend with the medium not please note with ads on the medium the more valuable that medium is to advertisersMary39s latest deck runs to a modest 334 pagesamp160 My bugbear chart on time spent is on page 22amp160 I39m very grateful to Sarah for risking her sanity getting through to pages 161 and on from thereAccording to Pew Research quoted by Meeker the proportion of US adults saying they are quotalmost constantlyquot online has risen from 21 three years ago to 26 todayamp160 Amongst 1829yearolds that figure rises to 39 up from 36 three years agoSo far so fairly standard if worryingamp160 But then Meeker39s deck gets interestingWhen British teenagers were asked in an early 2017 study by The Royal Society for Public Health to rate the five most popular social media platforms against a number of positive and negative criteria the results were as followsMeeker doesn39t quote the numbers to go with this chart but even at a topline level the impact of social media is clearly balanced between the positive and the negativeamp160 She goes on to quote from a 2014 study by Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka who found that quotregardless of what participants say they exhibit a preference for negative news contentquot and a Pew Research 2018 study amongst US teens that found these percentages claiming to have experienced the following online42 Offensive NameCalling32 Spreading of False Rumours16 Physical ThreatsTo recap social media as a whole reaches an awful lot of people who increasingly find ways to spend more and more time on the platformsamp160 Yet the platforms create negative as well as positive feelings no doubt helped along by what appears to be a greater than natural interest in negative storiesFinally amongst those using the social platforms the most represented here by US teenagers twofifths have experienced offensive namecalling and onethird have noted the spreading of false rumoursTo make the same point made here last week it is absurd that the platforms are not regulated to drive the most obvious excesses out of the systemamp160 It is equally absurd that an industry that ties itself in knots considering all aspects of a media form going way beyond the basic gross audience size to ensure clients get the best advice on the most appropriate media form for their messages seems to forget to look beyond the headline numbers to consider the nuances involved in social mediaAdvertisers might want to think carefully about associations with negativity rather than obsessing about gross numbers of usersPlanning as well as buying in other wordsPhoto creditamp160 Dean Moriarty PixabayClick the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Meeker, Social Media and Health

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Brian Jacobs

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