Segmenting Users: Pew Research’s 9 Tribes of the Internet

PointAbout recently attended an event hosted by the Web Manager’s Roundtable (also with a LinkedIn Group that’s very much worth joining) and captured the following presentation by Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet research foundation.  Transcript is below the videos.

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(1 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(2 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(3 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(4 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(5 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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(6 of 7) Lee Rainie of Pew Internet at Web Managers Roundtable from Daniel R. Odio on Vimeo.

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Transcription of the event:

03:06    Chris Testa:     Good morning everybody.  Good morning..  Welcome to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.  My name is Chris Testa.  I’m the acting CIO here at the museum.  I want to welcome everybody to what I think is going to be a fantastic speech and conversation by Lee Rani.  I want to say a few words and welcome the many familiar faces here and new faces.

03:33    Several months ago we hosted the mobile technology event here.  I’m glad to see many folks have returned.  I want to say a few words about a few activities here at the museum and we’ll get right to the show.  In January we talked about the museum on the verge of watching two new special exhibitions.  You can see a few of the new highlights here on our home page.

03:53    As you exit the Ruby Theater here after the presentation, you take a right, we have an exhibition called: “State of Deception, The Power of Nazi Propaganda.”  It explores the tools and technologies that the Nazi’s used to create a powerful new, dangerous vision for German.  It’s an interactive exhibit.  I hope that you have time to step through it.

04:16    I also want to spend a few minutes talking about an interactive exhibit that’s up on the next level as you exit the permanent exhibition.  We just launched an exhibit called: “From Memory to Action Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today.”  What we try to do is bridge the experience within the physical museum with the online experience.  So it traces the history of modern-day Genocide through interactive story telling.  We have an interactive table where you can explore the stories, save the stories to a personal card and take that home with you and learn more about the individuals and their narratives.  But you can also do some action as well.

What we encourage our visitors to do is to make a pledge towards any Genocide.  At this point we have over 10,000 pledges in the physical space and online.  I encourage you to visit and give us your feedback and hopefully make a pledge.

05:20    So without further ado, I’m going to ask Julie to come up here and present our speaker.  Once again I want to welcome you here and thank you for visiting.

05:37    Julie Perlmutter: Good morning everyone.  I hope that you do take the time to visit the museum as the presentation goes on this morning, we’ll be passing tickets to the main exhibition.  Just sit in your chairs and we’ll pass them down the isle.  So whether you decide to take an hour right after the event or decide that you want to come, this will allow you not to have to make a reservation just to go through the museum.  If you have never done it, you really owe it to yourself.  It’s a fabulous place.

06:17    Welcome to the Web Managers Round Table, the nine tribes of the Internet with Lee Rani speaking to us today.  Before we get on to Lee, I just want to give you a couple of things that are going on with the round table.  We launched successfully our Linked In group.  So although we still have no website and probably never will we are crawling into the social media space.  We will make it a habit to post the presentations on the Linked In group after the event.  The Linked In group is not open to the public.  There are almost 650 people who joined that site, however that does not mean that does not mean that you get an invitation to come to the Web Managers Round Table.

We opened it up on Linked In so that we could have a public image so that we could find the people that are really doing business here and enterpriser organizations.  We select from that group who gets invitations.  Together with your personal referrals, those are really the only people who get invitations to the Web Managers Round Table.  We are now publicly closed in terms of registration.  If a colleague of yours tries to register and they can’t get on, basically write me a note and say: “Hey, so and so referred me to the network,” and then I add them to the list.  This really will assure that you always will have a place to come that we won’t fill up too early.  So if you just don’t mind cooperating with this, I think that our group will grow stronger and more intelligent as time goes on.

08:07    We are going to post Lee’s presentation after the event and we’re going to post a question: “What is the best thing you learned today?”  We are hoping that you all will come.  I’d like to see about 100 comments.  I know there is at least 100 things that people could say about what they learned today.  I’m going to call on Dick Davis.  Is he in the room?  There is an event that he knows about.  Dick, tell us what’s going on at Google.

08:33    Dick Davis: [Inaudible]

10:00    Julie:     OK.  No discussion, just an announcement.  [laughs]  I want to take the time to always recognize the people who give us the chow with our chat; the people who not are only the financial leg, the lion chair of the Web Managers Round Table, but also add a tremendous amount of value in terms of their expertise.

10:26    Aquin is the worlds largest creative and marketing technology firm.  For over 25 years they have helped organizations hire and find talented professionals on a freelance and try before you’re hired basis.  To me they are the postal service of the Internet.  Rain or shine they deliver!  I can tell you that since the second meeting of the Web Managers Round Table in 2005, they have supported this even rain or shine, every single idea I have ever pitched them.  With that kind of enthusiasm I know that they will always transfer that enthusiasm to your organization.  So they’re really really a special company for me and I hope they will be for you sometime.

11:15    Rock Creek Strategic Marketing specializes in: branding, integrated marketing, interactive design, new media campaigns, search engine optimization that all deliver a rewarding user experience and help audiences engage with your brand.  Scott Johnson who is the founder and President of that organization told me a wonderful story this morning that, as a result of a relationship that he built here in the Web Managers Round Table, that his firm is now engaged in one of the most exciting client engagements in the history of their 24 years.  So those things can happen here.

11:56    Iron Works is a project-based consulting firm with one mission: never fail the client.  The firm offers expertise to clients nationwide in the practice area of IT strategies, program management, user experience, content management, portal development, business intelligence, and custom application development.  They have offices in Virginia, McLean, and Raleigh North Carolina.

12:22    I’m thankful to John Casey who really and I depend on this kind of thing because not everybody can do it.  Who can figure out the value of the Web Managers Round Table faster than you can read the time on your cell phone.  John Casey was one of those people.  A recent story that I heard from one of his colleagues at Iron Works named Scott Warren who paid a visit to the American Chemical Society, ACS.  She had never been to the Web Managers Round Table, but at that meeting, ACS took the opportunity and thanked Iron Works for supporting the Web Managers Round Table.  She was so thrilled by this kudos that she wrote me which was very nice for her to tell me this.  She said: “Don’t forget, please include me on the invitation list.”

13:14    But more important, it’s this story, it’s the story that happened to Scott Johnson, it’s these sorts of relationships that are built from the audience and the service providers and our sponsors that go such a long way when companies decide where they’re going to put their marketing dollars.  When they have that kind of ROI, that means that the Web Managers Round Table can continue to exist in its present form.  I want to thank you all for that.

14:16    All right.  Let’s talk about Lee Rani.  He is the Director of the Pew Internet and the American Life Project.  To me, he is the rock star of the Internet.  That organization is the non-profit, non-partisan fact tank that produces studies on the social impact of the Internet.  The project has issued more than 200 stores based on surveys that examine people’s online activities and the Internet’s role in their lives.  Lee is a Co-Founder of a series of books about the future of the Internet which is published by Compria Press and based on public surveys.  He is currently co-authoring a book with MIT Press and it should come out in 2010.  The working title is: “Connected Lives the New Social Network Operating System.”  Prior to launching the Pew Internet project, Lee was managing editor of the U.S. News and World Report.  He is a graduate of Harvard University and he has a Master’s Degree in Political Science from Long Island University.  With no other further ado, Lee Rani.

15:30    Lee Rani:  Thanks Julie.  It’s an honor for Pew Internet to be here.  We have been here a couple of years and it’s starting the honor today is being here at the Holocaust Museum.  There are magical things to do here in Washington.  I’m a Washington native at this point, but nothing more magically has happened in the Rani family than going through the exhibits here.  So thank you Chris for giving us tickets because I’m going to get some.

15:57    Julie said we are a fact tank because we have no operative belief system which is lucky because I have no beliefs, but pew has specifically prohibited us in the terms of our grant from taking positions on policy matters, on technology, on applications, on personalities.  We don’t have a dog in this fight.  We are meant to generate information that is useful to people like you so Pew thinks this is a home run when I’m talking to audiences like this, but we do it from the bases of our findings and data, not from any sort of underlying agenda that is driving our work or Pew’s interest in this work and certainly anything that’s going on in my head.  So thanks and I hope you do find it relevant.  I will just start there.  I will give you fact one if you wanted to say one thing that you learned.

16:50    I always start my talks with an apology these days after about 18 months ago when I was addressing some wonderful librarians in Pennsylvania.  One of the librarians came up to me after my talk and said: “Mr. Rani, I’ve got a great idea for a second career for you.”  I said: “Ma’am, I’m an aging baby boomer I don’t need a second career.”  She said: “Nevertheless what you could be is  a reader of the disclaimers on the drug ads because you talk so fast that it’s hard for people to get to you.”  I said: “Ma’am, I’m a New Yorker.  I’ve converted to Washington and that’s combining two of the most awful talking cultures in the land.”  I’m sorry I have a lot of data in my head so I do talk fast and that’s my apology.

17:35    I also begin by asking a question: who is Tweeting this?  There are a handful of people wireless.  There’s self service but you can tweet afterwards and we can create a hash tag for this afterwards.  For those of you who have been under a rock in the past year, I’ll just go through a little tutorial about what Twitter is.  It’s a service where you can post a lot of material about “What Are You Doing?”  Some people take that literally and talk about trips to the mall and things that they’ve eaten at a meal, but one of the big values I get as a Twitter user is using it as a filter system where I follow people who tell me stuff they’re reading, what interesting conferences they’re going to and stuff like that.

18:24    So yesterday I posted in response to “What Are You Doing” the fact that I was planning a talk for here and I think that some people might be in the room today because I did Tweet this and there are some people who are following me in the room.  There are metrics on Twitter.  I’m lame.  I’m way at the end of a long tale on Twitter in terms of audience population.  I follow 104 people 483 are following me and I filed 314 things.  Ashton Kutcher has 1 million people following 2 million people now following him.  The White House has over 1.5 million now.  So I’m a real piker.  Chris Anderson would love me at the long tale end.

19:04    You get to see who is following you and you understand that you are speaking to audience doing this.  Those of you who have been here to see me in the past know that I used to start by asking who is blogging this.  Now I find that it’s more common that people are Tweeting me live.  I’ve had wonderful experiences in that just as I had when I was asking the blogging question.  There was somebody who missed a presentation that I was giving and Tweeted: “Wish I was there to see digital research king, Lee Rani at the Interactive Media Association.  He always presents great work.  I arrive in Atlanta tomorrow.  See you all there then.”

19:45    I made sure that a few folks knew exactly what my reputation was.  Rock Star is now going to go on my bio.  I also had a Lloyd Benson, Dan Quale moment on Twitter which was fabulous.  Somebody Tweeted: “Mmm, data.  Are marketers using data to drive decision making?  Check out this new white paper from E-Vantage and gave a shortened url link to the PDF where that research was done and the response from Joe Rukert was: “You’re no Lee Rani, but you’ll do.”

20:21    And of course I’ve been tweeted in Dutch … Lee Rani [Dutch].  So what do you do when you’re tweeted in a language you don’t know?  You pump it into Babel fish or some language translator and here is what this person was saying: “Lee Rani, director incredibly how many words in a sense in a minute huit to pronounce.”  So they’re even moaning and groaning and bitching about me in Dutch about how many words I can speak like a New Yorker.  Well that’s the background of being Tweeted.  Help me out here.  If you post an interesting tweet about me, you’ll make my next presentation.

21:06    I’m going to talk today about some of our newest research and some of our newest finding.  There is a grand thought that overlays everything that we at Pew Internet see and everything that we talk about in the context of the world.  If you think about the modern era as being divided from it’s precursor, there is The Industrial Age including The Industrial Age of media and then The Information Age.

In The Industrial Age information was scarce, expensive, institutionally oriented, and designed for consumption.  It took a lot of people and a lot of money and a lot of resources to gather up the most interesting stuff, turning it into stories and then pumping it back out.  It’s also not just the function of media companies to do that of course, there is a theory of corporations that says that they are the most efficient way to gather up all of the information that an economic entity needs and then make sure that it’s processed in the right way.

21:55    In the Information Age virtually all the stuff that existed in the Industrial Age is now being turned on its head.  Information is abundant, cheap, personally oriented and designed for participation.  I can’t underline that last point more loudly.  It is the biggest thing about the Internet is that it facilitates conversations and contribution from lots more people in lots more ways and the defining feature of the Internet Age as distinguishing it from the Industrial Age is that people think they are their own media makers and their own media creators.  That changes the way they think about the world and certainly changes the way they think about their relationship to big institutions.

22:38    So the asteroid that made the then the now was the arrival of the Internet.  I’m just going to give you data from the life of the project.  In very late 1999 we did our first survey in March of 2000 and released the results in May of 2000.  The adoption of the Internet.  Even with that the dramatic difference between then and now shows up in our data.  At the time we did our first survey, fewer than half of Americans had access to the Internet.  Fewer than 5% (I’m just guessing we didn’t even ask) had access to broadband.  They were all on expense accounts.  It was really expensive to do and so their businesses paid for it.  Half the population owned a cell phone.  We didn’t ask the question about wireless activity.  It wasn’t even possible.  Probably in 2000 it certainly wasn’t in a way that you could talk to the general population about it.

We didn’t ask a question about the cloud.  I’m guessing that less than 10% of web users used some mail function or something like that.  It was out there, but it wasn’t the norm by any stretch of the imagination.  The environment that we were measuring at the dawn of the project was the Internet was a slow stationary connection built around my computer.  Stuff was carried around with you or it was housed on your desktop, maybe more importantly.

23:58    2008 we’re just about to release some brand new data so I can’t give you the exact numbers because I’ll step on my own news story on here, but more than 75% of American adults now use the Internet.  94% of American teenagers use the Internet.  More than 60% of all Americans have broadband connections at home.  That’s important because the conversion experience from dial up to broadband changed the way people acted online, changed the expectations about the role of the Internet in their life as well as what was going on on the Internet.  It changed what was somewhat of a novelty in their life.

You remember how you were in your first days as a dial-up user; kind of fun, kind of funky.  You did e-mail, you did little games, you looked up news.  The dial-up protocols were really annoying and so it was sort of something on the side that was a novelty.  Now with broadband at home and broadband at work people think of it as a vital information communications utility.  Again, it changes the way they act online and they think about the information universe they’re encountering.  85% of American adults have cell phones now compared to those 50% in 2000.

25:09     There is a wonderful story in today’s New York Times Steve Lorr about Smart Phones coming on and actually having a growing market and that changing the was that people relate to this thing that used to be called the telephone, but now is a really powerful computing device that happens to make phone calls and receive phone calls.  More than half of Americans connect to the Internet wirelessly.

We’re still having a bit of trouble inside our universe talking to people about this because when we’re asking about mobile connections we’re asking about not only what’s available on their laptops, we’re actually at the magic moment where very soon, not in this survey, but in one we will do before the end of the year, more than half of computer owners will be laptop users rather than desktop users.  So we’re talking to people about mobile connections through their laptops, but we’re also talking now about data functions  that are housed in that thing that used to be called the cell phone.

26:07    We’re going to get the things right about talking to people about mobile connectivity so I wouldn’t hang all of my professional reputation on that number.  It might be a lot higher, it might be somewhat lower depending on the functions that people use their smart phones for.  More than half of Americans now use the cloud and we’re not even capturing that very well.  Everybody that uses a social network site, everybody that’s going to go on the Linked In site this afternoon, everybody that has a web mail account, everybody that uses Google docs and things like that, everybody that posts pictures, everybody that uses You Tube and posts on You Tube is a cloud user.  It’s really a big thing for a lot of businesses.

I know that some of the firms and organizations and firms in this room are thinking about how to apply cloud functions online.  Again, it’s very much tied to that mobile experience.  When your stuff is out there somewhere then that means that you can get to it  with any connective device that you carry around with you or that you have access to.  We’re finding that that is a key demographic for the work that we do in the way that we used to see the conversion from dial-up to broadband was a very dramatic change in peoples relationship to each other and to networking.

We are now seeing that wirelessness or mobility is itself a critical distinguishing factor between those who use the Internet that way as opposed to those who don’t.  Wireless users are different users  from heavy broadband users.  We are now being much more conscious about developing that and baking it into surveys we do because we see that there are differences that arise from that.

27:44    So the Internet arm now has gone from that slow stationary connection built around my computer to an environment that we’re measuring where it’s built outside servers and outside storage and again the changes that come from people’s lives.  I’ve been really fast getting through our data, but let me pause here and make sure everybody is still with me.  Questions about this core overview data that we have?  Excellent!  Or you’re cowed.  OK.

28:13    In this new environment I describe ten ecosystem changes that are systemic.  They don’t apply to everybody and the nine tribes is how I’m going to unpack this idea.  There are ten things now that are different about the information and communications environment and change the way that people react to it.

28:30    First is the volume of information.  There is wonderful work done by the research firm IDC that talks about information doubling in the next five years.  Can you imagine that?  Of all the millennium we’ve been through the volume of material that we are going to generate is going to double in the next five years.  It’s largely because it’s digital and easy to do and it’s largely because we are now moving to a knowledge and information economy rather than an industrial economy and stuff like that.  But there is more of it.  That’s a big change in peoples lives particularly when they have access to the more of it.

29:03    The variety of information and information sources increases.  What that means is as partly a coping strategy, partly as a celebration strategy, people now gravitate to the things that matter to them.  They don’t have to pick from a small number of media sources, from a small number of information sources to pursue work opportunities to interact with each other.  They can go to the stuff that they really want.

So that segments all the major media markets in a way that they weren’t segmented before.  There is a lot of concern for instance for the purposes of this audience, there is a lot of concern in the political science community that the results of the last election not withstanding, the long term effects of this information exploding and the variety of it increasing is that people will become less engaged with civic material because they have more opportunities to avoid civic and political material.

The people who were casually introduced to political and civic information in the 1960’s and 1970’s when we had three networks, right and we had a small number of newspapers and news magazines and stuff like that.  Well those casual people now play games or they go to the hobby material that they want or they go to the social networking communities that matter to them and they are less and less connected to the core political and civic information that defines who we are at least as a political culture.  So it’s an interesting change, but it’s a change that is making our lives a lot more complicated.

30:34    The velocity of information speeds up.  The people who are twittering this are a prime example of this.  Big stories always get reported and everybody learns about them relatively quickly.  The velocity of information that matters here is stuff that matters to individual people.  It’s their quirky stuff, it’s their particular stuff, it suits their own sensibilities.  Now they have a lot more ways of getting new inputs and new information a lot more rapidly than they did before.  That’s again changing their relationship to their colleagues and to their communities.

31:03    The time and place to experience media change and enlarge.  People can encounter media and can watch TV on their video iPods.  They can read their newspapers on the iPods or their laptops and stuff like that and they can do it on their schedule and with their play lists dominating their choices rather than the play lists of the media companies or the media properties pushing it out to them.  So they can consume news at different hours of the day, they can listen to music at different hours.  Appointment media is becoming less and less important and relevant to people rather than them defining the choices that they make.

31:42    People’s interest for information expands and contracts.  So the expansion version of this is that people when they’re really turned on by something have a lot more opportunities to dig more deeply into it.  The classic thing that we track, as a matter of fact, tomorrow we’re going to be putting out some brand new data on health searches online.

When people either are newly diagnosed themselves or when a love one is diagnosed, they can go from zero to a million miles an hour overnight and learn everything they want through searches about what’s going on with this condition, what are the recommended treatments, what’s going on in clinical trials, what’s the medical literature show and stuff like that.  In effect they can become amateur experts in a relatively short amount of time on something that motivates them.  The same thing with anything that turns them on.  You can go down more rabbit holes in the Internet than you can even count.

By the same token their vigilance for information contracts in a classic sense of multi-tasking.  We have a lot more opportunities to encounter a lot more stuff now and so we have to graze a lot more readily.

Those of you who have seen me over the last year or before know that I am very fond of a notion of a friend of mine in Linda Stone who is a technology consultant out in the valley, who talks about all of us living lives in a state of continuous partial attention where we’ve got our e-mail client on all the time, we’ve got our cell phone on all the time, every device in our life is capable of alerting us and interrupting us and we dare not turn them off because the next input that comes in through them might be really important or really relevant or a lot more interesting than the thing we’re working on right now.  So the capacity to be distracted and the capacity to always have your antennae up makes us a little bit more stressed and makes us a little bit more vulnerable to people interrupting us, but that’s a condition of modern life.

33:43    The immersion quality of media are more compelling.  Think of the gaming environment or the virtual worlds’ environment.  And we ain’t seen nothing yet.  The way that they are packing pixels into stuff now, the way that band width is growing, the way that storage is growing, the virtual worlds and the gaming now and the worlds where people are experiencing serious stuff are going to get immersive over time.  There is a larger social science community who is wonder if this is going to make us retreat from real life.  There is a push back from technology community saying: “This is real life.”  This is how people encounter stuff, this is how people learn stuff, this is how they amuse themselves.  Don’t sweat it so much because it’s just going to be more interesting and more useful  and compelling for people.

34:23    The relevance of information improves.  About half of Internet users set up some sort of filtering system that they customize on their own.  They get a web page that’s customized for them, they get RSS feeds, they set up alerts.  How many people here have set up alerts on their own name.  On your institution.  On other stuff that really interests you like former boyfriend/girlfriend. [audience laughs]  See?  You can get a lot more stuff a lot more quickly about this and it is tailored to your interests and your needs.

A wonderful phrase that came from this idea was promulgated by Nicholas Negroponti, the former head of the MIT Media Lab who wrote a wonderful book called “Being Digital in the Mid 90’s” and actually it was 1993 or something like that.  He predicted the rise of something he called “The daily me.”  Rather than gatekeepers and media properties telling me what they think I might be interested in on any given day, I can now arrange for my own filtering system and my own customization of information so that I can get what I want.  There is also a daily “us” version of this where if you care about your company or your hobby group to other groups and stuff like that you can arrange to get these filters acting for you that way.  So people are now getting more relevant stuff, but there is some worry that is a thinning out of stuff that they might be interested in if they knew about it, but they just don’t have time for it or they think it’s irrelevant to them or whatever.

35:53    The number of information voices explodes and becomes more findable.  That’s content creation.  We find now that about half of adults and more than two thirds of teenagers have created stuff that they have put out online.  Sometimes it’s just personal information and profile stuff, other times it’s real creations of theirs that they have posted online.  This explosion is accompanied by the fact that it’s now a lot more findable on the individual sites and the search functions on Flickr and You Tube are great, but they’re also now findable in the world of Bing as well as the standard Google world.

36:33    Aboding and ventilation are enabled.  This is the wisdom of crowds.  There are a lot more people now that are facilitated on sites that are represented in this room.  You can say: “I like this or I don’t.”  “I can forward this or not.”  “I think this is a good idea or I think this is a crummy idea.”  And people can express their opinions so there is a lot more information packed into the stuff that is generated.

36:54    Social networks are more vivid.  We’ve always had social networks, but now we’ve got a phrase for it and businesses built around it and stuff like that and we can see a lot more readily how people are functioning in the real world and who their networks are.  That’s really important particularly for organizations like yours because social networks are really the primary ways that people filter information, assess information, screen information, and pass along information.  So before I get to the nine tribes I wanted to talk about the general things that this new environment has created.  I will stop before I go beyond my ten points.  Is everybody still with me?

37:40    OK.  So homo-connect-us.  It’s a different species of human.  What we’re doing here a little bit, but it’s different in the sense that people have different expectations about access to information, availability of information and findability of information.  We will go out and measure this in some of surveys in the future.  We’re going to do something on e-government this Fall, but I think it’s pretty clear to say that if you walked around to the average person and asked them if they could access material that’s in an encyclopedia.  Do you think you can find it relatively easily do you think that you can get to the stuff that you want relatively quickly?  Even in an environment of information abundance people think they can.  This changes the way people think about access to information and think about what purposes information can serve in their lives.  It changes the way people use their time.  Sorting through their days and the rhythm of their days are somewhat different because they can access the things that they want at the times they want on the device that they want.

38:48    Their sense of place, distance and presence is changing.  It’s changing in both directions.  The linkages between those three constants; place distance and presence on one level is becoming de-linked.  When you can pick up a cell phone and dial a number and talk to someone on the streets of Tokyo  and have a very intimate conversation and almost be in their world.  Well you are in their world.  The fact that you can be holding a conversation in the lobby here and someone can call you from any place in the world, the idea of: time, distance, and presence is changed.

I see this a lot in my kids lives because their conversations will never end.  It doesn’t matter whether they’re physically with someone or not they just keep going on even after they’ve had a meeting.  They want to talk and text about it before they have meetings they want to talk and text about it.  It’s just the parade never ends.  It also means they’re more connected particularly now in the ear of Smart Phones with GPS connections and stuff like that.  Where you are and where the stuff around you is is somewhat more relevant.  So both things are happening.  It’s paradoxical, but it’s true.

40:04     The possibilities of work and play are different.  The boundaries that used to exist that were relatively stable and relatively high.  You didn’t do much leisure stuff at work and you didn’t do much work stuff at home.  How many people live that life now?  You’re doing some leisure stuff at work or some home stuff at work and you’re doing lots of work at home I’m sure.  So your sense of what you can do and when work is happening is very different.  The same thing is happening in learning and play.  People’s sense of personal ethic and personal effort has changed.

The book that I’m writing that Julie referred to: “Connected lives” argues that there is a new sensibility that was happening before the Internet and cell phones, but has really been accelerated in this era.  It’s defined by people acting as networked individuals rather than people acting in tight bounded, small knit, very important groups, people are now acting in networks to get their needs met, to get emotional support, to get financial stuff.  Think about your own lives.  You’ve got a bunch of really tight family members and friends who will do a lot for you and who will take a bullet for you.  The way that you act in the world is often as a networker.  When you have certain needs for network support you go to one group when you have health question you go to another group, when you have a financial question you go to another group, when you have a question about your spiritual life you go to another group.  So we’re acting more like networkers.

41:38    There are two things that happen.  First of all you get a lot more freedom in the era of small tight bounded groups everybody knew your business.  That was potentially stifling and you were deeply known to those people.  So there’s freedom now when you don’t have to be dealing only with that group and you can maneuver in various networks in various ways.  So that is the upside of networked individuals.  The downside is you have to work harder to get your needs met and act in social groups.  You have to be an active networker.  If you’re passive and a looker, the group leaves you behind or your network doesn’t rely on you or you’re not useful to other people in their social networks and so it withers.  So you’ve got to work harder to get your own needs met and to help other people get their needs met.  It’s a pretty big sociological change.

42:30    The final thing to say about that is the rewards and challenges of networking for socio, economical, and cultural purposes are also changed in the way people think of stuff.  They now think in terms of social networks.  One of the things that I want to convince you of here if you’re not already convinced is you have a role in helping people in their social networks.  You can be a friend, you can be a node in people’s networks because they now think that institutions and media can help them solve problems in their life or can act in ways that will be useful to them as they are going through their lives as networkers.  It’s different from the past where institutions in media were at arms-length for people.  They didn’t think of them as actors in their network.  Of course they were at times.  Media gives you information you need and you pass it along to your network.  Institutions help you solve problems and stuff like that, but there is a much more personified sense in people’s lives that the people who create media whether they’re individuals or institutions are acting in my network and can be my friends even if they don’t think of you as their friends.

43:39    So there are four dimensions of interaction that institutions have in particular with people that I just wanted to quickly run through that are more general and then I’ll get to the nine tribes.  The first is attention.  How do you capture people’s attention in their environment?  How do you help them acquire information in this environment?  How do you help them pass information once they’ve acquired it?  There is a big question.  A lot of people are quite skeptical about the information they encounter on the Internet and stuff like that so they rely on their networks and their friends and reliable, trusted brands to help them make sense of the world and to assess the credibility of information.  Finally again this new action piece.  Information flows now.  It doesn’t just stop with me absorbing it and pondering it as a consumer.  I can be an actor in the world as a content creator and there are ways for institutions to be thinking about that environment.

44:34    So how do you get peoples attention in this new world?  First of all, don’t give up on the stuff that you already do well and the ways that you already function in the world.  I think there is a little bit of concern or a little bit of an impotence for  people to think: everybody is online, let’s transfer a lot of our traditional functions to the online environment.  It’s efficient it serves our needs and we can maybe reduce some costs on our end and why not?  Well in some respects people have grown up knowing you in your traditional role and your traditional platforms and you can’t give that up.  That’s in some ways a key pathway that you already have established with them.  In addition to that, there are ways that these channels interact with each other.  It’s not just an either or situation.  People are constantly churning through different channels and different relationships to things.  So relying on what you’ve already grown up doing is a good way to make sure that you have a shot at their attention.

45:37    In this new environment you offer alerts, updates and feeds.  People will sign up for those and that’s a way that you can break through the clutter of their lives.  Be available in relevant places.  I can’t answer a question that might be on a lot of your minds which is: if I set up a Face Book page, what’s the pay off?  What’s the ROI?  How many new members am I going to get?  How many new contributions am I going to get?  What’s the downside and stuff like that?  I don’t know.  There are some ways that that works for institutions and there are other ways that it’s so lame that you’ll sort of be laughed off the stage and that’s something that you guys are going to have to figure out.  As an exercise you need to think through where your traditional audiences are and where are the people who might not be aware of you, where can you get their attention? The first place that means experimenting with being in a variety of places and seeing what the payoff is.  It doesn’t mean you have to have a Face Book page and Twitter account and stuff like that in perpetuity, but it might make sense to see what this yields for us.  Let’s get into this environment and see what it means and see if we can capture people’s attention that way.

46:44    Probably most importantly the way to capture attention is through people’s networks.  There is a little bit different sense that influencer’s now in this new age are different or are added onto traditional influencer’s that we’ve always seen in community life and in the life of groups.  A marker of an influencer is someone who has a blog.  It’s not that hard.  The act of creating it is an act of participation and an act of willingness and that means that person wants to drive a little bit of conversation.  That’s influential.  Classical political science reckoning of who is an influencer, it was small stuff.  It was not necessarily the head of the community newspaper or the TV station or the most prominent business official in town, it’s people who went to vote, people who showed up at meetings, people who give contributions to groups, people who write letters to editors and stuff like that.  Those are influencer’s.  So setting up the blog is the Internet era age of being at least a more active part of the conversation than those who are lookers.  I’m arguing that the way to capture people’s attention is maybe to make yourself available or find out who the influencer’s are that you might want to exploit (in the pejorative sense of the word) or find who can then pass along what is most useful and relevant and interesting about you to the others who are in their network.  It’s the validation that that influencer gives to you and your work that makes that person, the influencer’s recommendation matter and stand out and matter to people.  “Oh!  I actually should pay attention to this because Sally, the neighborhood lady says it’s a good thing to pay attention to.”

48:29    OK.  I help to acquire information and be available in the long tale world.  Every organization in this room is at the very least a long tale organization.  You’re somewhere in the tale there but you’ve got to make sure that you’ve done the search engine optimization right.  You’ve got to make sure that you’ve used the right meta tags.  God knows how the algorithms are being changed, but making sure you’re giving yourself a shot at being found is important to do.  You’ve got to recognize that we’re in a world of distributive publishing rather than relying on main stream media and main stream institutions to mediate you experience for you and tell the world about you.  Offer Link Log.  Link Log is the currency of the Internet.  When you are offering a link you are offering not only a vote of confidence, but you’re saying to that other institution I get it.  I get  what you’re saying, I like what you’re saying to the people who care about me.  With any kind of luck they’ll say: “Oh yeah, I agree and I will return the Link Log.”  This is the way that social capital is built or social capital is built on the Internet.

49:38    Participate in conversations about your work.  They’re going on all the time now.  There are ways for you to find out about them that didn’t exist in the past.  Offer yourself up.  Human faced institutions cannot be overstated as an important thing.  There are ways that you have to put your institutional face on and represent yourself to the world, but there are other ways that it makes sense that there are flesh and blood human beings standing behind the institution that really want to solve problems and really want to help people and have a little bit more human sensibility to them than the “face of god” as the institution.

50:11: How do you help them assess information?  You honor the ethics of whatever you do.  There is a culture that has been built up in your institution or in your field.  You’ve got to make sure that you don’t violate the codes that already existed in your work, but in the new era, transparency and linking and establishing links and archiving everything is a new marker of trust and credibility.  We haven’t got data on this, but we hear consistently from lots of Internet users that people that show how they did their work and how they came to the understandings they did and show where it came from, the primary material or the source material that they used get a lot more credibility than the institutions that are sort of “the face of god.”  We know it, we’ve filtered it, we’ve edited it, and here is what you need to know about it.

51:01    Another marker is how you aggregate material.  I know it’s sometimes not appropriate for jobs and stuff like that, but there are plenty of ways that you can at least think about helping steer people to the other related work because, again it’s not necessarily the case that the institutions represent in this room are the be all, end all, final word on the subjects that they care about.

51:24    The final ethic that has changed in the era of the Internet is that instead of stonewalling when you’ve made a mistake or correcting it on the sly or having a formal mechanism, ask for forgiveness.  Everybody knows you’re going to make mistakes.  Everybody knows that things aren’t right.  Fess up to it.  You get more credibility and more trust for having done that than certainly by stonewalling on it or going through some obscure process of trying to sort through the facts.

51:54    How do you assist and act on information?  This is the participation side, opportunities for feedback, people love it as long as you give them a sense of their feedback is being listened to.  You can’t just absorb it and not react to it.  Offer opportunities for remixing and mash ups so that exciting things that are happening are taking government data and certainly the Obama administration is very active now in pushing out lots of data to allow people to create their own stuff off of it.

52:21    Offer opportunities for team building and be open to the wisdom of crowds.  The Dan Gilmore, the great technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury and now an independent journalism consultant has this wonderful line saying: “My audience always knows more than I do.”  They’re not smarter than he is and their IQ’s maybe aren’t higher, but collectively they’ve got a bigger sense and a broader sense of the world that he cares about and I think that’s a sensibility that makes good sense for you to pay attention to.

52:58    OK so now we’re getting to the Nine Tribes.  This comes from a report that we did a couple of months ago called the mobile difference.  It’s available on our site www.pewinternet.org and again all of this stuff will be available to the the Linked In posting and as a matter of fact we’re going to post these slide shows live on our site too.

53:19    We did a survey that was actually the second in a series that we did where we asked people about three things.  We asked them about the technology assets that they had.  Do you have a ell phone?  Do you have a lap top?  Do you have a digital camera?  Do you have a gaming system and stuff like that.  So we took an inventory of their gadgets.  We then asked them what they did with their gadgets, so their actions.  How do you use these gizmo’s that you’ve got in your life.  The third thing that we asked about was their attitudes.  It turns out that people’s attitudes about the role of technology in their lives, about the function that technology plays for them is very determined by the kind of technology users they are.  You could take people who have the exact same technology profile; they’ve got the same stuff in their homes and their purses, but if they like it then they say it makes them feel more productive and it makes them feel more connected and it makes them feel more useful in the world.  They are very different in the way they use the technology from those who say: “I really need a break from it every once in a while.  I hate being online all the time.  It doesn’t really make me more productive because I’m interrupted.

54:26    We asked people what devices were more precious to them.  What would they be least likely to give up?  How often do their gadgets break.  Do their gadgets serve a variety of personal needs in their life like productivity, connection to their community and stuff like that.  And we asked them about how much they like being always connected; if they had enough gadgets to have that be a reasonable question.  We asked them: Do you like those always being on or do you need a break?  Do you like to have time off for quite and contemplation or are you really jazzed by always being online or on the grid in one way, shape or form.

55:06    It turns out there is a nice, clean divider.  There are people who are into it and mobile connectivity is  making them more into it and there are people who are less into it or don’t do it at all.  So in our big sample, about 39% of the adult population are those people we call motivated by mobility.  They’ve got the gadgetry, they’ve got the connections that allow for that.  There are actually five groups of them.  The thing that’s distinguishable about them is that they adore their technology mostly and their attitudes are mostly improving.  As I said this is the second time we did this survey and so we could see change over time.  We also talked to about half the sample of people we had talked to before so we could actually measure longitudinally what had changed from the last time that we had talked to these same people.  We saw this was the group where attitudes were improving.  They had more stuff, they loved their mobile connections, and it enhanced the way that they felt about things and the way that they used the world.  They are also combined with that mobility, they like content creation.  They like the self-expression piece and the fact that they can be contributors to the world.

56:23    61% of Americans are not that much into it.  If anything their attitudes about the role of technology in their lives are either the same or gone down.  They are not necessarily wild about mobile connectivity in the way that it opens them up, opens other things up to their lives, they are more likely to say that they need breaks, they are more likely to say that things do break on them that are vital and that annoys the hell out of them.  In many cases they have lots of technology, but they segment their use of technology.  When they’re stable and stationary, that’s the time for technology.  When they’re on the move, they don’t want technology in their lives.  So there’s this divider between mobility 39% and people who like their stationary media 61%.

57:12    Now I’ll unpack each of these groups.  I’ll give you the five groups who are motivated by mobility.  The first group is digital collaborators.  These are the top of the food chain.  These are the people who get all the press attention, all of the cultural energy going to them, they’re buying new iPhone’s today that were released yesterday.  They are content creators of every kind.  They have broadband in every dimension of their lives.  They have smart phone that they move around with.  They are wildly enthusiastic about the role of technology in their lives.  This is about 8% of the population.  In many ways this is the out-sized portion of the population if you think of them as influencer’s.  They’re the early adopters.  They’re the ones who are paving the way for the rest of us, but they are not a big cohort.  It’s a heavily male group.  The median age is in the late 30’s, generation X in many respects in part because of resources and wealth and eduction, and in part just because of life stage stuff.  They’re into this stuff.  They aren’t necessarily the youngest users who are the most wacky for all this kind of stuff.  They do have a lot of college education.  They are disproportionately likely to have graduated from college, high levels of income, mostly in the labor market, mostly suburban and urban.  They have a lot of Internet experience, they’re married.

58:38 They’re one of the most significant continuous predictors of Internet access, availability and usability is being a parent of a minor child.  In many cases families have sort of bet that this stuff is important for their kids future.  That learning is a prerequisite for success in the future, so they’re into it.  They’ve also go knowledge-based jobs and stuff like that in many cases.  So think parents when you’re think of this group rather than think college students.

59:10    Strategies for you guys to embrace is you become a node or think about being a node in their network, just get the tools to do the things that they already want.  They don’t need a lot of anything else from you although they would love to provide you lots of feedback and stuff like that so offering them opportunities is a good thing.

59:29    Ambivalent networker’s are younger, but they are not the people who are wild about this stuff.  If you look at all the metrics of assets and actions they are usually number one or number two in all of those things.  For them you just come away with the sense that they’re a little bit burdened by all of this.  They want to take a break every once in a while.  They’re on line a lot and on their phone’s a lot not because they’re wildly enthusiastic about it, but because they’re a little bit afraid that if they don’t do it people will think they’re out of it or work communication will slip by or something like that so you feel a little bit of burden on their shoulders in the way that they express their attitudes about technology.  Highly astute male and the youngest group in our cohort, but it has not nearly the proportion of college graduates as the previous group.  They are a lot poorer group; a lot of students in this group and so they’ve got pressures on their lives in other ways.  They are not e-mail users.  Part of that may be a reflection that they don’t want to be on the grid all of the time, but they don’t want yet another application that they have to manage  and be a stewart of and stuff like that.  They’re heavy into phone texting.

So for them what you want them to think about is that there is a space in life where they can have a sanctuary.  They’re into gaming.  That’s one of the artifacts of them being such a young group.  So  maybe a pathway to enthusiasm in their life would be through the gaming environment.  Working is really big with them.  That’s another artifact of their being students.  These people feel some sense of information overload so helping them navigate to stuff they want is more important for this group than the one we just described; the collaborators.

01:01:27  Media movers are not quite as enthusiastic or not quite as active as the previous two groups, but they’re really into this stuff.  They are mostly people who will go out and find other stuff or maybe they’ll take a digital picture with it and share it with others.  The key thing about them is they think this world in many respects serves their social needs more than it serves their professional needs.  They like the fact that they can gather up material and share it.  That’s sort of a social exchange or a building of social capital with them.  They share a lot of what they find.  They’re the ones that send e-mail links to you all of the time.  The top three groups are male, pretty young, racially there is not great distinction among them.  They’re not really heavily college educated.  They’re relatively well to do, but not like the collaborator group.  They’re not very rural.  They are the kind of people who record video on their cell phone, they’ve got digital cameras and they’re insistent on showing everything about it to you or posting lots of photo albums and stuff like they.  They’re health seekers.  They are very interested in getting health information online as opposed to other stuff.  So understand to be a node you’re giving them stuff that helps them further their social world and social lives and so helping them make connections and using your material for their social purposes is a pretty interesting thing to do.

01:02:55  Roving nodes are very different in a gender way from those previous three groups.  This is women.  This is working little league mother in this group.  They got their cell phones to help them manage their lives.  They’ve got a lot of stuff going on in their lives, they’re working women, they might be taking care of an aging parent, but their cell phone is the central communications device of their life to help them manage the things that they need to do.  They love e-mail, they love texting, they love the communications side of this stuff a lot more than they show appreciation for the information side or the content collaboration side because they’re too busy.  They can’t blog.  They’ve got lives to lead.  Again, heavily female, late 30’s, it skews a little bit over indexes into Latino it’s relatively highly college educated group, a lot in the workforce, not very rural, wildly into their cell phones, use Internet all over the place, and what they most express appreciation for is that technology helps them control their lives.  So efficiency is what they’re all about.  You’re helping them get to the things they want; the transactions they want, as quickly and efficiently as possibly is what they would appreciate.  They might like alerts or the capacity to set up alerts and stuff like that.  They through cloud stuff since they’re always on the move, allowing them to do a lot of stuff in the cloud is a useful thing for them.

01:04:29  Then 8% of the population we call mobile newbies.  These are people who have just gotten their cell phone in the past year or so.  They are like zealous.  They are like converts.  This is the best thing that’s ever happened to them.  They’re not really wildly into the Internet, but they love this new world that this new cell phone has opened to them.  They again, this is the central piece of technology in their lives.  It’s a female group.  It’s the oldest motivated by mobility group.  It’s a little bit over indexed for minorities, both African Americans and Latinos.  It’s not terribly educated.  It’s most predominantly high school diploma’s or less than high school.  They don’t make a lot of money and stuff like that.  They’re not Internet users, but what they like is the new connective and the new sort of “with it” aspect that the cell phone has brought into their lives and that’s why they express the level of enthusiasm that they do.  So these are people that are converts and might appreciate from you exposure that other things that technology will do that will help them widen their world.  In many cases they don’t understand all the wonderful stuff that’s available to them on the Internet or the wonderful ways that the Internet can serve their interests, but they’re open to that.  So thinking about ways that you might introduce yourself to them and introduce how useful you could be to them is the right frame of mind to have with them.

01:05:54  OK.  So those are the five motivated by mobility groups.  There are five groups that are stationary media majority.

01:06:04  The largest of them by far are old white guys.  They’ve been online a long time.  They are happy to be at their desk and doing stuff and they think it’s a highly functional life, but think of them as peeking out in 2003.  This served all of the basic purposes that it was ever going to serve for them and they haven’t really thought much about the social media revolution.  They think the whole thing I did at the beginning about Twitter is lunatic and they’re use of this cell phone is exactly centered in 2004.  Make the call, receive the call, case closed.  They’re heavily male in their mid 40’s over indexed for white.  They’re pretty highly educated.  They’ve got a decent amount of resources.  A lot of them are in the work force.  Not very rural.  They’ve got cell phones and they want to make the calls on them.  They think it’s ridiculous that you give them a 900 page user manual with lots of other functionality or there’s lots of extra buttons on the damn thing.  They don’t want it.  They are very happy with what they’ve got.  They think it serves purposes in their lives, but again this is a group whose views about the efficacy and the usefulness of technology has stopped growing.  They’re fine with it, they don’t wildly object to it, but they’re just not more into it.  So what they’re all about is using the traditional stuff in the tradition way in their connections.  They might want some help thinking about social media.  Helping them understand what it is and how to do it and stuff like that.  Maybe some of them will be enthusiastic about it, but don’t set your hearts on it because your hearts will be broken.

01:07:56  Drifting surfers are a really interesting group.  They are a high proportion of this stationary media majority.  They’ve got a a lot of stuff in their lives, they just don’t show any reason to do more of it or less of it or be wildly embracing of the advantages it can bring to their life.  They’re drifting.  What’s a better way to say that.  They skew female in their mid forties.  Racially there are not distinguishing characteristics of them.  They’ve got relatively high amounts of income.  They are workers and stuff like that.  The thing about them is their asset and even their action profile fits a lot of the other groups it’s just that they don’t do it very often.  They don’t think that it helps them that much.  They are less likely to say that the Internet makes me productive than lots of other groups.  The Internet helps me get the things I want done.  The Internet gives me access  to information.  They’re mostly doing online stuff out of obligation or because mildly more efficient that the alternative for gathering information and communication, but they are very likely to report that they love taking breaks from all this stuff because it just feels very burdensome to them.  So they don’t want to be force-fed technology.  They  are the kinds of people that your traditional services and traditional communication methods are most going to appeal to.  They are also the people who have had bad experiences with their gadgets and they don’t feel like they have their own skill set to fix their gadgets and very often in their life they don’t have friends who can help them fix their gadgets.  So they’ve had a bad time with a cell phone or a computer and it just feels like a hassle rather than something that they can muck around and fix or find somebody who can fix it and then they’ll get on to the next great thing in their lives.  They are not happy about information overload.  That’s how they experience 4.5 million search results in 1.3 seconds.  They are just not happy about this.  They are the most skeptical about the content they encounter online.  Over time they have gotten feeling more burdened than they were when we talked to them in 2006.  They like old traditional media.  They love their TV’s, newspapers, magazines, radio programs and they consume those media on those traditional platforms too.  It’s the highest male group.  It’s an older group in their 50’s.  One third, one third, one third between some college and high school.  They’re not necessarily highly represented in the workforce.  There is a lot more rural representation that other groups and yet you see the technology ownership is relatively high.  All of it feels like an obligation.  All of it feels like something that somebody is forcing on them that they just don’t want and they need help with their new gadgets.  So you need to offer them a shoulder to cry on.  Don’t force anything on them and help them navigate who you are and what you are for them through traditional means and by all means be a referral and navigator or filter for them.

01:11:24  Tech indifferent are people who just from day one never really thought much of this stuff and they got it because everybody else has got it and they don’t think terribly much about technology at all.  It’s a side light in their life and they’re not into it at all.  Mostly female.  A little bit over indexed for African Americans, high school or less is the predominant education style.  They’re not terribly well off.  They have less technology to begin with.  They voted with their feet or their pocket books not to have the technology to begin with.  But they do have cell phones, but they’re the kind of people who never turn their cell phone on until they have to make a call.  They’re the kinds of people who shut their cell phone off after they’ve completed the call.  So they don’t see any benefit in technology.  Your offering it to them is not very good.  Maybe tutorials will help get them by and yet this is a group that I had some sense of a feeling that public places are places that they are more likely to engage technology if they had to.  The gun was at their head and stuff like that.  This might be a group that you’re thinking about serving by making technology available to them.

01:12:42  The final group is people who are entirely off the net.  That’s Aunt Bee from Mayberry.  14% of the population does not have the Internet or a cell phone.  So these are folks who are over represented among females.  It’s the oldest group.  Excuse a little bit to African Americans and Latinos, they have mostly high school educations or less.  They’re the least well-off groups of all.  Some of them have laptops and desk tops and some of them have actually been Internet users in the past, but the thing broke or never served its purpose or they got a virus or whatever.  So it’s not like they have completely disassociated themselves from technology, they have tried it or someone has encouraged them to try it and it’s just not work for them.  It’s been more of a hassle than not.  Thinking that your traditional services serve them.  Maybe some gentle coaching and maybe pairing them us since they’re the oldest group.  Maybe thinking about serving them in a tech support and coaching and mentoring method would be the best.

01:13:50  You know what?  I’m going to stop there just to make sure I get to all the questions because I know you’ve got some and we’re getting close on time.

Gary:  My question for you is about priorities.  How do we set priorities to know what’s important?

01:14:34  Priorities are usually driven by needs.  So when you ask people about priorities, what they will give you is general answers that are not quite meaningful in the sense that you need to operationalize them.  When somebody has been healthy for the past 20 years and then gets diagnosed with a need, their parties change that day.  There is a way I think about this in this final slide – thinking that you are there for them when they have a need is probably the right way to think about it.  That is not helpful to help you distinguish how you spend your next investment dollar, dollar of investment time and stuff like that.  I think you start by thinking who is my cohorts instead of more or less the regulars.   Then thinking what their priorities are.  That’s the institutional need that you probably ought to think about serving first.  Then you think about how do we expand.  Where are the logical places for us to be and to build our audience to other places because peoples needs differ so greatly by the moment that they’re in, the circumstances of their culture, the circumstances of their community, the level of urgency of the need.  Thinking about audience priorities is probably not as useful a way to think about it as I know lots of you would like to.  I think serve your regulars most avidly and make sure that they’re happy.  Think about where the next increment of growth or outreach makes sense for you and then figure out how to meet their needs.  So in my little 4A’s, I think for the first audience it’s numbers two and three.  It would be help them get the information they want in the most timely way.  So that’s acquisition of information; making sure it gets to them.  And then assessing information.  A lot of times people go to websites or ping their networks because they’ve encountered something they don’t quite understand or is new or is alien to them and they’re trying to find some way of measuring it as how important it is in their network or their world.  They will ping their network or they will ping their trusted institutions or brands and you helping them figure it out is a good thing to do in the sort of grand strategy that probably applies across all people, all needs, and all classes is helping navigate.  You can’t devote enough attention to helping people navigate to the information the want.  There is no rule book on this yet.  It’s driven by different needs and different life circumstances, but making sure that you think about people and taking them by the hand to get as quickly as they need to be to get to the information they want from you, you’re serving their needs that way.  It’s a lame answer that flipped your question 93 degrees but that’s the best I could do.

01:18:07  There is a spread sheet that goes along with all of this data that I can send you that shows you where they fall.  In most cases English speaking Latinos are very much absolutely main stream.  They look just like Caucasian Americans in almost all of what they do.  There is some cultural differences in that they search for different kinds of news.  They search for different cultural stuff online, but they’re answer to the question: Do you get news online?  They’re very similar to Caucasian Americans.  So the best thing for me to do is send you the spread sheet so you can see that they are pretty fully represented throughout all of these things.  They don’t necessarily stand out as a group for the “Latino-ness”  Latinos are a young cohort so they look more young.  What’s driving a lot of their behavior is young behavior as opposed to Latino behavior because it’s generational solidarity that seems to be at work as much as their interest in stuff that draws from their ethnic background.

Can you speak to the revenue potential for iPhone applications?

01:19:30  No.  We look at the social impact of the Internet and there are lovely, wonderful, expensive, proprietary firms that provide data on stuff like that.  We felt there was a need to provide things to the world on stuff that wasn’t getting studied because it didn’t necessarily have commercial applications.  What I can say is that we’ve begun in broad surveys.  We’re doing these big surveys of the entire adult population.  It’s meant to be represented of everybody who is 18 and older.  For the first time in the survey results that we will be releasing in a couple of weeks we’ve begun to find people who will say: “I’ve downloaded an application of one kind or another to my cell phone.”  and stuff like that.  It’s relatively small, but I’m sure it will grow over time and this is representative of a larger question that we get asked a lot.  If I could have the answer I wouldn’t be working for a non-profit.  What happens to content in the age when, as Chris Anderson is saying in his new book, “free is the common price.”  Will people pay for news if a lot of it is available for free?  Will people pay for applications if they can get a good enough version for free?  So there is an enormous debate that’s taking place that is classic debate about destructive forces in the economy about where do we set the new boundaries here.  We don’t know the answer.  Sorry.

01:21:07  From an e-gov persecutive is there any results about how citizens are engaged versus online versus offline.   Do they vote?  Are they engaged in their community and that sort of thing?  Did any of that come through?

01:21:23  We asked them general information on this on government and I will point out – send this group some more information on that.  There are a couple of things to say: we’re going to do e-government work in the Fall.  So we’ll have a lot more to say in November or December.  Peoples expectation have radically shifted, so for pure play information needs now, the majority of people the top of the bell curve, want stuff online and expect it online and preference it if just an information query.  If it’s a personal thing – if they’ve got a problem to solve with government or it’s a sensitive matter that they’re seeking information on, they want a human being to deal with.  They don’t want to rely on a website.  They don’t want to rely on general information.  They want specific stuff and frankly they want a human being to say this is what’s going on or this is the way to go.  They certainly want the human face of government to be interacting with them.  I think the Obama campaign in the first moments of its governing has clearly ratcheted up expectations about transparency.  People now want to see the primary stuff.  They want to be able to vote on it.  Not everybody will do it.  As a matter of fact, very few people will take the time to give you comments on regulations or to recommend stuff on Digg or anything like that, but you’ve got to do it because this is now baked into the experience people have with government.  We’re beginning to see – actually not it’s a pretty consistent finding – somewhere about 13% and 20% of people who do anything online are participators.  We see it in: health, government, politics, news.  These are the people who will post on their blog about what you’re doing.  They will recommend or post a link on their website or form a group in Face Book or something like that.  These are very different people in some respects from traditional civic actors.  They are really into tech.  They’re kind of quirky in the sensibilities.  They are rabid free speech information free people.  These are not outliers, but absolutely if you put something behind a wall they will take it as a challenge to go find it or beat the crap out of you in the process.  So that’s kind of the sensibilities that we’re seeing.

01:24:15  I’d like your thoughts on the administration’s dialog tools; asking citizens their opinions.  Do you think there are any problems due to the ambivalent networkers.  What can we do to make sure we get a good cross-section of America?

01:24:46  I would actually caution you at first to think that you’re ever going to get a good cross-section of America.  There are wildly varying levels of enthusiasm, motivation and engagement in the public.  The unenthusiastic, unengaged, the deeply skeptical, the people who hate the government are never going to be responsive to that.  The other dark side of that is people who hate you or hate the government or just generally are nasty human beings will exploit and try to ruin those sites or try to take over the conversation on those sites and stuff like that.  I don’t have a troll repellent idea that will work with you.  The other way to set your expectations at a better level here is that a lot of the feedback they will give you, you already know.  In the wisdom of crowds notion in some respects, you already know what it looks like through your 800 numbers, through your other engagements through your regular numbers and stuff like that.  It’s not like opening up new tools automatically opens up lots of new fabulous insights and ideas for innovation and stuff like that.  You will see a lot of the same stuff.  In some respects the burdens on offering conversation dialogue citizen input is good and healthy and it helped build better feelings about government.   As a trained Political Scientists I can tell you what matters to me.  I think in some respects the magic of what you get out of that is the aggregation,  It’s finding out what the totality of the group – what it’s sensibilities are, what it’s insights are and stuff like that.  I think it would be the rare, rare, rare gem if someone says something that opens your eyes in a new way or makes you think you ought to offer this or this is something you ought to pass along to the agency head or the President of the United States.  It’s pretty prosaic stuff when you talk to Americans about what they need and their needs aren’t that hard to understand.  So I would just set your expectations at that level.  Offering these tools and then monitoring them so that they aren’t destroyed is probably the best you can do.

01:27:07  Have you ever compared American data with international data?

01:27:14  The question is a great question.  Is there any international comparison on our data?  It’s so expensive to do international polling.  I would love to get Pew money or any body’s money to do it, but it’s not possible to do.  There is a world Internet project that is housed at USC  that has some very broad brush material about politics.  They might do some e-government stuff.  It’s called: “The project for the digital future” at USC.  They just released a cross-cultural material that they’ve been gathering for several years a couple of months ago.  Americans are special and unique.  What little we know about cross cultural work is that Americans have different expectations and different experiences of engagement with government and government experiences.  We are outliers in many respects and all for the stuff that you guys care about.  They want more transparency.  They want more material.  They want more transactions and stuff like that.  In a lot more cultures, people want to yell at the bureaucrat right in their face or want to have a human encounter mediating their engagement with government.

01:28:33  I’m going to make this the last question because I know we’ve got to go.  Let me just go back in the data rather than remember it entirely.  What is generally true about health seekers is they come from a variety of places on our user typology spectrum, but once they become health seekers, their notion about technology and their notion about how technology can serve them radically changes.  So the healthy 23 year old whose mother gets sick who didn’t ever think that the Internet was a health seeking tool now because rabid to get e-mail alerts and cell phone alerts and access to web pages that are customized.  So I’ll have Susana Fox get back to you on that.  We have some health data coming out tomorrow that is not tied to our typology, but it shows incredibly high numbers of people getting it.  Not necessarily everyday.  The chronically ill or care givers for the chronically ill are regular website users particularly with a diagnosis for them or a loved one they all of a sudden dive into the deep end of the pool that couldn’t be predicted if you just looked at their previous Internet experience.

01:30:12  Thank you so much.

01:30:22  Julie Perlmutter: Time just flies when Lee speaks, doesn’t it.  So thank you very much Lee and a small token of our appreciation; a Starbucks gift card and there’s one for you too Chris.  We’ll just use that applause for our host and our sponsors: Aquin, Iron Works, and Rock Creek Strategic Marketing.  The followup will have Lee’s presentation on the Linked In site.  If you’re not already on the Linked In site, we’ll make sure that you do receive an invitation to join that.  The best thing that I learned is now working is becoming more important so therefore I feel more relevant and if there are now Nine Tribes of the Internet then that brings new relevance to the concept of the pow wow.  So some how I’ve got to figure out how to have a web manager’s pow wow.  I was always a big pow wow follower and it’s really where tribes come together and they really party like hell if anybody saw the opening of the American Indian museum, it was the biggest pow wow I ever saw.  It also is when tribal leaders come together and in a sense we are tribal leaders and they come to discuss the issues of the day.  That maybe really what the web managers round table is becoming.  Our next event will be the web analytics pow wow.  It will be with Jim Stern who is founder of the Web Analytics Association and founder of the E-Metric Summit Worldwide.  Jim like Lee speaks once a year to our group.  We’re tossing around ideas but we’re looking at the top of SEO internal search and site navigation.  The analytics associated with those searches and how they affect your overall content strategy on your website.  If you think you may have something to add to be on a panel, please contact me.  We are thinking about moderating that kind of event.  We are also looking for a venue for this event.  You don’t have to have as beautiful a place as this, but if you do have a place that you think you can house us I would really like to know about it.  The next event is August 7th.