Consumer networks in social media marketing

7/29/2019 Consumer networks in social media marketing

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Blessed are the Geeks: an Ethnographic Study of ConsumerNetworks in Social Media , 2006-2012

Journal: Journal of Marketing Management

Manuscript ID: RJMM-2012-0257.R2

Manuscript Type: Special Issue - AM-SI-2012

Keywords (headings notselectable):

Identity < Consumer research, Interactions < Relationship marketing, Newmedia < E-marketing, Social networks < E-marketing, Viral marketing < E-marketing, Consumer culture < Consumer research

Methodologies: ethnography, phenomenology / observation, netnography

Free Response Keywords: Facebook, Twitter

URL: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rjmm

Journal of Marketing Management


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Blessed are the Geeks: an Ethnographic Study of Consumer

Networks in Social Media , 2006-2012

Abstract

Understanding the nature and extent of consumer networks in social media has been

complicated both by their rapid adoption and their tendency to adapt and mutate as they have

been deployed. Originally described as Web 2.0 technologies, social media appear to have

shifted the locus of communicative power from brand owners, governments and large media

companies, in favour of their audiences. Much has been claimed for social media marketing,

but empirical studies are only recently starting to appear in leading journals, and in most

cases concentrate on the role of brands, products and services. This article presents the

findings of a 6 year virtual ethnography, one focused on the consumer, a study with the aim

of gaining a preliminary understanding of this evolving phenomenon. It finds that social

media contain sets of complex interpersonal relationships in both concentric networks and in

ad hoc groupings. These networks function through multi-faceted reciprocal displays in

which products, services and brands may have a role, but are more likely to be peripheral to

other aspects of relationship building.

Summary Statement of Contribution

Provides further evidence on the value of ethnographic research in marketing. Provides a

consumer/user viewpoint to supplement much of the recent scholarly research on strategic

aspects of social media marketing. Highlights areas for further research, as well as possible

limitations of conventional surveys in an area which is subject to rapid and disruptive change.

Tentatively identifies online display approval and virtual conspicuous consumption.

Keywords

Social media, netnograpy, Facebook, Twitter, reciprocity, virtual conspicuous consumption,

virtual display approval, catharsis

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Blessed are the Geeks: an Ethnographic Study of Consumer

Networks in Social Media , 2006-2012

This journey began on an ordinary Thursday in November 2006. I was stood in front

of 200 final year undergraduates, trying to figure out what to say about YouTube. The

students had signed up to a course which would explore contemporary issues in marketing:

but Googles acquisition of YouTube, completed earlier that week with a price tag $1.65

billion, made no sense at all. YouTube was losing a billion dollars a year and was facing the

prospect of a series of ruinous lawsuits from copyright owners. At the same time, I had

observed my students and family alike migrate from text messaging (SMS) on mobile phonesto instant messaging on MSN and Yahoo. While they were hanging out in Myspace and

Bebo, politicians in France and Germany were adopting avatars to carry out their virtual

campaigning in Second Life (Baygert 2009), and a would be president Obama was starting to

experiment with social media (Fineman 2009).

This article describes curious longitudinal study whose broad aim was to discover the

nature and extent of consumer networks in the burgeoning online communities. It was

curious, not because of the method chosen ethnography has been providing insights into

consumer behaviour for more than 20 years. Rather it was that the phenomenon I was

studying evolved and grew exponentially, morphing into an almost unrecognisable virtual

behemoth six years later. More interestingly though, I will show how there was a co-

evolutionary dynamic in play: as a user, the technology changed the way I conceptualised

myself and engaged with the outside world, just as, in parallel, I and other users were

responsible for changing the very nature of the technological offering.

Context

What we were dimly aware of in late 2006 was that the world wide web was evolving

from something that audiences consumed, to an entity which they actively created (Harwood

and Garry 2010, Heinonen 2011): a whole new set of easy-to-use tools came available and

the web became not just what we read but how we expressed ourselves (Pehlivan 2011). As

one computer science student put it to me, Ive spent the last four years learning how to put

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together websites: now someone with no skills whatsoever can create their own Myspace

pages in a couple of hours.

It was not just the democratizing of the web through the development of new, user-

friendly platforms: a series of changes in the software and hardware environment resulted in

the increasing adoption of more powerful computers, sophisticated digital recording devices

and above all, reliable broadband connections to drive the content-based revolution. Web

2.0, a vague term popularised in Silicone Valley from 2004 with a series of conference with

the same name, described a set of alternative business models, where capital and revenue

were less important than creativity and reach (Lanchester 2006), invariably driven by a new

type of web entrepreneur (Burkeman 2006). At the same time it was recognised that the

original knowledge-based aspirations of the internet could be addressed more effectively by

developments such as the Semantic Web (Economist 2006). Web 2.0 was recognised as more

than a plaything for scholars and children, or even as a burgeoning channel for retail

distribution: the term digital engagement arrived and rapidly focused the minds of

politicians and business leaders (Cross 2009). The communications landscape was

inexorably changing: ironically it was media companies like News International that were

riding this wave, leaving technological giants like Microsoft floundering (Naughton 2006).

Unlike the dotcom bubble debacle of 2000-2001, Web 2.0 was changing the ways in which

users engaged with the web and with each other: companies that understood this stood to

profit from it (Economist 2009b).

The ethnographic approach

The problem appeared to be how to make sense of disruption, discontinuity and change

(Valos et al 2010, Harrigan and Hulbert 2011). What we seemed to be witnessing was a shift

from web-based corporate communication to user-based networks of conversation, something

already identified by Kozinets in 1999, and a theme taken up again by Barnes and Mattsson

(2011). I had achieved some success in studying consumer narratives using ethnographic

techniques (Croft et al 2007), so it seemed only natural to approach the phenomenon through

this same interpretive paradigm. The earlier study had demonstrated that consumers' social

interactions were far more complex than had previously thought, in the business and

management literature at least: while products, services and brands appeared naturally in

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consumer discourse, distinct groups used different conversational strategies and often

appeared to be working towards conflicting social goals.

Just as Kozinets had chosen to understand the whole Star Trek phenomenon by joining

communities of Trekkers at their conventions (2001), so I chose to enter the virtual worlds

of Web 2.0 both to listen and to join in the conversations. In much the same way OGuinn

and Belk had mapped out consumption patterns and rituals among evangelical Christians at

Heritage Village in South Carolina (1989). Still more methodological guidance was provided

by Kozinets, whose 2002 study explored the often paradoxical rhetoric of non-consumption at

the Burning Man Festival. None of these seminal studies started out with a formal set of

research objectives: rather, they identified broad research questions and provided persuasive

rationales for studying them in terms of their cultural and commercial impacts. Likewise I

framed my research question in terms of gaining an understanding of the nature and extent of

web-mediated social networks by studying these from within: the commercial imperatives for

this were being clearly articulated by the media at the time (a telling example being The

Guardian newspaper, which devoted an entire special supplement to Web 2.0 on November

4, 2006, the text versions appropriately enhanced by supplementary video and audio material

online).

However, while Kozinets (2001, 2002) and O'Guinn and Belk (1989) started their

studies with a brief discussion of the theoretical frameworks, in this piece the conceptual

development emerged later, and is included with the analysis here. Empirical studies startedto be published when the research had already been under way for some years (for example

the Journal of Marketing Management 's special issue 26:3-4 from 2010). This article, then,

starts with an introspective study of a personal engagement with computer-mediated online

networks from 2006 to 2012, going on to examine the thematic interpretations through the

studies that emerged post hoc (O'Guinn & Belk 1989), as well as returning to the seminal

ethnographies of Kozinets and others. The process provided a set of analyses which were

used in turn to revisit the original data and to develop some tentative models with which to

map consumers' engagement with each other, as well as with products, services and brands.

The ethnographic premise involved conceptualizing the social media phenomenon as a

collection of inter-connected, socially-constructed networks with their own consumption

practices, discourse and norms (based on Kozinets 2002); the longitudinal study sought to

understand the discursive acts and ritual practices by engaging with them and reflecting on

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the nature of the social relationships on display and the role of marketing in mediating those

relationships.

In the early stages I diligently kept field notes: initially these were in the form of a

daily blog post shared with a colleague who was interested in making discoveries that would

help inform our understanding of e-learning in this changing environment. The initiative was

soon abandoned as it became clear that rather than recording our observations in an objective

and systematic manner (Kutsche 1998, pp.27, 48), our notes had become epistles, created for

an audience of one. More importantly, perhaps, I realised that note taking in this way was

atypical: what mattered more was immersion in the subject matter where, inter alia , a record

of my various interventions was being maintained independently in a virtual world.

Similarly, a number of interventions described as 'interviews' in this article were spontaneous

social interactions where the themes emerged naturally: in these cases field notes, where

possible including verbatim transcriptions, were completed as soon as possible after the

event.

Communities: ad hoc and concentric

As I studied the Web 2.0 phenomenon I would seek out fora where my burgeoning

networks suggested the conversations were happening, and get myself signed up. An early

example was Myspace: my profile, painstakingly created and customised in 2006, is still

there, although the party has now moved on. Much the same happened with Bebo, while most

of us who joined Google+ in 2011 are still waiting for the party to start. Facebook was

another matter: I was there ahead of most of my students and all of my family: Facebook was

an obscure college network when I was invited in by one of my students at the end of 2006:

by the end of the study it had a billion active users worldwide and a market value of $104

billion (Dembosky and Demos 2012). Likewise I found my voice on Twitter, putting out

3,000 messages to an audience of over 500. It was a similar story with filesharing: on Flickr I

uploaded 3,000 photographs which in turn were viewed over 150,000 times. On Youtube I

went from being a consumer to becoming a producer, uploading over 40 movies, some of

which were viewed more than 2,000 times. I shared documents on Google, edited Wikipedia

pages and shared slide presentations and articles. Similarly, my online consumption

experiences on eBay, Amazon, travel booking services and similar outlets became part of my

study.

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During the study I collected over 1,600 contacts into my various social and business

networks. How was this possible, and how can one manage such an extended network

efficiently when anthropologists suggest that the human brain generally can cope with just

150? (the so-called Dunbar Number, Economist 2009a). My experience was that networks

created on different social media platforms had distinct properties and were often managedfor quite different purposes. I identified two network types, which I termed Concentric and

Ad Hoc . The Concentric Networks tended to consist of people whom I knew personally,

rather than the groupings of strangers I was linked to in Ad Hoc networks. Naturally the

boundaries of these groups were porous (a point also made about communities by OGuinn

and Belk in 1989, and Kozinets in 2002). Not only were these distinct groups, but the many

interactions happened on different levels: indeed, the Dunbar hypothesis has been critiqued

for failing to allow for this type of distinction (see, for example, de Ruiter et al, 2011).

Roberds and Bennett (2011) have also drawn attention to the distinction betweennetworking (using social media to build new networks of contacts) and networks (sites

used for developing and performing social relationships). Similarly, Heinrichs et al (2011)

highlighted the varied strategies employed by different groups, according to the platforms

used, experience and other factors, something confirmed by the work of Page et al (2011)

with young online audiences.

In my study, Concentric groups tended to be within the larger business and social

networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Here network protocol required both parties to

agree to connect which put a firm emphasis on real-life relationships. Almost everyone

here I had met face-to-face at some stage: in LinkedIn there were roughly equal numbers of

colleagues and former colleagues, current and former students, and business and professional

associates. However, within my professional networks there were very few personal friends

and family members - these were in other concentric rings such as Facebook. There the

environment was less formal and although Facebook included students and colleagues, the

conversation was quite different. I found that my professional networks (LinkedIn, Xing,

Plaxo) tended to be much larger - containing around 600 contacts - but in many ways they

lacked the dynamism of the personal social networks. My professional networks tended to

resemble the online equivalent of a drawer full of business cards, kept partly as an aide-

memoire and partly as a low-maintenance means of keeping up to date with people with

whom one would not normally maintain contact socially. In these rings people collected

each other on the basis of acquaintance or common interests (in my case, academics at other

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institutions). We kept our professional details up to date, and may have tried to adapt our

personal brand through occasional updates such as describing the projects we were working

on.

Some authors (for example Lin and Lu 2011, Brandtzg et al 2010) have described this

process in terms of social capital theory, and show how users often have to negotiate trade-

offs between maximising their reach and losing their privacy. What I noticed was that

because in these outer rings little happened, and people gave away comparatively little

about themselves, there were no real barriers to network growth (social capital). However,

Brandtzg et al point to the importance of trust in building social capital, something perhaps

difficult to do when users are building their own personal brands. For these authors, network

building, in social capital terms, focuses on a smaller number of connections due to the

surrender (investment) of privacy. Similarly, Lin and Lu (2011) have shown how what was

important was not a crude measure of network size, but the quality of the interactions. This

problem has been addressed by professional social networks such as LinkedIn by providing

firstly the opportunity for other users to endorse a member, and secondly (and more recently)

by giving users the chance to rate others in terms of a range of attributes and skills.

Within the inner rings, (what perhaps Brandtzg et al would call 'thick trust'),

interactions were both far more numerous and more personal: on Facebook I found I was

having to manage my network, deleting contacts who were either high maintenance (one

former student, for example, would typically make more than 50 postings over a singleweekend), or because their contributions were tedious (I had to 'unfriend' two family

members, both of whom were US-based and whose Facebook contributions were largely

right-wing political diatribes).

Ad Hoc networks tended to contain contacts whom I had not met face-to-face, but for

whom there was some other point of convergence. On Twitter, for example, I was

following in the region of 600 individuals and companies, and in turn was followed by a

slightly smaller number. The driving force tended to be connecting with people or

organizations who had an interesting story to tell: I kept up to date with politicians,

technology companies, specialist journals and similar bodies via Twitter. I also used it to

develop a narrative of my own, often linking my postings to other work such as photography

or articles I had posted online. On the photo-sharing site Flickr I had 130 contacts - hardly

any of whom I had met. The network here was based on a mutual appreciation of each

others work, a desire to keep up to date with this oeuvre - but which rarely strayed into the

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domestic or personal. On more than one occasion I had taken part in active Twitter fora at

conferences: although as participants we were all in the same building at the same time,

attempts to arrange a face-to-face meeting were invariably met with apathy. Ad Hoc

networks grow as the users find other points of contact where something interesting is being

said: there is no particular requirement for the person or body being followed to engage inany way, although where there is a common interest this often happens. Media commentators

had started to identify this phenomenon during the US Presidential Election of 2008, when

the emergence of virtual tribes was believed partly to explain the success of the Obama

campaign (see, for example, Fineman 2009), although Kozinets (1999) had tentatively

identified the process much earlier, and Robards and Bennett (2011) further developed the

concepts. What I termed Ad Hoc in many respects resembled the earliest internet-based user

groups, many of which pre-dated the worldwide web: virtual communities were based around

shared interests, and strict protocols applied to membership and participation (Ballantine andMartin 2005, Kozinets 1999).

Reciprocal behaviours

What I perceived within social and business networks since 2006 was the central role

of reciprocity. This was particularly the case with Ad Hoc networks where the nexus of a

relationship was that it will be maintained so long as it brings value to the parties involved. I

would provide news, information, opinions, pictures, video, humour and other commodities,and in return would expect to be entertained with more of the same. Social networks like

Facebook made this sort of reciprocal behaviour easy by providing Like buttons with which

to comment on individual postings, and the ability to add personal commentary also.

Filesharing sites like Flickr and YouTube allowed the same sort of commentary, and the

ability to favourite items. I came to realise that it was not so much an audience that I was

looking for when I uploaded a photograph or comment on a news item: instead it was

audience reaction.

In a social network one is using a range of tools primarily to tell a story: it takes time to

find ones voice and ones preferred medium, but the end reward is gaining audience

engagement rather than building an audience per se . Kozinets had reported on the same

reciprocal behaviour at Burning Man (2002). I had posted film to YouTube which had been

viewed more than 2,000 times: more satisfying, though, was to have a handful of strangers

comment on a photograph or an article. One of my frustrations with blogging was not so

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much the time it takes - writing is generally a positive experience in itself: the demotivating

part was knowing that the article was being read, but having no feedback posted. I learned

how to use tagging and cross-posting to increase the audience (Google gave me the figures

daily), but still was not able to get a dialogue established.

Reciprocity in social media showed itself in many different facets. Often the

transaction was emotional: for example someone would have a general moan about life and

be compensated by a series of virtual hugs from her friends (a phenomenon described

extensively by Ballantine and Stephenson 2011 and also identified by Huang 2010). During

the course of writing this article I posted something on Facebook about how difficult it was to

conform to the page limit: within an hour four people in my network had empathized by

liking the comment, while another three posted their own comments in agreement (Hard,

innit? said one). In a social network the distinction between audience and artist is largely

irrelevant: the conversations are co-created, be they mediated by jokes, pictures or general

chit-chat (Harwood and Garry 2010). Chan and Li (2011) studied this type of reciprocal

behaviour in detail, their netnographic findings being confirmed by a separate online survey.

Similarly, Jones et al (2009) stressed the importance of reciprocal displays in their study of

the online branding of an offline retailer. We may learn that our audience is interested in

trivia by finding ourselves interested in the trivia they provide. I followed the postings of a

great many politicians, not because I believed in what they said, but because of the way they

articulated their ideas in a new medium. In the early days of Facebook users were given

customised reciprocal tools in the form of virtual rewards to hand out - icons of flowers,

drinks, cake, etc. These were short-lived, perhaps because they lacked the authenticity of a

personal comment.

Who do you think your are? Social media schizophrenia

A set of discursive linguistic protocols are implied in active social media such as

Facebook and Twitter: as with any social gathering, trying to sell things to other attendees is

frowned upon. Instead, we are expected to perform our experiences. Another behaviour that

is disapproved of is Lurking - where someone is part of the community but never

contributes (see Kozinets 2002). The community implicitly shuns such behaviour as the

individuals are felt to be consuming the creative output of the group without giving anything

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of themselves (Kozinets described this at Burning Man in terms of gift giving and of

purified social relations, 2002).

This point perhaps hints at another theme that emerged from participating in a range of

social networks for more than five years. There was a feeling that a community defines itself

as much by who is in it as by who is not. Kozinets discovered this when studying Star Trek

devotees, who in many cases thrived on the derision cast on them by non-fans (called

mundanes by the Trekkers, Kozinets 2001). For young people Facebook became the

coolest place to be as MySpace started its decline in 2007, but its coolness was defined by the

youth of its members and the novelty of the whole system. The attraction, of course, was

heightened when social networks became the target of old media scaremongering (Social

networking websites are causing alarming changes in the brains of young users cried the

Daily Mail, ( Derbyshire 2009)). By the following year, though, the predominately young,

educated users of Facebook were being joined by an older generation, initially in a lurking

role (Johnson 2009), reflecting a marked increase in the engagement of the over 50s with the

internet in general (Bradshaw 2010). In the UK the Saga group, a long established and

successful specialist provider of insurance and holidays for this generation, had an active

online discussion forum, including helpful pages on how to use Facebook and Twitter (where

it had pages of its own). Grossman (2009), meanwhile, had listed 10 reasons why it made

perfect sense for old people to be on Facebook, some frivolous (old people wish someone

would photograph them in compromising positions and post the pictures online), some

serious (Facebook is a business network with endless possibilities).

The tensions caused by these demographic changes have yet to work themselves out in

social media,: how much fun can a party be when your middle-aged parents show up?

According to MacMillan (2009), Facebook's reponse was to trial new privacy controls to

enable younger users to block certain postings from the view of their parents. There was

some anecdotal evidence that younger Facebook users were migrating to other platforms:

however, while I found in my study many students reporting that their parents and other

family members were now 'following' them, none cited this as a reason for moving on.Instead, I interviewed several former students who had migrated from Facebook to Twitter

and who enjoyed the medium as they totally got it, while their friends were still at the old

party. Baker and White (2011), meanwhile, suggested that the lack of adoption of social

media among ones peers (in teenage years at least) was often cited a reason for a failure to

engage in these channels.

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This suggests a final point to consider in this review of 6 years of consumer networks

withing social media channels. As I have proposed, there are different types of network and

distinct modes of conversation within these. Initially most users inhabit one network only for

the bulk of their transactions, generally Facebook or Twitter as both have some critical

audience mass. Where this is the case ones voice can be consistent, even where a user has aLinkedIn account for professional purposes and a Facebook account for social use. Multiple

platform users, though, can start to develop a sort of social media schizophrenia, where they

find they are engaging with different audiences in different ways, often on the same platform.

While there is some anecdotal evidence to support this, I could find no empirical studies on

the topic, although Muise et al's 2009 study started to hint at this in their examination of

online jealousy. The fact that networks such as Twitter and Facebook offer applications

which monitor who is 'following' you and who has 'unfollowed' you suggests that users are

concerned about the composition of their networks and their own audience engagement.LinkedIn goes one further, offering a premium service (ie, paid for) to list on a daily basis the

names of other users looking at your profile.

In my case I found that it was difficult having uninhibited conversations with

colleagues when there were students present, and inadvertently started restricting membership

of the social circles as a consequence, largely designating concentric networks as a place for

friends and family, and ad hoc equivalents for business contacts.

This has echoes with the problem of parental Lurkers suffered by younger socialnetworkers (Ballantine and Martin 2005). As the channel becomes filled, for example, not

just with different generations of family members, but employers, customers, colleagues and

other stakeholders, what does the creative voice sound like? A common solution is to

compartmentalize the divisions with more than one account in each social medium (see for

example Young 2011).

Social media provide us with a space in which to define ourselves, supplying a canvas

on which to create identities (OGuinn and Belk identified something similar at Heritage

Village in their 1989 article). The picture is built up through the ways we describe ourselves

online (interests, beliefs, background) and the products and services we relate to (films,

music, brands, personalities, places). Lin & Lu (2011) describe how users develop social

capital through this process, using interaction with friends, acquaintances and family. Ahn

(2012), refines this as social bonding, reporting that youths with higher levels of social media

use have similarly high levels of social capital.

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As we build our online personalities we merge with virtual communities, and in doing

so discover mutual trust through reciprocal behaviours. Real-world social gatherings allow

participants a very limited range of tools with which to define themselves and build self-

esteem: social media, by contrast, encourage creative expression through conversation,

imaging, humour, storytelling, music, discussion. But this process of image-building can be anon-linear one: I sometimes found myself using the tools of social media to brand myself as a

jazz musician (I was learning to play the saxophone at the time), which reflected an aspiration

rather than a reality. At the same time, though, the same social media tools were encouraging

me to think of myself as a photographer I enjoyed 150,000 viewings of my online

photographs, sold some and had others included in learned lectures and books. Social media

provided an unexpected and largely appreciative audience, and encouraged me to devote

more time and other resources to developing this creative line.

Early networks such as Myspace were quite advanced in providing users with an array

of tools with which customize their online space before inviting their virtual friends around

(Baker and White 2011). The Facebook equivalent was far more constrained, but was

arguably easier to set up and to navigate (and at least was stable). Both shared the property of

being a space in which people could express themselves in a reasonably safe environment.

By contrast, in an offline environment we are comparatively constrained for means by which

to express our personalities, beliefs and aspirations, being limited largely to tangible elements

such as clothes, shoes, make-up, hair and jewellery. Online, though, we are able to describe

ourselves through stated preferences in music, films, food, and a range of products and

services, whether we actually consume them or not.

The projective dimensions of products, services and brands

As I had noted in my study of face-to-face communication (author 2007), products,

services and brands featured comparatively little in ordinary discourse: similarly, online

perhaps as few as 10% of conversations asked for or gave an opinion on a commercial

product. Counter-intuitively, though, a later study of business-to-business audiences using

social media found many customers, suppliers, distributors and partner businesses in

technology supply chains happy to describe, endorse and generally engage with some of the

major brands like Intel, Oracle and Cisco (author 2012): B2B brand owners were happy to

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oblige with multiple brand-themed platforms containing company and user-generated content

in video, audio, picture and text.

In consumer marketing, though, many of us used the like button to express a

preference for a brand, although in some cases this action expressed aspirational branding

rather than consumption decisions: an example of this process was the classic Porsche 911,

the first brand to achieve over a million fans on Facebook. In a wry reciprocal display the

company engraved the names of 27,000 randomly selected virtual fans on a specially

commissioned physical example of the car, which was then exhibited in the Porsche museum

in Stuttgart (Phillips 2011). Virtual products, services and brands in social media are like

their real-world counterparts: we will tolerate them in this most personal of spaces if they

provide value to us, for example in terms of co-branding ourselves as international jet-setters,

Fairtrade enthusiasts, eco-warriors or Red-Eyed Suburbanites. In the complex virtual world

of SecondLife we have most of the same opportunities to present ourselves as in the real

world: major global brands such as Adidas, Reebok, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Nissan,and Sony

BMG Music have their flagship stores (Jacoby 2008), but here the exchange process mimics

reality more closely with items such as these having to be traded in an economy where the

currency is the Linden Dollar.

What seemed often to be taking place was virtual display approval, where users are

able to create a sense of personal identity in relation to their public 'likes' of brands, bands,

people, places, movies, celebrities and other peer-mediated value markers. In addition, thecounterpoint appeared to be virtual conspicuous consumption, which involved sharing

experiences such as long-haul travel, cultural events and dining out with one's circle of

friends by posting pictures and other audio visual materials online (this process being made

simpler with the introduction of smartphones in 2007).

The concept of public and semi-public 'likes' whereby users are able to articulate their

self-perceived personalities has further potential in terms of using the projective dimensions

to profile consumers and to segment them and target them with product offerings. Such

considerations, though, probably misunderstand the nature of the social network and the

potential engagement of consumers with brands: I observed, for example, how a major food

brand had a request for 200 subjects to complete a market research questionnaire over-

subscribed within 20 minutes of being posted online. The social media consumer's role is

blurred: we consume a product or service, while at the same time exploiting its brand values

in the process of self-expression or co-branding. This point has been made by Hardey

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(2011a, 2011b) who highlights the insights that brands can gain from studying user-generated

content on platforms such as Facebook. Users are not merely passive audiences but active

owners and co-creators online.

Where brand owners appeared to adopt conventional marketing strategies based on

segmenting consumers and targeting them, personal experiences suggested that 'targeted

advertising' was frequently found to be well wide of the mark: why, I wondered, with all that

Facebook had discovered about me, was it targeting a middle-aged male with offers for

cosmetic surgery? Subtle personal recommendations, termed nudges by Harris and Dennis

(2011), on the other hand, could prove to be effective. Once again, though, there was a clear

distinction between the superficial deployment of social media likes in the building of ones

online brand, and the deeper involvement of earlier online communities described by

Kozinets in 2002. This in turn mirrors the findings of Sicilia et al (2005) which drew

attention to differing levels of cognitive processing by users of corporate websites.

Discussion and methodological commentary

When I started on my exploration in 2006 it was on the understanding that an

ethnography was inevitable given the lack of prior methodological testing in respect of this

new, audience-driven medium. In the event, Web 2.0 proved to be less novel than expected,

as it became clear that users had been exploiting web-based discussion fora (and user groups)

since the early days of the internet, often pre-dating the worldwide web. In retrospect, then,

the strictures of Hiness 2000 work, Virtual Ethnography were highly relevant - the key

difference being that Facebook and other social media had largely democratized the

environment. This is commonly presented as an evolutionary dynamic, that is, behaviour has

shifted with technology (Harwood and Garry 2010). Another superficial example was the

way in which Facebook changed its privacy requirements in response to evolving consumer

awareness. However, a broader view of the phenomenon reveals a co-evolutionary dynamic,

that is behaviour and technology have adapted to each other. Changing behavioural norms

have also spurred technological evolution, for example the failure of Google Buzz that

resulted in the eventual creation of Google+.

Reflecting on the whole social media experience, particularly through examining the

products, services and brands that consumers share, suggests that in other ways what is now

happening on Facebook and Twitter is often the same as was shared via email at the end of

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the previous century, and by photocopies and word-of-mouth before that. Consumers use

personal experiences to provide entertaining narratives in the normal way of conducting of

human discourse: often this is through sharing experiences, particularly warnings regarding

food, drink, places and people (author 2006). Discussing experiences, be it face-to-face or

online, is part of the social glue that binds communities together: narratives help to embed behavioural norms as well as to establish social hierarchies (author 2007). In this article I

also suggest that social media allow user to consume inaccessible items such as luxury goods

in a virtual world, as well as sharing more conventional conspicuous consumption

experiences in real time with a wide audience. The key difference is that with mobile devices

the social media experience is invariably a synchronous one we can share our holiday in

some exotic location as we experience it, rather than having to wait until we are back home or

at work with an album of photographs and a box of souvenirs.

By extension, of course, other consumers sharing these narratives are in turn

consuming the product or service vicariously. Social media, therefore, appear to replicate

much older, asynchronous narrative-sharing and display approval functions; the key

differences are in the immediacy and (often) the size of the audience consuming them.

Further research is needed to explore the motivations of people sharing their experiences: I

came across a range of emotional triggers including altruism, playfulness, revenge and

catharsis (the latter two as reactions to poor customer service episodes), but no evidence that

online information sharing differed in any material way from the sorts of offline behaviours

described by sociolinguistic and consumption studies (see for example Wardhalugh 2006 and

author 2006).

Another parallel development was a personal engagement and identification with

geekery: I found that the ethnography not only gave me the understanding I had set out to

find, but it was turning me into an expert in a dynamic and highly topical subject. Although

this had not been the intention at the outset, I had unwittingly become an academic lead user

(von Hippel 1988), sought after for media appearances, engaged as keynote speaker, invited

as visiting fellow and co-opted to university working parties on technology in education.Ethnography had produced a co-evolutionary dynamic of its own, going beyond the modest

original objectives of scientific inquiry, into producing a technophilic evangelist for social

media in education and business.

In many respects, though, the pre-internet anthropological studies of consumer tribes

conducted by Kozinets, OGuinn, Belk and others proved, counter-intuitively, to be

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invaluable in encouraging me to return to my field notes and the evidence of my own activity

online. I discovered, for example, that I did not crave an audience at all, but sought approval

from sections of the audience which social media had encouraged me to respect. I realised

that as much as encouraging traffic to my creative offerings, I felt compelled, reciprocally, to

consume the photographs, videos, articles and conversations of my network friends and to provide them with constructive commentary. Kozinets produced what has become the

definitive methodological work for this medium in 2010, but his contribution, for me at least,

was to encourage me to question the assumptions I had built up since 2006 and to force me to

re-examine the nature of the communities I was now a part of (see also Kozinets 2002). The

classic JCR anthropological studies provided a much needed counterpoint to a work that had

become highly descriptive: by using these to build and test the thematic interpretations

(O'Guinn & Belk 1989) it was possible to re-assess much of the original data and to provide

analysis in place of description.

Most interesting, perhaps, was to re-examine some of the questions that prompted the

initial research . The results are presented here more as topics for further research than as

definitive statements. Firstly, the Google-Youtube tie-up made sense only as an indication

that things had fundamentally changed from being producer-based to being audience-focused,

or co-created (Harvey et al 2011), thus vindicating the choice of examining consumer

networks rather than, for example, online brand building. Web 2.0, and social media in

particular, have taken the tools of mass communication from brand owners, governments and

media groups and delivered them into the hands of ordinary consumers (Harrigan and Hulbert

2011, Kozinets 2002, Kozinets 1999). The social networks of Facebook, Twitter and others

give us the space in which to discover who we (ordinary consumers) are and where we

belong. It is possible to use an admixture of intimate and semi-impersonal networks

(Concentric and Ad Hoc ), but regardless of this, the audience now controls the medium, and

invites products, services and brands to contribute on his or her terms.

The choice of ethnography for this study, finally, needs justifies further consideration.

It may appear at first sight that the findings presented here are merely the ramblings of amiddle-aged academic. On reflection, though, it is possible to suggest four main areas where

this study may have been able to contribute to our understanding of these new channels.

Firstly, while there was comparatively little scholarly guidance at the the start of the study,

the findings of this article to a large degree are confirmed by the growing body of literature

that has been published in the past two years or so, much of which is cited in this paper.

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Secondly, although many studies have understandably focused on young consumers (for

example Page et al 2011), anecdotal evidence suggests that in developed markets the numbers

of middle-aged users are growing rapidly on social networks (Johnson 2009); already by

2010 Facebook was reporting that the over 50s were the fastest growing demographic,

accounting for over 25% of the user base (Bradshaw 2010). At the same time there isanecdotal evidence (mostly unattributable and confined to blogs) that younger users are

leaving Facebook. Third, the reflective process involved in this ethnographic study

demonstrated how a superficial analysis of ones motivations and beliefs may not stand up to

scrutiny when challenged - in my case by re-reading my field notes in conjunction with some

of the seminal ethnographies from the Journal of Consumer Research as well as more

recently published studies. On the other hand, the evangelical zeal generated by the process

possibly makes me an unreliable observer of future developments. But while recognising the

methodological limitations of this study, it is important also to bear in mind the potentialunreliability of the online surveys used to support more recent studies.

Finally, this ethnography has highlighted the ways in which social media channels over

time adapt the ways in which users interact, just as users themselves are responsible for

changes in the channels themselves. Many of the conventional studies published in recent

years have provided snapshots of technologies which have moved on in terms of functionality

and reach, or which have largely been eclipsed by other channels. Now user interactions with

Facebook and Twitter are increasingly being mediated by mobile devices such as the iPhone

and its imitators (Baird 2011): my own experience mirrors that of numerous other users

where increasingly the old technologies of PC and laptop are supplanted by handheld devices

(Waters 2012), a trend recognised by Facebook itself as early as 2011 when it reported that

nearly half of its users were accessing the platform via smartphones (O'Carroll 2011). This

process is changing the nature of the conversations and stories told, putting an emphasis on

the immediacy of the experience and allowing for greater creativity in terms of the rich

content available from the audio visual capabilities of these devices. Smart phones and tablets

such as the iPad may in turn be exercising disruptive changes on social media equivalent to

the disruption caused to interpersonal communications by the widespread adoption of the

worldwide web in the 1990s.

This article started by citing the case of Googles apparently inexplicable $1.65 billion

purchase of YouTube in 2006. At that time Facebook was virtually unheard of outside US

college networks, yet by early 2012 had over 900 million active users (de la Merced 2012):

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more importantly, perhaps, its Initial Public Offering valued the company at somewhere

between $75 billion (Magat 2012) and $104 billion (Dembosky and Demos 2012). Over the

same period, what had seemed like a shrewd investment by News Corporation in MySpace

turned out instead to be a cash drain (Bradshaw 2012), while Bebo made money for its

founders only then to run up embarrassing losses for AOL (Li 2010). As if to mirror theearlier, apparently inexplicable investment by Google in 2006, the previously unknown

Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram, a two year old company with just a dozen employees

(Dembosky 2012).

The turbulence and disruption highlighted by Harrigan and Hulbert (2011) and Valos et

al (2010), seem if anything to be a defining feature of the digital marketing in general and

social media in particular. The challenge for future researchers, therefore, may be to adapt

methodologies for a phenomenon where both the tools and the users are co-evolving in

unpredictable ways.

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