Tag: social media

• People like TikTok and grocery stores

  Dan Frommer has just just released his latest Consumer Trends report (2023). If you’d like to download a free copy, you can do that over here. It is amazing to see how big of a deal Tik Tok has become. In Q3 2022, the average Android user spent 98 minutes per day in the app. That is a lot, and it’s roughly 2x what Facebook and Instagram each saw (though if you combine these two apps, I guess they’re pretty similar). Either way, this is where people’s attention is now being spent. For those of us in real estate, the report also has some interesting slides on grocery stores. The key message here is that physical stores remain hugely important.

  The year-over-year change in online grocery spending is now flat to a little negative:

  

  No matter which generation you ask, more people prefer shopping for groceries in-store, versus online:

  

  And even when people do shop for groceries “online”, they still tend to pick them up from their local store or have that local store deliver it to them (so the store matters):

  

  For the full report, click here.

  2022.12.02

• Twitter > Instagram

  If I had to pick only one social network to use, it would be Twitter. I, of course, also enjoy Instagram because I like taking photos. But if I had to pick one, it would be Twitter.

  I just find that Instagram is more about passive consumption (like watching TV), whereas on Twitter I’ve found a way to actively engage in productive discussions around the topics that interest me — everything from real estate and architecture to NFTs and photography.

  The crypto community is also very centered around Twitter. I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I would think that NFT activity has been, or at least should be, a boon for the company. That said, Twitter has never really been a great business and public company.

  But maybe that changes now that Elon Musk has become its largest shareholder with a 9.2% stake in the company (currently valued at a few billion). The stock jumped over 27% today. Or maybe it doesn’t change at all and this is just a fun side hustle for Elon.

  Here is a typically funny explanation from Matt Levine introducing what just happened:

  Look this all makes complete sense, obvious, intuitive, simple sense. If you are the richest person in the world, and annoying, and you constantly play a computer game, and you get a lot of enjoyment and a sense of identity from that game and are maybe a little addicted, then at some point you might have some suggestions for improvements in the game. So you might leave comments and email the company that makes the game saying “hey you should try my ideas.” And the company might ignore you (or respond politely but not move fast enough for your liking). It might occur to you: “Look, I am the richest person in the world; how much could this game company possibly cost? I should just buy it and change the game however I want.” Even if your complaints are quite minor, why shouldn’t you get to play exactly the game you want? Even if you have no complaints, why not own the game you love, just to make sure it continues to be exactly what you want? The game is Twitter, the richest person in the world is Elon Musk…

  2022.04.04

• Finding an audience (on Facebook)

  Social media can be both fun and useful. Over the weekend, we were exploring a few different design options for an address sign at Mackay Laneway House and so I posted this image on Twitter and storied it on Instagram. I got a bunch of responses, as well as some great suggestions. And we ultimately ended up making a small change to the design. That process was both fun and useful. The final design is now out for pricing and production.

  

  But as we all know, there is also a dark side to social media. The algorithms that power social media have been optimized to amplify whatever drives the most engagement. Oftentimes that means whatever gets people the most enraged. In this recent NY Times article, Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel make a compelling argument that Facebook has actually been coaxing many Americans into taking more extreme views on the platform — it made them more popular.

  And we’re not talking about extreme views on home address signs.

  2021.01.18

• A mismatch of expectations

  Seth Godin’s blog post this morning, called “I hate this restaurant,” is really excellent. I would encourage you all to read it. In it, he talks about a mismatch of expectations. More specifically, he gives the example of somebody going to a restaurant and not liking what’s on offer, and therefore being upset. It’s not that the food was bad or that the restaurant has failed, it’s just that the person didn’t get what they were expecting. There’s a mismatch. And this, of course, happens all over the place and not just in restaurants. In his view, this failure is caused by a few different factors that ultimately result in us — the people that are involved in everything from the arts to business — having to make a decision about the kind of operation we would like to run. Below is an excerpt of those things. For the full post, click here.

  This failure comes from a few contributing factors, all amplified by our culture:

  First, you can’t know if you’re going to like an experience until you experience it. All you know is your understanding of what was on offer. And because there are so many choices and there’s so much noise, we rarely take the time to actually read the label, or we get carried away by the coming attractions, or we just don’t care enough to pay attention until we’re already involved.

  [And marketers are complicit, because in the face of too much noise, they hype what’s on offer and overpromise…]

  Second, because many people are afraid. They’re afraid of the new and even more than that, afraid of change. Most people in our culture would like to be entertained not transformed, lectured at instead of learning.

  Third, the double-edged sword of giving everyone a microphone means that we’ve amplified the voices of dissent at the same time we’ve given people a chance to speak up about their desires. This means that mass culture is far more divisive than it ever was before, and it also means that bubbles of interest are more likely to be served.

  And so the fork in the road:

  You can either turn your operation into a cross between McDonald’s and Disney, selling the regular kind, pandering to the middle, putting everything in exactly the category they hoped for and challenging no expectations…

  Or you can do the incredibly hard work of transgressing genres, challenging expectations and seeking out the few people who want to experience something that matters, instead of something that’s merely safe.

  2020.10.20

• Intimacy at a distance

  In 1956, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term parasocial interaction to describe the psychological relationship that people were starting to have with TV personalities. Though radio had already started this phenomenon, the television brought with it an entirely new dimension. People started to really feel as if they knew that person on TV. They had become a friend.

  But as Christopher Mims points out in this recent article about loneliness during the coronavirus pandemic, the problem with parasocial interaction is that it’s entirely one-sided. It also isn’t real: “Sitting around the house watching television, parasocializing with our favorite news anchors or sitcom characters, didn’t confer the same benefits as socializing with real people.”

  The internet has further enhanced the way we parasocialize. Similar to how TV built on radio, the internet has built on TV. Instead of just scripted television shows, we now have Instagram Stories, TikTok videos, inappropriate Snaps, and many other methods of communication, some of which are maybe a little less scripted.

  Of course, we also see our real friends online and those people we know, but never actually spend time with, maintaining only a loose “relationship” via the occasional emoji reaction. Mims argues that this has created a new kind of “mental equivalence.” It has become harder for our minds to distinguish between our real friends and our parasocial friends.

  Recently, we have all become familiar with terms like “flatten the curve” and “social distancing.” But what is clear as we all start isolating ourselves at home — whether mostly or entirely — is this: it sucks. Even with all of the tech and social media that we now have available to us, we cannot replace what it’s like to give someone a hung, look them in the eyes, and have a meaningful conversation.

  That said, the Italians seem to have really mastered this whole self-isolation thing with their balcony orchestras and internet videos like this one here:

  More good humour from Italians stuck at home… 😂 pic.twitter.com/XpURuZSlu8

  — James Longman (@JamesAALongman) March 15, 2020

  Stay strong, friends. Normalcy will return.

  2020.03.15

• TikTok’s revenue is apparently over $7 billion

  Last week, audio clips from an internal Q&A session at Facebook were leaked and published by the Verge. These meetings have historically always been private. In what I think was the right move, the company then decided to publicly livestream a subsequent Q&A session — you know, to show that they had nothing to hide.

  The media tended to focus on Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about the threat of Facebook being broken up by regulators. #BreakUpBigTech. Lots of people are also attempting to glean what this leak might signal about the company’s current corporate culture. But there are lots of other interesting soundbites.

  Here’s an excerpt from Zuckerberg about the Chinese social media app, TikTok:

  So yeah. I mean, TikTok is doing well. One of the things that’s especially notable about TikTok is, for a while, the internet landscape was kind of a bunch of internet companies that were primarily American companies. And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that pretty much only were offering their services in China. And we had Tencent who was trying to spread some of their services into Southeast Asia. Alibaba has spread a bunch of their payment services to Southeast Asia. Broadly, in terms of global expansion, that had been pretty limited, and TikTok, which is built by this company Beijing ByteDance, is really the first consumer internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is doing quite well around the world. It’s starting to do well in the US, especially with young folks. It’s growing really quickly in India. I think it’s past Instagram now in India in terms of scale. So yeah, it’s a very interesting phenomenon.

  TikTok now has over 1.4 billion installs outside of China according to TechCrunch. And in the first half of this year, it supposedly booked more than $7 billion in revenue (though most of it came from China). The company is also saying that it posted its first profit in June of this year.

  All of this is, indeed, “a very interesting phenomenon.”

  But it’s even more interesting because this is probably the first consumer-facing Chinese internet product with massive global adoption. And it has Facebook paying attention. They’re now the ones who have to play copycat — their version of TikTok is called Lasso. Of course, it’s not nearly as popular.

  2019.10.07

• Death of the standalone camera

  

  I took the above photo on my Fujifilm X-T3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Toronto. Obviously, it is a cast of David Bowie’s head. I’ve been using Fujifilm’s X cameras for exactly 3 years now and have already gone through 2 different models. I love them. But Om Malik’s recent post on why the future belongs to computational photography is, in my opinion, entirely accurate.

  For most people, taking photos on a standalone camera and dropping them into Lightroom is not only far too much work, but also unnecessary. Here is a chart from Om’s post showing total worldwide digital camera unit sales (in millions). Sales have fallen off a cliff from about 10 years ago and now look to be on the verge of dying.

  

  What is obvious is that we are all now just taking photos on our phones. Thanks to better chips, sensors, and software, the future of photography looks, again, destined to be computational. Apple is set to announce its new iPhone 11 (or whatever it will be called) this week and already the rumors point to a dramatically improved camera.

  This change in hardware has also changed our relationship to the photograph. We now take photos for the purpose of real-time sharing, which is another point that Om makes. When I post photos of things that have happened in the past — as I often do — people are commonly confused: “Where are you? When are you back in Toronto? Wait, is this a #latergram?”

  This has made photographic memories feel ephemeral. Once the moment has passed, we forget about them. They get drowned out in new real-time images and shares. As a society we are taking more photos than ever before. Not surprisingly, this lowers the gravitas of each individual one.

  2019.09.08

• WordPress buys Tumblr for (only) $3 million

  Last week it was announced that brandondonnelly.com/ (which is what I use for this blog) had purchased Tumblr for around $3 million. This is, of course, after Yahoo had purchased it for $1.1 billion in 2013 and later wrote it down, having never figured out how to monetize it. Yahoo lost its shirt on the investment. I am sure you’ve probably seen some of the headlines and searing commentary online:

  Tumblr #hottake 🔥
  
  Who wins the award for destroying the most value, or making the illusion for creating value? Marissa Mayer & Union Square Ventures @usv pic.twitter.com/XwOyByKYSv

  — Scott Galloway (@profgalloway) August 14, 2019

  I used Tumblr every day for more than 5 years. I started this daily blog on it because I had already been using it to share and collect photos. At one point Tumblr had more active users than Instagram and Pinterest combined. But eventually it lost its way. Yahoo (and later Verizon by way of its acquisition of Yahoo in 2017) didn’t know what to do with it.

  And so at the beginning of this year I said goodbye to Tumblr and switched this daily blog over to WordPress. A big part of that decision had to do with the fact that Tumblr was never really designed for long-form blogs like this one and its mobile support was even more appalling for this use case. It was impossible to write on an iPad. Switching was the right decision. I should have done it sooner.

  But now Tumblr is owned by brandondonnelly.com/. At $3 million, it feels like they're almost starting again from scratch. Maybe they'll figure Tumblr out. Or maybe they won't.

  2019.08.17

• How to manipulate attention

  

  This Toronto Life article about a 32-year-old who has managed to buy 10 homes in the city is very Toronto Life. At a time where many young people are struggling to afford housing, here is a millennial who has bought 10 of them (albeit with some partners). The underlying message: You’re not working hard enough.

  I am fairly certain Toronto Life writes these sorts of articles because they know they’ll enrage people. As Facebook has taught us over the last few years, getting people pissed off is good for engagement. And engagement is what drives advertising-based businesses.

  Here is an excerpt from a recent Time article by Roger McNamee (a former Facebook advisor):

  One of the best ways to manipulate attention is to appeal to outrage and fear, emotions that increase engagement. Facebook’s algorithms give users what they want, so each person’s News Feed becomes a unique reality, a filter bubble that creates the illusion that most people the user knows believe the same things. Showing users only posts they agree with was good for Facebook’s bottom line, but some research showed it also increased polarization and, as we learned, harmed democracy.

  If you take a look at the Twitter conversations surrounding the above Toronto Life article, you’ll see the reactions you would expect: Troll article. Yeah, but how much debt has he taken on? He had help from wealthy friends. Here’s how a 32-year-old is eroding housing affordability in Toronto.

  I appreciate all of this, but I will never understand the need to shit on other people because of their successes, regardless of whether they are self-made or were born with a competitive advantage. Billionaire isn’t a bad word in my books. I am a first generation real estate developer, but I wouldn’t be at all upset if my great-grandparents had decided that buying land in Toronto was a good idea.

  Here is a guy that moved to Canada for University. Lived in a basement with cockroaches after leaving his first job after school. Took some risks. And saved his money instead of doing bottle service at the club on the weekends. I can respect that.

  But again, these sorts of articles are bound to make a lot of people cranky. And Toronto Life knows that.

  Photo by Tiago Rodrigues on Unsplash

  2019.02.09

• Spaces for the Instagram age

  In 2017, the New York Times Style Magazine ran a piece on Harry Nuriev – and his design firm Crosby Studios – titled: The man designing spaces for the Instagram age. 

  Since then, Harry and his firm have been in Time Magazine, have had a solo show at Design Miami, and have been named to the Architectural Digest 100, among many other things.

  There has obviously been a lot of talk over the last few years about the impact that Instagram is having on physical spaces and design #IRL (in real life). 

  Some, or perhaps many, worry that it is having a “homogenizing effect on design.” Everyone is following a kind of global minimalism that looks good on social, but is maybe getting a bit monotonous. 

  There’s no question that online is having an impact on how we design offline. But I am far less fussed about it than most. 

  Architecture, design, and art have always reflected the cultural milieu at the time, and it just so happens that we are living through a period where the internet is transforming so much of what we know.

  It is always important to question what is going on. But I think Crosby Studios is doing some really great work.

  2019.01.27