The Second Screen Effect: Raising A Generation of Media Multitaskers

In the April 1st issue of Adweek, there is a cool infographic about the issue of the second-screen effect. At my house, I call that behavior "doing two media at once." I frequently have to tell my son, "Stop doing two media at once." Apparently he's not the only one who has caught on to this idea. 

According to the stats (via Adtheorent):

Among those with a TV and computer, 52% are somewhat or very likely to use another device while watching television. (Source: IAB)

So called "media multitasking" is on the rise particularly with younger people. The article goes on to state that media multitaskers have fewer emotional highs and fewer lows. I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news -- or neutral like their emotions. 

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a fellow copywriter / blogger / social friend and also father to a teenager. We were discussing all the implications of our kids being tethered to a phone, tablet or other device. He said he does check his daughter's phone from time-to-time to see what she's texting. What he found alarming was that she is often texting about nothing. Literally. Nothing.

"What r u doing?"

"Nothing."

"what r u doing..."

"Nothing."

Really, this is text-worthy? How much radio frequency is used up by texting "nothing" back and forth between teenagers? It's ridiculous. Or so it would seem to me. And to my friend. Not so to the youngsters. 

I didn't actually get a cell phone until I was 35 years-old. I only caved after realizing that with a new baby, there might be need for me to call someone for say roadside assistance or I'm running late to daycare or something else that I would consider urgent. Now of course, I'm on my phone alot talking to friends, surfing the web, updating my social channels on twitter and facebook and pinterest.

One time I walked in on my son and he was on his phone Skypeing with a friend while watching TV on his iPad. He had turned his phone to face the tablet so his friend could watch the show too. They were watching TV together on the phone. I don't understand this behavior. Or possibly it's that I can't relate. 

Adweek calls the younger generation digital natives, while I fall into the nonnative category. I can remember a time when there was one home phone, one TV with only a handful of channels, and these things called books. Was it a better time? I don't know. It was my time. Now it's the digital natives' time. I hope they use their power for good. Just don't use it for nothing.

You can find me on the twitter @fightingfinn or sometimes I go outside without any device at all.

How Not To Do Social by Netflix

How Not To Do Social Media by Netflix

This summer Netflix announced they would be restructuring their pricing plan, raising prices by 60% for those customers who have both the streaming media and DVDs by mail plan. In a breezy blog post from Netflix VP of Marketing Jessie Becker, they explain the pricing increase as follows:

“Why the changes? Our selection of TV episodes and movies available to stream has grown dramatically, and as a result most members want us to deliver unlimited TV episodes and movies two ways: streaming instantly over the internet plus DVDs by mail. The price increase will allow us to continue to offer the popular plan choice of unlimited TV episodes and movies streaming instantly along with unlimited DVDs.”

What Netflix failed to mention, or perhaps notice, was a) the majority of their customers use the DVD option (approximately 80% according to Tony Wible, an analyst with Janney Capital Markets) and b) their streaming media library is limited. For example, a customer can watch all the episodes of seasons 1-4 of Psych via streaming, but the final season is only available via DVD.

No Comment is Unacceptable in Social

Customer reaction on social media was immediate and deafening. Once highly popular with its 22.3 million customers, Netflix saw firsthand what happens when a brand comes under attack via social. Comments on Ms. Becker’s blog post exceeded the 5,000 maximum in the first day and they ranged in tone from disgust and anger to expletive-filled rants. Comments like this one were everywhere:

In this economy, you opt to increase the price for my current subscription by this much? Well hey, guess what? Unless you seriously upgrade and update your streaming content, you'll be losing a long-term customer. And I'm sure I won't be the only one!

Contrary to social media rules of engagement, Netflix both deleted comments and did not respond to comments. Nothing. Nada. The sound of crickets.

On their Facebook page, it was more of the same, with nearly 70,000 comments along the lines of:

Dear Netflix,
After 3 years, I'm sorry but it's over. If I switch to Blockbuster I will have a greater streaming selection, with newer movies, plus games, and it will cost me only 75% of your new rates. It’s been great, but it’s over. It's not us, it’s you. Enjoy the bankruptcy.

Again Netflix responded by deleting comments. Customers took it as a challenge, and began posting the CEO Reed Hastings’ email address. The comments kept coming, apparently faster than Netflix could delete them. And still no response.

On Twitter, Netflix became a trending topic. Tweets were flying like “Dear Netflix: Are you trying to save Blockbuster?" and “Netflix customers see red after price hike http://bit.ly/nwleC9 (via @cnn).” Still nothing from Netflix.

Losing Sight of Your Customer Base

In the meantime, Netflix stock prices rose and fell as the market tried to figure out what would happen. Blockbuster jumped on the bandwagon by touting lowered prices to the media and customers. And Redbox looked more and more like the way to go.

Surely Netflix will survive, but their brand has been tarnished. As one angry customer posted on their Facebook page,

How sad that after years of holding a subscription and being a walking advertisement for Netflix, that we are stopping the use of your services. Greedy, greedy, greedy. Way to show your long term customers, who helped pave the way for your extreme success with a higher price. BRAVO to whoever had this brilliant idea. Goodbye Netflix, HELLO REDBOX!

In stark contrast that same week, another brand stood out as a shining example of how social media should be done. Actress Mila Kunis, star of Friends With Benefits, accepted a YouTube invitation to the Marine Corps ball from a soldier stationed in Afghanistan. The video, posted by Sgt Scott Moore with 3rd Battalion 2nd Marines, received 3,246,366 views in the first week.

When you are fortunate enough to have customers who are “a walking advertisement” for your brand, it pays to engage and respond to them on social media sites. Take note from the mistakes of Netflix.

My One and Only

Tonight I was rambling around twitter as I often do now, and I came across a friend of a friend @Military_Mom. She'd just posted this message:

"Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool."

Then a friend @ShellyKramer broke the bad news. This mom's 2 year-old, a little boy, drowned.

I have a boy Will and he's 11. I've always been a bit superstitious about Will because he's my only child, despite several failed attempts at pregnancy. He's the boy who finds the rusty tin can if you know what I mean. He's had face glue and stitches and a rotator cuff problem. He's not the injury magnet that some other kids are but he's not exactly treading lightly in this world.

The other thing about Will is that he really is an extraordinary kid. He's just a gem of a human being. So I worry. About Will.

I remember first seeing the movie, "Stand by Me" and then reading the Stephen King short story, "The Body". In that story, a boy, a golden boy like my boy Will, dies while intervening on someone else's behalf. And deep down I've had this fear about my Will. First of all, he's a boy who would intervene. And he's my one and only.

I always worried because Will was my only child. I thought losing your only child would be worse than losing a child when you have other children. But I know now that can't be true. Losing a child, your only or one of three, is the same. It's unfathomable.

This morning I scolded Will for not logging his reading, for missing the bus, for being disorganized. Tonight I feel afraid. I feel thankful and guilty.

Bad Twitter

For the most part, say 99.99% of the time, Twitter is a shiny, happy place. People tweet about their lives, their work, their passions. They are supportive and complimentary when conversing with their tweeps.

Sure there are some porn boys and girls and one time I got a very strange message from a guy called @Iheartpantyhose or something like that. He wanted to know if I was wearing any. I felt sort of sorry for him, looking at this twitter pic of a very young man wearing only pantyhose. Because no one wears pantyhose anymore.

I got in the middle of a dust-up on twitter one night when two women got into an argument with @dooce and her husband @blurb. I banged out a quick blog, made some mistakes that I corrected, not before insulting at least two of the people involved. One woman used some very choice words to explain why it was none of my business. The other @lydahl became a follower and I'm following her as well.

There are some passive ways to mess with someone on twitter. It's actually a tactic for growing followers to follow someone, they follow you, and then you dump them. There are tools you can use to check who is following you and who is not. I use http://www.friendorfollow.com/

Another is http://www.followwatch.com/. I think followwatch notifies you when someone dumps you. I don't mind when one of those "Make Money on Twitter" guys stops following me. But there have been a few legit ones that made me think, "What did I do?"

Recently, I started following this new guy @telesticles. I found him through another guy @TheUserPool. @TheUserPool is pretty interesting. His twitter bio is: You might call me a technology geek....I'm also the guy fucking your wife at work. @TheUserPool followed me first and I followed back. We DM'ed a few times and he seems pretty nice. It just so happens he has a ragin' sex life.

So @telesticles... his deal is he picks a twitter trend, almost all of which are inane. Yesterday was something about holla and today is #youknowyouruglyif (misspelled) and #arealwife. So @telesticles finds people using these idiotic phrases and he starts messing with them. Most of the people he's messing with are young women, wearing lingerie or in other "sexy girl" poses.

To @badgal69 he wrote, "Here's the real question: does #arealwife speak English. Because you sure as hell fucking don't.

Here's another one: Ass clown alert for @marcusbowers. Specific mockery not necessary. He does it for you.

A couple of days ago, I re-tweeted something from @telesticles and we exchanged the following:

@fightingfinn People don't always know what they're getting into when they RT me. I've been known to waste a lot of time just being a prick.

@telesticles You don't scare me.

@fightingfinn I'm not really a scary person. Just more of a malcontent and a grump. So long as you're fine with that, I'm fine with that.

Okay I get it now. Underneath it all, he's not a bad guy. Maybe even a nice guy, though his
twavatar looks like a box turtle on crack.

More insight from @telesticles: "Repurposing a proposal for a campaign designed to defraud an old client into a proposal for a campaign that will defraud a new one."

At last I understand. He's in the marketing business, probably advertising. A cautionary tale.

Twitter and Real Life: When Worlds Collide

Yesterday I found out one of my twitter pals lives in Norwalk, CT about 20 minutes from my house. I've promised to keep her identity and location a secret from the rest of the twitterverse. She's one of those masked men on twitter with neither picture nor location given. Her twavatar is a fuse box.

We came to the realization that we were neighbors through a circuitous route. We were talking about Bob from The Biggest Loser. (Just Bob, no last name) We were talking about Bob because my husband is working on a website for Bob's latest promotion, NUT-trition, a joint-venture with Planter's. I guess my twitter friend decided to take a closer look at me and figured out I was from Fairfield, CT.

At first, I felt sort of alarmed by her proximity. A big part of twitter is the anonymity, the mystery, the fake ID's. Sometimes I wonder, "Hey what does @badbanana look like in real life?" Or I'll say to myself, "Is that guy flirting with me or is he just waging an aggressive twitter follower campaign?"

I think @ArrogantGrump was flirting with me but he's since moved on to greener pastures.

This morning I had two unique Direct Messages from new twitter followers. Most of the time, the messages are along the lines of thanks for the follow and check out my system for making thousands of dollars on twitter. Or check out my naughty video. One lady asked me to help her pay for her 11 year-old daughter's college tuition. Needless to say, I feel my priority is to put my own 11 year-old through college.

New follower @kazukitakizawa in Hawaii asked me to help him move his 10ft tall sculpture with link to said sculpture. A quote-unquote Auric Shelter, the piece, installed at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was designed to reduce students' stress during finals week--using principles of color therapy. @kazukitakizawa is asking twitter followers to donate $4,000 to help with moving the sculpture from place to place, reducing stress all along the way.

Another new twitter follower offered me a free download of his new ambient album. I took a listen this morning and it's kind of nice. For a moment I was transported to a time and place when I could afford massages and spa treatments. I was having sensory memory of almond oil and incense.

It's tricky water we're navigating on twitter. Me and my new friend in Norwalk. The sculptor and the maker of ambient music. Who knows what we're like in real life?

Now crickets are chirping on the ambient album. We're all crickets out there in twitterville. Making odd, soothing music in concert with millions.

Dooce in Twitter Smackdown

In the PR biz, you know at some point your client is going to take a hit. A product is not well-received, an executive says something stupid or your numbers hit the skids. It's just a fact of life. One thing I've always told clients at this critical juncture is, "Don't worry. Americans love an underdog."

After all, we are a nation that watched Rocky four times. Or was it five?

Right now, as we speak, one of the biggest mommy bloggers out there, Heather Armstrong, is in an all-out war on twitter https://twitter.com/dooce). Beloved for her brutally frank writing about mommyhood and marriage, she has over a million followers. Maytag recently learned their lesson when they tangled with Dooce. After a negative experience with one of their washers, Ms. Armstrong repeatedly twittered DO NOT BUY MAYTAG, revealing she'd been offered machines for free by other vendors.

In this very astute piece about Dooce vs. Maytag, writer Anna asks if this is Brand Bullying. She calls out Dooce's recent change in bahavior from twitter "broadcaster" to conversationalist. Before most of her tweets were just sent out there into the universe or she would occasionally reply to @blurb (her husband) and other close friends. Suddenly she began engaging her audience, using the @twittername convention to give a shout-out to readers and followers.

Tonight, there is something else afoot in twitterland. A few bloggers @lydahl and @namechanged began making negative comments about @dooce. It may not seem like it, but this is either courageous or downright crazy. It's like David messing with Goliath.

Twitter at this point is still primarily populated by people on their best behavior. You get the occasional porn bot (or more than occasional) but for the most part people are using good manners, smiley faces and exclamation points to show their enthusiasm.

Tonight, that went to hell in a handbasket. Dooce instigated a program called "Monetizing the Hate". The idea is to take all the trash talk written about Dooce, put it in one place and then "litter the entire thing with ads". So aside from the mommy blogger swag, speaking engagements, book deal and other revenues enjoyed by Ms. Armstrong, she would also make money off her hate mail. Ingenious really.

In all fairness, Dooce has said she planned to donate all the money from Monetize the Hate. Still, the idea did not sit well with some of Dooce's followers like @lydahl and @namechanged who called Dooce out in a public forum on twitter. Then Dooce's husband @blurb got involved in response to @lydahl calling their behavior #douchebaggy, saying "Stop being insecure."

A few samples of the exchanges going on in the twitterverse:

@apuraja: @blurb @dooce are you guys really so corporate sellouty as it seems? Ducking for cover as poop is thrown my way.

@juliamstewart @blurb @dooce don't worry if you have old fans complaining, you have new ones like me enjoying everything

@sunnyhunt @blurb douchebaggy? No. Do I feel a growing disconnect? Yes. Love reading you and Dooce but growing harder to identify and enjoy lately.

Douchebaggy? Sellouty? Like a twittered down version of cursing. For now, a few little-known bloggers have become the underdog, joined by others if only in our chicken-shit minds. But the tide will likely turn at some point and @dooce will become the underdog. We are a society that can't abide too much love. Every once in awhile, we like to knock our heroes off their pedestals.

NB: @namechanged isn't an actual twitter username. After seeing this post, she sent me a very sweet missive asking me to mind my own (f-word) business. Sending smiley faces to you @namechanged.

Juan Martin

I rarely watch tennis because I prefer to play. Last night was the men's final at the US Open and while I hadn't planned it, I did watch the match. Juan Martin del Potro played Roger Federer. Del Potro is from Argentina and quite a lovely specimen. Unbelievably del Potro came back from losing the first set and being down in the second set to win.

While watching, I was also twittering and pulling for del Potro. Roger is a great guy and all but come on. He hasn't lost a match in years. So del Potro, in reality the person pretending to be del Potro, started following me on twitter. The real del Potro I found out sadly is @delpo

I ran upstairs to tell my husband. about my new follower. "Del Potro is following me. He's following me," I said.

"He's not really your type," my husband said. "With the facial hair and all."

Honestly, I could overcome my aversion to facial hair with JMDP.

To allay his fears that I might run off with Juan Martin, I said, "You don't have to worry."

He said, "I'm not."

My husband has a thing for those old school girls like Angie Dickinson and Barbara Eden.

So I said, "Hey maybe Angie Dickinson will follow you."

He said, "Isn't she dead?"

The Blank Page

As I told a twitter friend the other day (@misslizzyc ) sometimes you just have to write a bunch of stuff that you later delete. Or as she put it #JUSTBANGITOUT. Every writer has their rituals for breaking through writer's block, but mine is pretty straightforward. I've learned to just suck it up, sit down and write. Here goes...

I had coffee with a friend yesterday. We had this really funny conversation about moving in new directions. She's been raising her two little boys, freelancing after leaving her full-time job as a big-time producer for ABC News.

Earlier in the week, she came running in the house with a cucumber from her garden. She proudly showed the cucumber to her six year-old son and he said, "Mom I think you should get excited about something other than cucumbers."

Today my son ran a mile without stopping. I was really excited for him because he'd convinced himself he couldn't do it. He had this ear-to-ear grin on his face. Then he promptly began attempting to blackmail me saying, "Mom since I ran a mile, maybe you should buy me some Yu-gi-oh cards."

"I think I'll just congratulate you on your accomplishment," I said.

Then this bit of wisdom from my eleven year-old, "Maybe running the mile is my reward."

My producer friend covered the OJ trial, school shootings, war, you name it. For now, she's growing vegetables. But she's gearing up to get back in the game. Maybe a new game with new rules. For me, I'm working my way back into news. I've been on the other side, doing PR, long enough.

Our reward systems have changed dramatically. I mean on the one hand, my friend won an Emmy. And I worked at The Washington Post with Herb Block, Ben Bradlee, Bob Woodward, Gwen Ifill and the list goes on. Then the reward was the prestige. There's nothing like that feeling of saying, "I work at The Washington Post."

For now our rewards are cucumbers and running a mile. Maybe we're learning what my son did today. Whatever your accomplishment, no matter how small, the reward is doing it. Today it's vegetables, but tomorrow we're talking Emmy.