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If you think teens and young adults are doing the same things on social media that Baby Boomers are doing, or that Gen Xer's experiences in social are the same as Millennial's you're mistaken. That's the key takeaway from new Sprout Social data.

"Social media holds great promise for reaching your audience since multiple generations are now reliably all in the same place," said Scott Brandt, CMO of Sprout Social. "The effort doesn't end there for brands, however. The data shows that while these people of all different ages may be reachable via the same platform, they can use it in drastically different ways. Strategies should be adjusted to support individual customer needs, and brands that don't talk to their customers-directly or via social media-won't see the best possible results."

Researchers looked at how the difference demographics are engaging through social, and found that Millennials are more likely to turn to social specifically to engage with a brand. Other demographics are more likely to make a call or an email, for example. But, both Millennials and Gen Xers are about 2x more likely than Boomers to follow brands via social media. Other interesting findings from the report include:

43% of those polled are using Facebook, making it the most popular social network 1 in 10 social messages get a response from a brand Gen Xers are 2x more likely to unfollow a brand because of the brand saying something offensive.

Tags: Social marketing, social marketing trends, social media trends, Sprout Social

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Report IDs differences in how people use social - BizReport

At The Drum's Predictions Breakfast, I was interested to hear how 2017 is going to be the year social takes its rightful place at high table of digital marketing.

Im normally suspicious about 'years of anything' being proclaimed, but after I saw some fantastic presentations on the use of social data and about how a complex ecosystem of tools has evolved around the discipline I had become a convert.

The biggest area of growth seems to be around influencer marketing with the smart money moving from celebs to micro influencers as the centre of this world. And of course tech and agencies are growing up around this sector as well. We really are seeing a lot of growth in the requirement for staffing in this market already in 2017.

As we are all well aware, organic reach and effectiveness continue to diminish and most brands are increasingly have to pay to deliver the strongest results. Even organic posts which do perform well need fantastic content and more often than not, that will need funding as well.

So it's becoming clear that brands need to put the social channel at the heart of their marketing. Its also become clear that they need to do it well and to do it well is going to cost. No longer can social be seen as something you can do on the cheap. There's nothing more off-putting to a prospective customer than untended or abandoned Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Sadly, when we look at the data we gathered for the seventh edition of our Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report, we see that this is not a view that is prevalent across the board. Social media salaries remain below the average marketing salaries at all levels. This suggests that businesses are still to be convinced that effective social media marketing influences the bottom line enough to increase remuneration.

We found that the average mid-level salary came in at 35,583. Compare that with a general marketing role at 40,296, email marketing at 38,688 or SEO at 39,422 and you can see that social staff are getting a raw deal.

We see the same patterns at junior level where the average social salary is 25,379. A general marketing role is 27,376, email is 27,419 and SEO is 27,038.

So we can see a disconnect here. We know brands want to invest more in social. We know that social marketing is growing as a medium as brands move away from traditional display. Surely it should follow that if social is an integral part of your marketing strategy then you should pay to get that expertise?

Melina Jacovou is chief executive and co-founder of Propel. The Propel Digital Salary and Industry Insights Report combines internal salary data with over 1300 respondents to a survey carried out over three months in 2016.

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It's time to take social media seriously and that means paying higher salaries - The Drum

Business-to-business (B2B) companies need to research and understand buyer behavior on social media before executing a social content marketing plan, which can be done through social insights.

Knowing that buyers are using social networks is only the beginning, said Jillian Ryan, an analyst at eMarketer and author of the latest report, B2B Social Media 2017: Tying Efforts Back to Larger Business Goals. (The full report is available only to eMarketer PRO subscribers).

B2Bs still need to do research to understand audience behaviors on social platforms to deliver targeted content to the right person, on the right network, at the right time in the buyer journey, she added. These sort of audience insights can be extracted through social data mining and listening.

Companies that skip this step tend to be unsuccessful in their social marketing.

Chief evangelist and startup advisor Jill Rowley explained that mining social networks for signals is the backbone of understanding buyers. Do the research to be relevant to your buyer and the entire buying committee. B2Bs should use social networks to find buyers, she said. Insights allow you to listen to your buyers so you can relate, connect and engage them.

For marketers, this is a big shift in behavior, since social media is often thought of as a downstream method to share content with customers. However, using it with an upstream approach for persona analysis is valuable, explained Tim Barker, CEO at DataSift, a tech company that recently announced that it would be partnering with LinkedIn to bring engagement and audience insights to LinkedIns advertisers. If marketers have a pulse on their audience, they are better informed before they start to spend their effort building communities and sharing content, he said.

This means understanding buyer usage habits, channel preferences and content consumption patterns, according to Amber Long, vice president of engagement, PR, content and social media at B2B agency gyro. When a B2B maps out its whole social ecosystem and framework according to the needs, desires and preferences of their buyers, it means the strategy is all aligned to the buyer journey, she said. This is the epitome of audience-centric.

However, Long also noted that many B2B brands that she works with are still a little skeptical about leveraging social insights and intel. An August 2016 survey of US B2B marketers by Demand Metric and Socedo showed that the majority of respondents arent taking advantage of social media monitoring tools: only 39% used them.

Business-to-government defense technology contractor Raytheon, however, is sold on the power of social intelligence. We set up dashboards so that we can understand where the target audience is and listen to what theyre saying or what theyre talking about within these channels, said Pam Wickham, Raytheons vice president of corporate affairs and communications.

eMarketer analyst Jillian Ryan discusses B2Bs use (and misuse) of social in the latest episode of Behind the Numbers, eMarketers podcast.

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eMarketer Releases New Report on B2B Use of Social Platforms - eMarketer

Here's an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451:

Now let's take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did.

There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no!

Farhrenheit 451 was published in 1953.

Here's an excerpt from a Washington Post news story:

Before a book is published and released to the public, it's passed through the hands (and eyes) of many people: an author's friends and family, an agent and, of course, an editor.

These days, though, a book may get an additional check from an unusual source: a sensitivity reader, a person who, for a nominal fee, will scan the book for racist, sexist or otherwise offensive content. These readers give feedback based on self-ascribed areas of expertise such as "dealing with terminal illness," "racial dynamics in Muslim communities within families" or "transgender issues."

Sensitivity readers have emerged in a climatefueled in part by social mediain which writers are under increased scrutiny for their portrayals of people from marginalized groups, especially when the author is not a part of that group.

The Washington Post article was published in 2017.

As Post reporter Everdeen Mason points out, if you're an author of best-selling renown whose published works include Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone just for starters, you might think you don't need to be screened by a sensitivity reader. You'd be wrong:

Last year, for instance, J.K. Rowling was strongly criticized by Native American readers and scholars for her portrayal of Navajo traditions in the 2016 story "History of Magic in North America." Young-adult author Keira Drake was forced to revise her fantasy novel "The Continent" after an online uproar over its portrayal of people of color and Native backgrounds. More recently, author Veronica Rothof "Divergent" famecame under fire for her new novel, "Carve the Mark." In addition to being called racist, the book was criticized for its portrayal of chronic pain in its main character.

Furthermore, sensitivity readers aren't even controversial in the eyes of a surprising number of the media. "What's not to like?" asks Claire Fallon of the Huffington Post:

There's really no meaningful difference between the content editing any reputable publisher would offer and sensitivity readingexcept that most agents and editors, to this day, are white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied women. The average editor at a publishing house isn't personally familiar with the experiences of an American bisexual child of Chinese immigrants, or a black teenager, or a deaf woman. An editor can and will alert their author that an odd coincidence reads as ridiculously contrived, or that a character's dialogue seems stiff and unrealistic; that's part of helping a writer hone their craft and polish their book. What, then, if the book's flaw lies in a cultural detail misrepresented, or a glaringly dated stereotype of a person of color? Unless the editor has more fluency in a given culture than the author, the editing process could skip right over that weakness.

And Slate's Katy Waldman, although not quite so enthusiastic about the sensitivity industry as Fallon, still thinks it's a generally good industry to have around:

As a push for diversity in fiction reshapes the publishing landscape, the emergence of sensitivity readers seems almost inevitable. A flowering sense of social conscience, not to mention a strong market incentive, is elevating stories that richly reflect the variety of human experience. Americaspecifically young Americais currently more diverse than ever. As writers attempt to reflect these realities in their fiction, they often must step outside of their intimate knowledge. And in a cultural climate newly attuned to the complexities of representation, many authors face anxiety at the prospect of backlash, especially when social media leaves both book sales and literary reputations more vulnerable than ever to criticism. Enter the sensitivity reader: one more line of defense against writers' tone-deaf, unthinking mistakes.

Even authors these days seem to see no problem in having to rewrite their books to fit the exquisite sensitivities of sensitivity readers. Waldman mentions one author "who totaled 12 sensitivity reads for her second novel on LGBTQ, black, Korean American, anxiety, obesity, and Jewish representation issues, among others."

There's another name for sensitivity screening, of course. It's called self-censorship. In Fahrenheit 451 some 64 years ago, Ray Bradbury prophesied that ever-increasing authorial sensitivity to the demands of an ever-increasing group of aggrieved minorities would result in books so blandly inoffensive that no one would care about books anymore. And then you'd have actual censorship.

Read more from the original source:
'Sensitivity' or Self-Censorship? - The Weekly Standard

Censorship is the opposite of what art should be about. Nobody is saying that we should accept alt-right ideas. But artists and curators must be free to let their imaginations, and political ideas, run wild. Rather than just disagreeing with the content of the work on display, these protesters want to limit the creative imagination, and limit what the public is able to engage with.

Even to the end of tackling bigotry, censorship is counter-productive and cowardly. Its much easier to call for the silencing of offensive ideas, and far harder to counter arguments in the form of art, literature or political manifestos. But it is only through democratic challenge that backward ideas are defeated.

The LD50 gallery describes the reaction to its shows as exceptionally aggressive, militant and hyberbolic. Sadly, this isnt the first time this sort of thing has happened. For years, art galleries have been called upon to No Platform particular artists, even where the work itself is not explicitly prejudiced. Exhibit B, an anti-racist installation, was closed at the Barbican in 2014 after protesters deemed it racist.

Whats astounding is that those behind Shutdown LD50 dont even consider themselves censors. The group says the gallery and its collaborators are the authoritarian ones, for giving a platform to hate speech. Some protesters have gone so far as to label LD50 actual fascists, comparing themselves to those who faced off Oswald Mosley at Cable Street. A pink swastika has been painted on the gallery door.

These people seem to think that racist words are in themselves violent and anti-democratic, that they pose a threat to people from ethnic minorities. The act of displaying white-supremacist works in an art gallery is seen as just as much of a threat as a national, fascistic movement, crushing freedom through terror and violence. In truth, it is LD50 that is the real threat to liberty.

As someone who considers themselves a progressive, and who supports immigration and equality, it might seem strange that Im so concerned about the illiberal tactics of these protesters. Why not focus on opposing right-wing ideas? But the fact remains that you cant oppose authoritarian, illiberal ideas through authoritarian and illiberal means. Both sides in this case must be criticised.

Undermining democratic values is the wrong way to oppose views you disagree with. Its also inconsistent. How can those who support equality argue that certain rights must not extend to far-right voices, and galleries willing to give them a platform. Clearly, these protesters dont support freedom or equality at all.

Tessa Mayes is a journalist and documentary filmmaker. Visit her website here.

For permission to republish spiked articles, please contact Viv Regan.

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Censorship and art don't mix - Spiked