Journal of Marketing Management

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

Keywords (headings not selectable): Methodologies: Free Response Keywords:

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Journal of Marketing Management RJMM-2012-0257.R2

Special Issue - AM-SI-2012 Identity < Consumer research, Interactions < Relationship marketing, New media < E-marketing, Social networks < E-marketing, Viral marketing < Emarketing, Consumer culture < Consumer research ethnography, phenomenology / observation, netnography

Facebook, Twitter

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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 phones to 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 coevolutionary 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, userfriendly 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 started to 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 managed for 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 between networking (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 aidememoire 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 tradeoffs 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 single weekend), 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 in any 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 and Martin 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 a LinkedIn 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 social networkers (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 selfesteem: social media, by contrast, encourage creative expression through conversation, imaging, humour, storytelling, music, discussion. But this process of image-building can be a non-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, the counterpoint 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 oversubscribed 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 a middle-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 is anecdotal 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 potential unreliability 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 the earlier, 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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