Business Insider points out that, according to an Edison Research report on Twitter Usage In America: 2010, "black people represent 25% of Twitter users, roughly twice their share of the population in general."
Business Insider presents a handful of reasons this could be the case, including the fact that "not only are African-Americans the most active users of mobile Internet, they are also the fastest growing group to adopt the technology."
Why, oh why, indeed? But don't all those ads focus on geeky white folks? I just don't get it, said Cleatus, who recently purchased Big Mobile Deck Overseer Co. and then followed it up by purchasing Growing Mobile App Platform Inc. with his profits from the Moonshine Conglomerate Anonymous LLC.
Here's the deal:
Black people in America have always been trendsetters in adopting new communication systems from pagers to cellphones to Twitter. And that's just historical fact at this point.
I've written a little bit about this topic here and there at ProHipHop and have discussed it with folks but, in terms of research made public, I don't see people pursuing this subject in any real depth. And that reminds me of one of my biggest failures at ProHipHop, even bigger than the failures that were publically observable.
Back during my first year of ProHipHop, out in San Francisco five years ago, I was contacted by a happening lady who was interested in developing research papers that we would initially distribute to her corporate contacts at conferences like MIDEM which was the focus of much of her other work.
I started work on a research paper about the "hip hop demographic" and mobile usage. Part of the paper included a historical look at African-American uptake of mobile devices beginning with pagers including some of the prejudicial treatment of that reality by the mass media. For example, I remember Time magazine equating youthful pager uptake with drug dealing. Now, drug dealers were certainly using pagers but black people, I believe, were instrumental in bringing personal pager use into the mainstream for non-business purposes.
That's the kind of thing that white marketers and businesspeople still seemed baffled by, partly because the research isn't readily available.
Sadly, my partner turned out to be a bit clueless about the demands of good research and was not so good on the reading/writing level. Fine for everyday business but inadequate for research related work.
Because this was the first time I'd worked on this topic and because research always take longer than I expect, even secondary research such as the paper I was developing, I was unable to meet our overly hopeful deadlines and produce a paper worth distributing in time for a couple of major conferences.
My partner jumped the gun and distributed an incomplete draft that included notes and incomplete sentences at a major music conference because "that's just how she rolls".
Now, you can get mad at me, say bad things and we can still work things out but if you make me look like a bad writer and an incompetent researcher, you're dead to me. So I told her to remove all references to me and to never mention my name if she continued to distribute the paper.
Suffice it to say that nobody contacted us in relationship to that pathetic excuse for a research paper, which was absolutely no surprise.
But the big failure was my backing off such research at that time when, looking back, that would have become the best use of my skills as well as a more manageable role than chief blogger at a combative and, at the time, widely noted blog.
In my defense, I had people coming at me from every direction, folks in New York were reaching out, bloggers were interacting heavily and I just couldn't sort out what was best to pursue. It was my first real taste of what it meant to blow up, if even on a modest scale, and I had a lot to sort out.
All this to say, I wish I'd pursued the subject of African-American trendsetting in mobile and, now, web communication when I first began working on it rather than letting that initial setback throw me off, even if there were lots of other things happening.
On the other hand, I'm totally amazed that this stuff isn't common knowledge but I recognize the two main reasons why:
1) White people in power, for the most part, just don't get black people. They have a superficial picture of African-American history and little understanding of how that relates to daily life for black folks in America. And they mostly don't really see why they should bother to do their homework.
2) Real research is usually immediately misrepresented by pr people and media people and then dies a quick death in the public realm unless somebody picks up on the interesting parts and focuses on them, as Business Insider has done with the above mentioned study.
We're actually at a good place in history to do real research about such topics and get them into the public mind. Doing so could mean a lot for African-American business people, who continue to be disregarded, and for African-American consumers as well, who are often perceived as either a group to use as a springboard to reach the white masses or as people who will buy whatever white people are buying.
I am currently pursuing some possible openings for researchers and am also exploring launching a B2B related research project but none of it has to do with topics pursued at ProHipHop. However, if you're on your game and interested in the above from a business angle, please feel free to hit me up at:
hiphoppress(at)netweed(dot)com
I'd give you a more conversational address but the behavior of sp@mmers has taken that off the table.
Note:
Since I'm talking about race here quite a bit, let me clarify that I am a white man and when I talk about white people's weird ass behavior, I know what I'm talking about from an insider's perspective.
Marketing to Black folks is just about safe stereo types and your mention that most large marketing firms only view marketing to African Americans as a springboard to white America is so true. Fox did this with living color and other shows when they first came out, ironic. I usually call such marketing “Elvis Presley” marketing. One idea came to me from reading your article, since White America is not paying attention to African American needs in the market place, we now have a great opportunity, as minorities, to develop markets that are true to OUR sensibilities.
I think brands like Phat Farm or FUBU could be said to have done exactly that however it’s hard to make a fashion brand an enduring institution. That said, even earlier attempts that may have fallen short or that were appropriately short lived, due to the nature of trends, have something to teach us whatever our identity niche.