Poster by Sonja Utz & Jan-Hinrik Schmidt, European Communications Conference 2012, 25. October 2012, Istanbul

1. Audience management in social media: Affordances,
cultural differences, and implications for privacy
Sonja Utz (s.utz@vu.nl) & Jan-Hinrik Schmidt (j.schmidt@hans-bredow-institut.de)
1. Introduction 2. Conceptual background: Different audiences (cf. Schmidt, 2011)
 Social media are blurring boundaries between Intended audience: Empirical audience:
the private and the public those people the user (often those people who take notice of
implicitly) regards as “proper content (vs. those who are inactive,
 Users routinely have to deal with “unseen
recipients” of self-disclosure or to whom content is filtered out)
audiences” (Scheidt, 2006) or “imagined
audiences” (Marwick/boyd, 2010) Addressed audience: Potential audience:
those individuals or sub-groups a those people who might eventually
 Technical characteristics of digital networked
user is directly “targeting”, e.g. by take notice, e.g. due to specific
communication – persistence, replicability,
@-replying or posting a link “for all privacy settings
scalability, and searchability (cf. boyd, 2008) –
of you interested in music”
complicate audience management
 Intended/addressed audience will not necessarily be congruent with
empirical/potential audience
 RQ 1: How are audiences in social media composed?
 RQ 1a: Are there differences between different services?
 RQ 1b: Are there differences between cultures?
3. Context and content of survey 4. Potential audience on SNS vs. Microblog 5. Potential vs. intended audience on SNS
 part of international and interdisciplinary 0,0 20,0 40,0 60,0 80,0 100,0
0 20 40 60 80 100
research network on “Privacy and Web 2.0” (cf.
Trepte & Reinecke 2011) Friends
 Online survey among n=1.934 social media other family members
users from USA, UK, Netherlands, Germany, other family members
China, Hongkong parents
 Field time: 15 Nov to 14 Dec 2011 colleagues
expartner
 SNS users: 92.0 % (Facebook: 83.5 %, partner
renren.com: 5.1 %) partner
 avg. contacts: 388,12 (std.dev. 884,4)
colleagues ex-partner
 Microblogging actively: 24.1 % (Twitter: 67.9 %,
Sina Weibo: 24.8 %)
boss/teacher People I'm interested in
 avg. followers: 174,5 (std.dev. 478,5)
friends parents
 Looped questions, personalized for services used
 Potential audience: “Are the following people "online only" "Online only"
among your [contacts] / [followers]?”
 Intended audience: “If you think of a typical people I'm interested in boss/teacher
[SNS status update] – who do you intend to
address or reach with it?” celebrities celebrities
 Empirical audience: “And who is usually
strangers strangers
reacting to your [SNS status update] , either
online or offline?”
SNS twitter
potential audience intended audience
6. Critical cases and cultural differences
Intended, but not empirical audience (% occurring / country) Empirical, but not intended audience (% occurring / country)
American British German Dutch Chinese
American British German Dutch Chinese
Intended audience 100
100
yes no 90
90
80

80
“too much
Empirical Audience
yes 70
70 attention”
60
60
50
50

40
“not enough 40
attention” 30
30 no
20
20
10
10
0
0 boss/teacher parents romantic expartner strangers "Online only"
boss/teacher parents other family romantic expartner strangers people I'm celebrities partner
members partner interested in
6. Conclusion 6. Literature
 differences potential audiences on SNS vs. microblogging services:  boyd, d. (2008): Taken out of context. American teen sociality in
networked publics. Ph.D. Dissertation, Berkeley. Online:
SNS: mostly friends & family  microblog: more distant & more diverse ties http://www.danah.org/papers/TakenOutOfContext.pdf
[12/10/2012]
 SNS: intended audience are primarily the friends, mismatch potential audience!  Hofstede, G.H. (1980). Culture Consequences: International
Differences in Work-related Values. London: Sage.
 Problematic cases of audience management  Marwick, A., & boyd, d. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet
passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined
 intended, but not empirical (not enough attention): people I’m interested, partner and expartner audience. New Media & Society, 13 (1), 114-133.
 Scheidt, L. A. (2006). Adolescent diary weblogs and the unseen
 Chinese - celebrities & people I’m interested in => more strategic SNS use, less focus on close ties audience. In D. Buckingham & R. Willett (Eds.), Digital
Generations: Children, Young People, and New Media (pp. 193–
 British don’t get enough attention from parents/family members 210). London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
 Schmidt, J.-H. (2011). (Micro)Blogs: Practices of Privacy
 empirical, but not intended (too much attention): parents, people I know but never met personally, Management. In S. Trepte & L. Reinecke (Eds.), Privacy Online
expartners & strangers (pp. 159-173), Heidelberg: Springer.
 Trepte, S., & Reinecke , L. (eds.), Privacy Online. Heidelberg:
 Dutch & Germans: more problematic cases in the interpersonal domain (parents, partner, ex), less so when it Springer.
comes to strangers
 Americans & British: most often reactions of boss/teacher This research has been supported by the “Young Scholar’s
Network on Privacy & Web 2.0” (DFG TR 498/11-1)
 Chinese: strangers & people I know but never met problematic!