Social spaces

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Who are your neighbours? Are they the family living next door, the old lady over the road, or the commuters traipsing by your side to the train station every morning?

Or, in a digital world, do we need to rethink our notion of neighbours? Perhaps our relationships are stronger with people not physically close to us, but digitally close to us. 

With the rise of smartphones, Mitch Eggers, chief scientist at Lightspeed Research, began to think about the way people are migrating to digital communities or neighbourhoods, where our innate desire to fit in is just as strong as in the physical world. 

In 2017, eMarketer put the number of smartphone users at almost 2.4bn, an increase of more than 10% on the previous year. By the end of 2018, more than a third of the global population will be using one.

“The developed economies led the charge, but as smartphones became more affordable, along with access and an extraordinary set of offers in the app stores, the entire world migrated to smartphones,” Eggers says.

“What struck me was that we were not all migrating to a similar place – we were migrating to a place we constructed based on our values, beliefs, needs and individual proclivities. We were migrating to places and experiences where other people who sought those same experiences were migrating.”

He cites activities such as Pokémon, where players can be in the same physical location but focused on their devices, rather than on their environment. “It is clear there is a digital experience in that particular place more compelling than the analogue interactions also available. Often, our mix of beliefs, preferences and Pokémon needs are special combinations of politics, media, entertainment brand preference, and online community participation.”

So what was the tipping point at which digital neighbourhoods could be clearly identified? Eggers says the building blocks were email and domain names – “they were the early tools of finding and remaining connected to people, spread across far-flung geographies, who hold some form of shared interest or point of view.”

But Eggers says it was the release of the Apple iPhone, with its touchscreen and choice-based app store, that really presented the crossover point to forming digital neighbourhoods.

“The combination of a large range of possible experiences, extraordinarily high rates of adoption, easily personalised and customisable experiences, and fully mobile connections meant we could all reinforce our existing relationships and social interactions,” he says. “We could also construct a new place – all digital – where we could enjoy a new type of community and alternative sense of belonging.”

Social networking sites have further built on this, beginning with Myspace. 

“In 2006, more people visited Myspace than Google – and at the dawning of 2017, 1.8bn online digital neighbourhood builders chose to include Facebook as part of their constructed experience.”

In both the real and virtual worlds, people demonstrate a wide range of behaviours in the way they connect with each other. However, the digital world allows you to customise and shape your neighbourhood to suit your preferences. “In the real world, a person can avoid or embrace another person or local establishment, but they can’t just create the yoga studio they want, or the shopping experience they desire,” says Eggers. “Similarly, they can’t generate a line of people at their front door who are interested in dating them.

“Also, oddly enough, a person in a metropolitan area can travel to a bar and enjoy a potentially high degree of anonymity. In their digital neighbourhood, they may not have anonymity given all the digital breadcrumbs left behind as they navigate their constructed worlds of Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.”

Characteristics of digital neighbourhoods include behaviours, tastes, preferences and demographics; however, Eggers points out that the way we present ourselves in them is frequently only a slice of ourselves, and not the whole person.

“We often only present a good vacation moment, a nice plate of food, an exceptionally fun time or nice view. We can also collect and connect to a much larger group of people who want to belong to a digital slice or subculture. Those who like an indie pop artist – or who want to protest a coal terminal – can all be reached out to, collected and mobilised. We can find our like-minded people and connect, based on a narrow, unidimensional motivation or relatively uncommon interest.”

Of course, real-world neighbourhoods evolve as people move in and out and have changing lifestyle needs; do the same shifts apply to digital ones? According to Eggers they do, but the changes are more dramatic. 

“The major difference is probably the speed of joining and dropping, the degree to which an individual can precisely tune their experience to their preferences, and the rate at which any given experience evolves to better meet the needs of the ecosystems’ inhabitants,” he says.

For brands and marketers, it is vital to understand how this digital behaviour works, as people “self-cluster into membership and experience groups”.

Brands should be aware of two important features: “First, our membership often reveals key information about our tastes, interests and needs,” says Eggers. 

“Second, nearly all the building blocks of digital neighbourhoods offer an advertising mechanism to reach refined, well-defined audiences – at least audiences far better defined than anything available historically. There is a reason why digital advertising technology and budgets are evolving and shifting rapidly. That is where the people are.”

Brands looking to identify those most akin to their customers, and tap into them, can research their current customers to better understand their motivations, purchasing paths and habits. They can also use quantitative models, which, says Eggers, can help client marketers “find other people who are lookalikes – doppelgangers – to their current customers”.

“These receptive audiences can be programmatically or algorithmically served an ad that is more likely to be relevant to them. It is these types of techniques that have made Google and Facebook advertising juggernauts, and allowed vast swathes of the population to use and enjoy Facebook membership and internet search for no charge,” he adds.

Understanding digital neighbourhoods – and recognising what they give people that real-world communities don’t – is going to be vital for brands in future. Platforms may evolve, but the convenience and reach in allowing people to come together for shared experiences, news, entertainments and politics shows no sign of abating. 

This article was first published in Issue 22 of Impact.