The Secret Blog Of Adrian Mole, Aged Fifteen And Nearly Three-Quarters

The social mediaverse has been in a kerfuffle this week after a 15 year old Morgan Stanley intern shocked the City – nay, the world! – by having some interesting things to say about how teenagers use Twitter, computers, and social media. Leaving aside the revelation that the banking sector is in such disrepair it needs child labour, the teen’s observations seemed pretty much on point. Some bloggers in analysing them couldn’t resist a quick sideswipe at “marketers” who had peddled “reports” which painted a different picture.

Well, one person’s experience is always going to feel more realistic than an aggregate – this is why so much research as reported in the press raises eyebrows. Naturally I have complete faith that a teenager who’s landed an internship at a top investment bank will be representative of his demographic, but in any case I suspect the shock value of these findings has been overstated. The “teens don’t use Twitter” fact, for instance, has been currency for a while – Microsoft’s danah boyd pointed it out, analysis included, on her blog over two years ago.

Of course boyd hadn’t just asked one teenager: she’d talked to lots and lots of them in a big ethnographic study. This was her cardinal error: it puts her into the realm of research, which isn’t as good a story. The lesson for CEOs is this: ask one fifteen-year old about stuff and you’ll get brilliant insight. Put six of them together in a focus group and you’ll be killing your organisation’s creativity.