DigitalBeat

It’s hard to say what’s more shocking — that the words of a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern lit London’s financial world on fire, or that no one before thought to ask teenagers what they think (and actually listen).

To backtrack, Morgan Stanley Research in Europe published a report called “How Teenagers Consume Media,” (PDF) consisting almost entirely of intern Matthew Robson’s thoughts. Though unscientific, the report prompted calls from dozens of fund managers and CEOs, and the volume of responses was five or six times greater than Morgan Stanley’s usual research, spokesman Edward Hill-Wood told The Guardian.

Much of the report is common sense — teens don’t listen to radio, they play video games in long bursts, they like viral marketing, but not billboards, they rarely pay for music and they don’t read newspapers — but the real shocker, apparently, is that teenagers don’t use Twitter.

“Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they release [sic] that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit),” Robson wrote. “In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless.”

Actually, this is a pretty obvious observation. Twitter is a great tool for reaching out to people you don’t already know because of its bare-bones interface and semi-anonymous nature. We tech journalists like it because it’s useful for networking. But teens aren’t, and probably shouldn’t be, communicating with strangers. Of course, they’d rather interact with friends, and Facebook, which Robson praises in his report, is a better place for that.

It’d be nice to see some market research that backs Robson’s claims, but I don’t think the financial industry would be better served unless it completely refuted what the teen said. The report struck a nerve because it was so personal — one teen’s unfiltered musings. Maybe the lesson here is that investors and other Twitter-obsessed individuals should seek that out a little more often.

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