Social Media Revolution: Is Social Media A Fad?

Or is it the biggest shift
since the Industrial Revolution?

By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber the Baby Boomers. 96% of them have joined a social network.

Social media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.

Years to reach 50 million users. Radio – 38 years. TV – 13 years. Internet – 4 years. iPod – 3 years. Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months. iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months.

If Facebook was a country, it would be the world's 4th largest (after China, India and the United States respectively). Yet, China's QZone is larger with over 300 million using its service.

2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculums. 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65-year-old females.

Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences.

Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé. In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.

What happens in Vegas stays on Facebook/Twitter/Orkut/Bebo/Flickr/digg/myspace/YouTube. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world with > 100,000,000 videos.

Wiki is a Hawaiian term = Quick. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles. Studies show it's more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica. 78% of these articles are non-English. If you were paid $1 for every time an article is posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour.

There are over 200,000,000 blogs. 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily. Word of mouth; world of mouth. 25% of search results for the world's top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. Do you like what they are saying about your brand? You better...

People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14% trust advertisements.

Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009. 70% to 18- to 34-year-olds have watched TV on the Web. Only 33% have ever viewed a show on DVR/TiVo. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.

35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us. In the near future, we will no longer search for products and services. They will find us via social media.

Social media isn't a fad. It's a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (weblinks, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.

"It's the economy, stupid."
– James Carville, 1992

It's a people-driven economy, stupid."
– Erik Qualman, 2009

Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy. (Though I still think that this man with the magic pen rocked socks.) Listening first, selling second. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Still think social media is a fad? Welcome to the world of Socialnomics™. Are you ready?

* This is the transcript for Social Media Revolution. FYI, minor grammatical changes were made. (SEE! I SO HARDWORKING!) I first watched the video here on [b]ecker's blog.

---------


Welcome to the revolution.