Social Media

When the Wright Brothers invented their flying machine they did not constitute an alternative method of transportation, they utterly redefined transportation. That first flight drew a “line in the sand” that bifurcated aviation history into two distinct eras — before Kitty Hawk and after.

Much the same can be said of Social Media as a business strategy. With its birth everything changed in the business world, and nothing will ever be quite the same again. It was a paradigm shift and a sea change, all at once.

Social Media is difficult to describe adequately as a business tool, because recognizing and adopting it more than enhances age-old business methodologies; it altogether redefines them.

We are sometimes asked “What is Social Media and why should we care?” Is Social Media a skill set, an art form, or just a powerful new form of advertising? The answer is uncomplicated yet profound. It is all of this and none of this.

At its core Social media is a whole new way of communicating, of doing business, of finding and engaging your customers and potential customers, of researching your competition, of making sales, and of impacting on your world.

By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers — 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
One out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media.
Years to reach 50 millions users: Radio, 38 years; TV, 13 years; Internet, 4 years; iPod, 3 years. Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months; iPhone applications hit 1 billion in nine months.
If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest, between the United States and Indonesia.
ComScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience, with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month — Vkontakte.ru is the number one social network.
A 2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that, on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
One in six higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
Eighty percent of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway, and Panama.
Eighty percent 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. Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen in 2009.
What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.
There are more than 200,000,000 blogs.
Fifty-four percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth.
Twenty-five percent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
Thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.
People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them.
Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations.
Only 14 percent trust advertisements.
Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI.
Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
Twenty-five percent of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone.
According to Jeff Bezos, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.
In the near future, we won’t search for products and services; they will find us via social media.
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.

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