Social Media for Business

2009 has seen a rapid growth in the global use of social media combined with a decline in the effectiveness and impact of more traditional media forms. Here are two videos that demonstrate the growth

This first video,  “Did You Know – 2008 Latest Edition” was made by educators Karl Fisch, and Scott McLeod and is an updated version of a 2007 presentation titled “Shift Happens.” While it does have a distinct US focus, it does provide global stats on the Information Age and became an authoritative data source for Sony BMG at their executive meeting
held in Rome in 2008.

On July 30, 2009, Erik Qualman, the global VP of online marketing for EF Education, headquartered in Lucerne, Switzerland updated some of the research completed by Kagan, Fisch and McLeod.  He posted the video below to his blog  Socialnomics . His presentation is designed to cover the latest news and trends in social media.Erik’s presentation called the “Social Media Revolution” provides startling statistics from a vast amount of collated research.

Here are the facts shown in the video, taken from the Socialnomics blog, where you will also find the sources of these statistics listed.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. 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 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser.

I think these 2 videos and the stats certainly indicate that social media is not a fad, and certainly is not going away.It is  a reality that there is a fundamental shift happening in the way we communicate. Now we do not find the news, the news finds us! The death of Michael Jackson was a good example of that shift. We are all part of a user-generated society, now in control of our own destinies. And the numbers substantiate that fact!

To the savvy business owner this then poses other questions. ‘What changes need to be made in my organization to gain the greatest ROI of social media?’ How can companies leverage social media and how will they do that?

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