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Harvey Mackay
Column
For the week
of December 27, 2010
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The Perils of
Being Anti-Social
"Is social media a fad
or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?"
asks Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics. Consider these statistics
he presents, and my analysis of them, and then decide how connected
you should be. Hint: Your company website alone is no longer
enough!
As of 2010, Generation Y --
those born between 1980 and 2000 -- outnumbers baby boomers.
And 96 percent of them have joined a social network! There
was no initiation, no dues, no recommendations. Just a few taps
on the keyboard and voila! Instant connection to friends and
family, immediate information sharing, finding the kid who sat
next to you in kindergarten story-time.
As technology improves and changes,
it also changes the way we live. It took radio 38 years to reach
50 million users. It took TV 13 years, the internet four years
and iPod just three years.
Perhaps the star of the social
media show is Facebook, which added 100 million users in just
nine months and now has over 500 million users. Not bad for
a company that began in a dorm room. If Facebook were a country,
it would have the third largest population behind only China
and India. The fastest growing segment of Facebook is women
ages 55-65. (The jury is still out on how many of those women's
children have accepted a "friend" request from their
mothers.) |
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We no longer search for the news;
the news finds us. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web
links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared
on Facebook daily. In the near future we will no longer search
for products and services. They will find us via social media.
One out of eight couples married
in the United States last year met via social media.
Generation Y and Z -- the youngest
techies, born after 1995 -- consider e-mail passé. In
2009, Boston College stopped distributing email addresses to
incoming freshmen.
For those who prefer their communications
in 140 characters or less, a Twitter account is a must. Ashton
Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than
the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama. Approximately
80 percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices people update
anywhere and anytime. The apps for Black Friday sales changed
the way shoppers planned their retail strategy. On the downside,
imagine what an unfavorable tweet means for bad customer experiences.
As a business person, I often
wonder how we functioned before LinkedIn. One of the most remarkable
employment statistics I discovered while researching my last
book, Use Your Head To Get Your Foot in the Door, is that 80
percent of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool
to find employees.
Remember the advertising slogan
"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?" That's a little
misleading, because it also stays on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook,
My Space, YouTube or any other social media you use.
YouTube is the second largest
search engine in the world. It contains 100 million videos and
receives two billion viewers each day. Wikipedia has over 13
million articles. A whopping 70 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds
have watched TV on the web, while only 33 percent have ever viewed
a show on DVR or TiVo. And 25 percent have watched a video on
their phones in the last month. With a growing number of e-readers,
35 percent of book sales on amazon are for the Kindle. Some
publishers estimate that eBook sales will reach 50 percent in
the next five years.
There are over 200 million blogs,
and 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily. Without
knowing who or what organization is actually behind the blog,
here are some facts to consider:
34 percent of bloggers post opinions
about products or brands.
78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations.
Only 14 percent trust advertising.
Perhaps the most astonishing fact of all is that social media
have overtaken porn as the number one activity on the web.
Successful companies in social
media have learned the importance of listening first and selling
second. Qualman says, "They act more like party planners,
aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers."
Social media represent a fundamental
shift in the way we communicate. To stay current -- and competitive
-- in business, don't be a "twit." Put on your best
"face" and "link" into these tremendous opportunities.
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Mackay's Moral: |
If you want to have the world at
your fingertips, brush up on your "social" skills. |
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The Author  |
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Harvey Mackay is a nationally
syndicated columnist for United Feature Syndicate. His weekly
articles appear in 52 newspapers around the country, including
the Chicago Sun Times, Rocky Mountain News, Orange County Register,
Minneapolis Star Tribune and Arizona Republic.
http://www.mackay.com/
Copyright, Harvey Mackay. All rights reserved. |
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