Well the author of a book called Socialnomics, one Erik Qualman, would have you believe that it is NOT a fad…Here’s his Youtube video for his book…
(go ahead and watch it….I’ll wait)
Done, or not gonna watch it?
He covers a few things, but before I even go through stuff, I just want to say… His point is that Social Media is not a fad. I know he means this in the short term sense as in five years from now it’ll still be here…But if you take the longer view there were people who said Radio would be a fad. TV would be a fad. Talking pictures would be a fad. They’re still there of course, but will they be forever? Do they carry the same weight, even as social media?
All things change and end, and as we move ever so quickly into the future things will change even faster. He notes how quickly facebook was adopted. Well then next big thing that he, and I, can’t yet conceive of, probably invented by some punk 18 year old kid, will be the next big thing, and make facebook’s adoption look positively archaic.
That is the Singularity, and we’re rapidly approaching it.
So before I even cover why I AGREE with him that Social Media is important, don’t just focus on it. Be ready for change, because it’s soon gonna come and go faster than you can perceive it, and you need to be riding that wave as actively as possible or you’re gonna get left far behind.
Right now though, as he covers, the wave is on Social Media…
I jotted some notes on the video, and just want to go through some of them…
96% of millenials are in a social network
I talk about this alot with people, particularly “old business”. You know…We make specific types of steel springs for widgit manufacturers. They see no need for a website at all, much less doing any kind of social media. Sometimes they might have a point. However, look at that number 96% of millenials on a social network. They do everything online, in networks, on their phones or computers…Heck more and more they’re moving just to a mobile handheld computer being their MAIN access point.
When Barry the purchaser for the Widgit manufacturer retires next year and they hire a new 20 something to be their buyer do you want to risk him having NO relationship with you, and doing a search for steel springs and finding your competitor out there, but you’ve got jack? Kids today…
…they don’t even know what the Yellow Pages are.
The video also talks about how people find your business online.
25% of search results of the top 20 brands are links to user generated content
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations only 14% trust advertisements
50% of the world population is under 30
What’s that add up to for you? Think you can go about doing things the old way? The video even points out that kids in college aren’t even given email accounts anymore. They don’t use email. It’s passe. Seriously. It’s bizarre to me that when I went to college most people didn’t have email (I did of course, but I was a geek) and now it’s the same, but on the other end. Apparently Email was a fad like radio, that has faded into the background. People have email now as a means to confirm their identity on social networks or retrieve lost passwords. They just don’t use it to communicate with each other at all.
They search with google, wikipedia, youtube, facebook, twitter. They don’t look for new products. They’re plugged into networks and when a product finds them they talk about it and it spreads out to their network.
And hey…. This guy? He wrote a book, and he put a video on Youtube about it, and people linked to it, and spread it via twitter, and then it got posted on some blogs I read, and then I watched the video, and now I’m posting on my blog about it, and will twitter this post.
See how this shit works?
If you’re not doing social media marketing you’re making a big mistake.
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“78% of consumers trust peer recommendations only 14% trust advertisements”
That represents a finite store of “trust equity” that sites like Facebook are currently strip-mining without any regard for its sustainability.
It won’t be long before most people have single-digit trust for even peer recommendations, in much the same way that direct marketers pretty much destroyed the utility of the telephone.
To a degree Phil I think you’re right. I also think Facebook will eventually fall to the wayside as social media evolves. One of the distributed open source communities that are essentially torrentizing social media I think might take off, and everything will both get more private, but also spread out your social network into one thing for you across various systems.
Like RSS feeds, but for social connections.
Or it’ll change into something we can’t forsee at this moment.
Either way though I think ‘personal’ recommendations will remain highly trusted, but people will learn to sniff out the autobot stuff.
Kind of like how 15 years ago heatmaps showed people looked at advertisements on websites, and now heatmaps show that people now almost instinctively know where NOT to look, so they don’t even look at ads on the sites.
However if someone posts on Facebook “oh my god I love my baby carrier, it’s definitely the best around.” with a link to the carrier, other moms who need a baby carrier will probably read it. I don’t see that changing much honestly even if the medium changes.
With people barely talking on the phone, much less emailing these days, their social network is such a huge part of how the under 30′s communicate with each other about what they like, dislike, use, don’t use, are doing, are not doing, etc….and they actually care about what other people say.
Very rarely do they actually go out to discover new things. They’re truly falling into that primate mold of copying rather than invention. Really we’re, as a species, really great a copying things, but honestly not many of us are great at invention. So rather than look for new cool things, they’re waiting for other people to find them via other blogs or aggregators or tweets or whatever.
One person finds a neat new product tweets about it to their 500 friends, those friends like it tweet to their 500, etc.
I think the bigger concern rather than losing consumer trust will be just keeping up with the joneses as the paradigm shifts again as it will do probably within a few years.