Is Social Media Equivalent to the Industrial Revolution?*

OR Social Media Speeds the Path to Consumer Centricity

A YouTube video making its way around business and academic circles (above) entitled "Welcome to the Revolution" starts off by asking whether social media is simply a fad or the "biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution."

The video supports the release of a book, Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business by Erik Qualman, global vice president of online marketing for EF Education, headquartered in Switzerland.

Supported by a techno-beat, the video lists a stream of facts around social media that will supposedly be substantiated and analyzed in the book. These include:

• One out of eight 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 (four years), iPod (three years). Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months, iPod application downloads reached 1 billion in nine months;
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest after China, India and the U.S.;
• Eighty percent of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees;
• Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama;
• Studies show Wikipedia is more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica;
• Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, only 14 percent trust advertisements.

Social media is undoing all the assumptions of one-way communications. At best, the current internet experience is a one-way experience. We can slice and dice it but at the end of the day, the most "interactive" Web site is still someone in an office somewhere coming up with their best guess as to what the consumer-user-audience wants.

Social media's revolution is really in putting the two-way into the conversation. Aligning with, anticipating, and delighting your customers becomes a much more efficient and measurable enterprise with social media. As the technology becomes more readily available, and as X & Y and the next generations influence more and more spending each day, this revolution will start to feel like just that, a revolution.

This discussion is about a future-state of human behavior. Our behavior may change over time, but our rational and emotional drivers are not all that mysterious. Stores won't go away and neither will the Web or social media. What will change will be who controls the purchase. And that has not really changed all that much.

*originally published on RetailWire http://bit.ly/3fnCTb

Posted via email from ConsumerX: cXChuck's Stuff