Is Social Media the biggest global shift since the industrial revolution?

Many brands are dipping their toes into Social Media hoping that this will create and grow brand awareness while attracting a new set of customers. There is no denying that times are changing and because of the power of the internet and mobile devices brands can now communicate in real time with their target audience(s).

While social media presents a new opportunity for brand owners the real power in these new mediums lies with the users themselves. More importantly users now have ‘Martini’ based access and control of information - anytime, anyplace and anywhere - and have the ability to vote with their feet in real time and influence a brands status and reputation. Ultimately, the users will decide who will win and who will lose while brands try to figure our how best to optimise social media to provide a trackable and measurable ROI. While everyone is trying to get to grips with this new paradigm there are some interesting facts about social media, which maybe suggest that this might just be the biggest global shift since the industrial revolution.

• By 2010, Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers and 96 percent of them have joined a social network
• Social media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web
• Number of 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
• Eighty percent of companies use LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
• Worldwide there are more than 200,000,000 blogs
• Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices. People update anywhere, anytime. Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences!
• Facebook users translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than two weeks and this cost Facebook £0
• Seventy-eight percent of consumers that use social networks trust peer recommendations
• Only 14 percent of consumers trust advertisements

Many people will be excited by the above facts while others will be scared or bemused. Whatever each of us might feel about Social Media one thing is sure, times are changing rapidly. The pace of change is so fast that some of the above information is already out of date!