“Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipendia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon- the groundswell- that has created a permanent shift in the way the world works.” This is written on the book jacket of the book Groundswell, a national bestseller. The social media revolutions is upon us. Several experts claim for it to be the biggest shift in business since the industrial revolution. The change in how we communicate with the public, potential and existing customers is evolving at a pace that has not been seen before with adoption of other technologies. Its a social media revolution.
It used to take years to build new media platforms, for radio it was 38 years, television 13 years, the internet 4 years, and the iPod 3 years- each respectively to reach 50 million users.
Facebook secured 100 million users and Apple had 1 billion application downloads within nine months.
If Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest.
Meanwhile there are two billion blogs on the net with 54% of bloggers posting content or tweets daily.
Like it or not, they will be talking about your brand. That’s a fact. And disregarding those comments could see your brand become irrelevant and redundant. It is important to identify the discussions around your brand and see it as an opportunity. The book Groundswell talks about ways to turn these discussions into opportunities for the company and the authors have shared several case studies.
The Social Media Revolution, otherwise being labelled “Socialnomics”. Blogger and author, Eric Qualman has created a video that visually illustrates the changes in the marketplace.
In his book he warns that businesses and marketers need to shake and wake up or risk becoming forgotten in the market place. Traditional advertising is evolving to a new medium known as social media.
He claims that, “In the near future, we will no longer look for products and services. They will find us via social media.” We can already begin to see the foundation of this shift with more web sites using Facebook Connect to integrate their reviews, comments and purchases into the users FaceBook stream.
“Social media isn’t a fad. It’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. More than 1.5 million pieces of content are shared on Facebook daily.”
Qualman’s advice is that for companies to be successful in the social media environment, they need to act more like “party planners, aggregators and content providers than traditional advertisers.”
Qualman has written about the subject in length in his new book, ‘Socialnomics’, but to give interested parties a taster he has also produced a video with some highlights.
Check out the video that he recently produced about the revolution in social media.