It’s 8.10am and the DART is packed, standing room only, yet it is oddly silent.
Obviously people aren’t at their most loquacious on a stuffed train first thing in the morning, but what is extraordinary is just how many people are on their mobile devices, reading, scrolling down, tweeting, emailing or just surfing. If you want to understand just how ubiquitous social media is, catch the train and watch your fellow passengers for a few minutes.
Last weekend I was at the brilliant Merseyside derby between Everton and Liverpool, chatting to Liverpool supporters about the 96 fans who died in Hillsborough. My own memory of the event is hazy but I do remember living in Belgium at the time and only finding out about the awful calamity at Hillsborough a few days after the event. Such a delay would never happen now.
The people on the Dart have access to more information than any security or intelligence agent operating with the most sophisticated techniques and networks only a few short years ago.
This change in how we interact is crucial to understand if you are in the business of selling anything. Social media is the single most important disruptive technology we have seen in a generation primarily because it is actually changing the way we behave. It is changing our concentration spans and points of reference and our capacity to absorb messages and information.
Obviously it has enormous implications for secrecy, both personal in the case of people’s day-to-day lives, and institutionally, post-Snowden and Wikileaks, in the case of a state’s ability to surreptitiously track people’s movements and conversations.
However, where it will have — and is having — an enormous impact is in advertising. Because it is free, it has the potential to make very small companies very big and create a David-and-Goliath dynamic in marketing and branding because it is changing the rules and the terrain in which companies compete with each other to get their message out.
In his latest book, ‘David and Goliath’, Malcolm Gladwell makes the point again and again that the underdog can win by fighting the incumbent, not on the incumbent’s terms but on the underdog’s terms. Starting with the shepherd boy David, Gladwell traces many brilliant instances where the little guy beats the favourite by using different tactics.
Commercially, for small companies social media is a terrain changer. More than that, it is evolving all the time and advertisers who are deploying resources to on-line and social media should be aware of these changes.
The normal refrain we hear from ‘seasoned’ marketers is that social media is still the preserve of teenagers. This is not the case.
In fact, this week Facebook’s chief financial bod, David Ebersman, caused a bit of a stir by admitting that “usage among US teens overall was stable from Q2 to Q3, but we did see a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens”.
Admitting that early teenagers were not using Facebook as much as before caused Facebook’s share price to wobble a little, but social media is changing. All across the medium we are seeing enormous changes in who is online, for how long, what are they doing and how they are accessing social media.
Recently, Fast Company — the bible for many new companies — published a fascinating article documenting statistical changes you didn’t know about social media. The data captures worldwide trends so there is every reason to believe that the trends are the same in Ireland.
Here are seven big trends that have huge implications for marketing and advertising:
* Social media is getting older, quickly. The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64- year-old age group. This may surprise you. This age group’s usage has gown 79pc in the past year. Now the fastest growing demographic on Facebook and Google+ is the 44-55- years-old group. This is up 46pc on Facebook and 56pc on Google+.
* 189 million Facebook users are mobile only. They are not using it on laptops but on phones. Already 30pc of all Facebook’s ad revenue comes from mobile devices.
* Social media has taken over from porn as the number one activity online. It is not a fad but is becoming a part of people’s daily habits and, if you doubt that, consider the next surprising fact.
* A quarter of all smartphone users between 18 and 44 can’t remember the last time their smartphones were not beside them. Over 60pc of all smartphone users have their phone on and beside them for all but one hour of their working day.
* 93pc of all American companies use social media for marketing. This is a huge figure and shows the upside that companies see in this largely free medium. Yet only 9pc of US companies use a committed blogger to get their message out. This is a challenge for old-fashioned marketers because there is a knack to using social media and it isn’t as easy as transferring print or TV techniques to the online world and hoping for the best.
* YouTube reaches more American adults from the ages of 18 to 34 than any US cable-network. This shows the importance of videos in this new world. For example, I only realised how significant this could be when, a little while back, I teamed up with an animator to use short YouTube videos/cartoons to explain economics under the name Punk Economics. We expected to get a few thousand hits on YouTube but thus far the series has received 500,000 views. We are doing this for fun and to provide information to interested people for whom economics is often shrouded in difficult language, but can you imagine the impact of something like this with a committed team?
* One million websites are integrated with Facebook. This shows you how important it is to have a social media aspect to online strategies and how the terrain is evolving.
Looking around the Dart carriage, it’s easy to see there is a massive audience that is changing the way in which we receive messages and information and, more importantly, how we engage with it.
For small companies, it is a disruptive technology, which offers all sorts of opportunities to re-make the terrain. For Irish companies exporting it is a cheap way to let the world know about them and their products. And for the advertising industry here and elsewhere, it is an opportunity to create a parallel Madison Avenue online.
David McWilliams hosts the Winter Tales’ book festival at Dalkey on December 7. Tickets www.dalkeybookfestival.org
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Interesting article. I lknow someone with a small business who uses face book exclusively to get orders.
As someone who visits Silicon Valley regularly, I can confirm that social media is altering human behaviour, but mostly not in a good way. I hate sitting down to a meal in a group of people, and watching every one of them photograph their meal and post the picture on facebook before they start eating. WTF? I hate that people seem to have completely lost all concept of privacy. I hate that they can’t cope with my sense of privacy – if I choose to not reveal some detail of my personal life to them, they take it as a… Read more »
Having a great product and not telling anyone is like winking at a girl in the dark the only one who knows about it is you.
Does the ‘doart’ have leap card¿
From Wall Street on Parade, for the online socialites :
The Official Video from the Federal Reserve on How It Creates Electronic Money
The FED itself has a video there of how money is created out of thin air.
Thomas Hoenig, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and now Vice Chair of the FDIC, believes the only means of reining in the abuses of Wall Street is to separate the insured banks from their casino cousins by restoring the Glass-Steagall Act. Wall Street On Parade strongly agrees with that assessment.
In a way, the new dissemination of information is a massive improvement in terms of people becomming really away of what is going on. I often wonder how this country managed when people actually too RTE News seriously. Well, of course, many people did for many years. All the relentless emphasis of “the economy is booming, property is going up in value”. And not one mention of the debt build up. Not once. There is a lot of excitement on the internet about an RTE Newscaster calling citizens who were protesting about the Bondholder bailouts, “idiots”. The next step in… Read more »
The Truth Computers and WiFi , Facebook etc have been with us before . In fact the last time was 25,000 years ago and 25,000 years before that again etc etc .Each of those Astro-Periods were known as Age of Aquarius .This is the Life of AIR as written by an Aquarian . Our recent age only arrived since year 2000 and that is only very recently and this will last for 2,500 years .You and I are not going to see much of what will come again .We are only on the edge and the beginning , The questions… Read more »
Gary Vaynerchuk: “99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns” (TCTV)
http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/13/gary-vaynerchuk-social-media-clowns-tctv/
We need to realise that this is just a media channel which is as useless as all the rest of them out there except for one thing – hype (oh…and looking up catalogues). The main purpose is have a few idols and a load of worshippers or wannabe idols. People are still as illiterate as before and as misinformed as well judging by how we are about to make the same mistakes yet again. Is it not a pity that spontaniety of conversation, looking around and simply paying attention to ordinary things takes second place to “what’s happening now”.com Oscar… Read more »
“Here’s the reality: Social media has made marketers lazy, because so many people think it is the magic bullet for new sales. It’s not. It never has been. And it never will be.”
5 Reasons Social Media Is Ruining Marketing
http://mashable.com/2012/09/07/social-media-bad-marketing/
There are Luddites all over the shop on this blog. Time to enter the 21st century lads. One of my clients started making an extra 5K a week after I initiated a properly managed Social Media campaign for them. Those numbers speak for themselves and that’s just one example I can give. There are lots of badly managed platforms and campaigns for sure. It’s not just about flashy marketing, it’s about efficiently and instantly providing people with information, or the tools to find that information that they would otherwise take longer to find themselves. That’s the short version, I don’t… Read more »
The Difference Between Content Marketing and Social Media and Why You Should Care
“If Social Media feels foreign (even trite) to you then it’s because you are a natural born storyteller.”
http://pushingsocial.com/the-difference-between-content-marketing-and-social-media-and-why-you-should-care/
Some are rightly wondering how they were “uneducated”, “uninformed”, and why even with all that wiki and internet “information” still people remain so. I posit the reason – collective amnesia. Group dynamics of social media surpass by far the previous control methods of such as the Tavistock Institute, enforcing amnesia. But the murder of JFK is the beginning of the collective amnesia that is rampant even among those born long after 1963. So it is not that one lacks “information”, rather that one has forgotten. And we have Plato’s Meno Dialog – education is remembering. This is why “wake up”… Read more »
Here is another case of intransigent amnesia, or criminal insanity :
Sir Alan Greenspan said the US economy probably will grow more slowly next year than some forecasters predict and indicated that a near-record US stock market was not in a bubble.
“This does not have the characteristics, as far as I’m concerned, of a stock market bubble,” Mr Greenspan said in an interview with Bloomberg Television, which is due to air this weekend. http://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/world/near-record-us-stock-market-not-in-a-bubble-says-greenspan-1.1610305
Article on this in yesterday’s FT also 131127:
Sophia Amoruso Expands Nasty Gal
In just seven years, the founder of Nasty Gal turned an eBay store peddling vintage clothes in to a multimillion-dollar company through social media, smart investments and raw instinct
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324354704578637870086589666
You read the FT yesterday so David :) Sophia Amorusa Nasty Gal http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ba9c00bc-55e3-11e3-b6e7-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2lwwBGkkK
Does anyone know where and when there might be a good view of comet ISON. It seems there just too much of the same info on the web, a copy and paste depository for allot of crap that is passed, and never flushed…. Also, where might I find concise / definitive info on ISON as it appears the web has nothing of value and looking for a comet info on the web seems harder(a time waster) than looking for comet in space. How did we manage before the web? – We did not waste time wading through nonsense, we were… Read more »
I still read the papers both left and right
Bonboon in the link below there is story you might like you might note he does not say wrong, but just ‘carless’
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/28/boris-johnson-iq-unpleasant-elitism-nick-clegg
I like media outlets and blogs that use Facebook’s “Comments Plugin” to sign in and comment on their site.
thttps://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/comments/
Several of the local papers and TV stations here in San Diego for example sign in using Facebook. It is very convenient and keeps track of my various comments by automatically putting them on my Facebook news feed. Comments are now an integral part of the media.
The FB plugin also contains built-in moderation tools including the “like” button. I wish David would instruct his (very weird) webmaster to use it.
Hi Pat can you give us some links?
unsociable media won’t work without electricity or even a database error.
Anyone remember the electricity cuts back in the 70s – allot of social networking went onback in the darkness which resulted in a baby boom.
Looking forward to a possible upcoming ESB strike?
If your database goes down for hours on end twice a week it will drive people away.
Remember the power cuts in the early 70s sitting round the fire telling ghost stories. There is a story there I am sure. A good one.
David slayed Goliath in the Valley of Elah (great movie, Tommy Lee Jones) with a stone.
Today with an ipad anf fb, without electricity? Make Goliath’s day!
Does anyone know a good Irish web hosting company?
How to stop being afraid to sell
http://www.copyblogger.com/fear-of-selling/
What we need now is a form of Glass Steagall for the antisocial media, which would separate the corporate media for the people – a gold plated people’s social media, seriously!
Hello Neo…
Interesting:
http://www.maxkeiser.com/2013/11/bill-still-gets-on-the-cyrpto-train/
Cyrpto coin will eventually give way to digitalized gold and silver currency. But here is the dirty secret of Glass Steagall as admitted by LaRouche Pac “Reenacting Glass-Steagall will mean orchestrating the largest market crash in human history. We present six detailed steps that describe how we will clean up our banking system. Glass-Steagall is not the full recovery, it does not guarantee economic growth, but it is the first step forward–and it will ruin Wall Street.” What bonbon accused poor little gold bugs was lusting aFTER A COLLAPSE. Hayek is supposed to be salivating for the same. As I… Read more »
Hi David, I work in the ICT sector but it has serious flaws..online is just one tool in the toolbox what all companies big and small need to focus on is basic salesmanship , across the board in my experience the standard of salesmanship in this country is woeful ….the reason teens are turning off certain social media is ……its boring!!! let’s face it …cats and dogs doing silly things, a bit of chat and PHOTO’s …sharing your photos was a social faux pas years ago …because it was boring. People aren’t exposed to information …there’s precious little of that… Read more »
urfa digit?rk bayi ile en uygun digiturk paketinden sizde yararlanin.
?anl?urfa Uyducu olarak uydu çanak anten ar?zalar?n?zda bir telefon uza??n?zday?z.
Sanliurfa Uydu Tamircisi olarak uydu ?anak anten arizalarinizda bir telefon uzaginizdayiz.
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