We all know that social media is here to stay, but that's because we are in the middle of it, watching it grow. After my presentation on Tuesday, the VP's first comment was, "Is this whole thing just a passing fad?"
It's easy for me to just say, "no, its here to stay", but its hard to prove that to somebody who is disconnected from all the user created goodness out there on the web. So now I'm on the hunt for research that proves social media is on its way up...and staying there.
I just wanted to share a few articles and sites that, I feel, help illustrate the importance and lasting appeal of social media.
Entertainment Industry Proclaims Social Media not a Fad
Podcast Downloads Pass 1 Billion
MediaRealism: Social Computing is not a Fad
Busting the Top 10 Social Media Myths
If anybody has some interesting links, I'd love to check them out! Sorry if this post is a bit of a tangent, It's Friday and I've got a couple of big posts in the works for next week.
7 comments:
Great links. I need to share some of these with my marketing fellows and upper management. ;)
Thanks Mike!
oh, by the way, going by your blogger profile you have a killer taste in music!
Andy, I have hundreds of links tracking trends and all kinds of goodness.
But here is one that I think is very telling from comScore.
It basically shows that facebook (though I am becoming more leery of discussing facebook because I don't want to reinforce the misunderstanding that myspace ad facebook are all of social media) but shows that they grow by 100,000 new members per month and that the biggest growth is in the 25+ age group.
Good to prove that its not just punk kids doing this. Prime auto loan and home loan folks are on the social media soul train.
I left out an interesting PEW research nugget.
64% of online teenagers participate in social media
http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/230/report_display.asp
Sorry I keep posting, but I get this question all the time and there are so many things that you can use to show that not only is this not a fad, but has already been around for almost 13 years (almost the beginning of the internet).
AOL really picked up steam as an ISP in 1995. The reason people used AOL instead of other ISPs at the time (Juno, earthlink and basic peer to peer multinode bulletin boards). What made AOL so cool and draw in the crowds was that you were able to create "Buddy Lists" and there were rooms for almost every topic of interest. You could create your own user profile and email everyone on your list at once. There were groups and chats and using sites like Geocities, there were even blogs (only we called them personal pages back then). AOL (and I hade the black and white 1.0 dos version of the software) was the first time I had friends that lived outside of my city. Some of those friends I still have now on facebook and myspace.
Social media is not new, it is just evolving. As technology makes the world smaller, our social networks will get larger and we will need a way to communicate - that is what social media provides.
Not only that, companies like SONY and Toshiba are incorporating RSS readers into their wireless networked televisions to that you can get feeds on the couch.
Social media is not going away, it may change and continue to develop but it is not going to fold up like pegged jeans and pet rocks.
Ok, that was my last post.
Tony,
Thats some great info. I remember first getting AOL and being amazed that I could go into the chat room in the games section and talk with people all around the country, or bring up AIM and talk to all my friends from school.
Also, feeds on your TV...awesome! I'm gonna have to stay away from that or I'll never leave the couch.
Thanks for the Links!
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