PR 101

I intended this week to write about an entirely different subject .Two things changed my mind: I love the blues. As I write this I am listening to Son House sing “Government Fleet Blues” on iTunes. It occurred to me that the reason I can hear a Blues song recorded over 80-years-ago is because of a technology perfected in the 1920s – phonograph records. It seems quaint now, but the record was a huge leap from the waxed cylinder previously used to record music. It democratized music distribution. Social media is having the same effect on information distribution,

Second, I was a reading the Socialnomics Blog. It contained information that just blew me away. I read a lot of social media blogs written by some of the best: Simon U. Ford, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis, Sarah Evans, and others. They are all saying that Social Media is taking over. I know they are right. But the following information underlined that fact in a way that surprised even me. Did you know:

(If you prefer the information in video form, here’s the link to the Social Media Revolution.)

• Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth has now become world of mouth.

• In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services – they will find us via social media.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – listening first, selling second.
• Successful companies in social media also act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser.
• Twenty-four of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because the Web is now the primary news source.
• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers – 96 percent of them have joined a social network.
  • Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen.
  • Social Media has overtaken porn as the number one activity on the Web.
  • Three 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
    • The Internet – four years
    • iPod – three years
    • Facebook added 100 million users in less than nine months.
    • iPhone applications hit one billion in nine months.
    • If Facebook was a country it would be the world’s fourth largest – between the United States and Indonesia.
      • More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook – daily.
      • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
      • Some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using its services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this).
      • Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than four weeks and cost Facebook $0.
      • comScore indicates that Russia has the most engaged social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the number one Russian social network.
      • A 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction. One-in-six higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
      • Percentage of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees – 80 percent.
      • Eighty percent of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime. Company reputations are often killed before the company even knows it is bleeding.
        • Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama.
        • There are no secrets in social media – ask any job applicant who didn’t get hired because of those college party pictures on Facebook or Flickr.
        • The second largest search engine in the world is YouTube.
        • Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78 percent of those articles are written in languages other than English.
          • If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour.
          • There are over 200,000,000 blogs and 54 percent of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
          • Twenty-five percent of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. Thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
          • People care more about how their social networks ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them.
          • Seventy-eight percent of consumers trust peer recommendations
            • Only 14 percent trust advertisements.
            • Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive return on investment.
            • Ninety percent of people that can skip ads using TiVo do so.
            • Hulu (the online video site) has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
            • In the past month, 25 percent of Americans said they watched a short video – on their phone.
            • According to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, 35 percent of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available.

It takes a lot to surprise me. I was a newspaper for 25 years. I have pretty much seen it all. These facts, though, amazed even me. Social media isn’t taking over, it has taken over.

Traditional marketing, public relations and advertising are dying. They just don’t know it yet.

Note: Two weeks ago, I posted a blog about how the kindle could save newspapers. I thought it was an original idea. Well, I was wrong. In 1994, the old Knight-Ridder newspaper chain came up with the same idea. They called their reader The Tablet. What stopped them was technology had not moved far enough along to make it viable. Check out this video to see what Knight-Ridder planned to do.