Social Media's astronomic rise

A colleague recently shared these stats/insights gleaned from recent reporting about social media's reach and impact (have not personally verified them). These speak for themselves.
I'm not one of those who think everything will change as a result of social media. But many things have changed, among those the ability of marketers, politicians or newsmen to control their message. Those days are over. No way to hide behind smart advertising and slick PR. I love it!

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. 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 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

Profit vs. benefit

Bill Maher recently wrote an insightful post arguing that not everything has to make a profit in order to be a good idea. It's actually quite sad he even had to write that, it's a testament to how twisted some of our thinking has become.

Am not sure where this started. But one movement we can certainly point to as part of the problem is those who believe that paying any amount of taxes is bad, and that the government's responsibility is to keep as much of our money in our own pockets as possible.

Don't get me wrong, I like keeping as much after-tax income as I can. What gets missed though is the trade-off. The other side of the coin. And when Ilook I sure don't like what I see: Fast deteriorating public education. Non existent public health. Massive national debt.

Bill Maher is right. Profit is not the right measure for many things. Benefit is. We should look at how our public dollars are invested not based on financial efficiency, but on value generated. What is the benefit of adequately funded public education? What is the benefit of universal access to quality health care? What is the benefit of sustainable farming? What is the benefit of reducing dependence on fossil fuels? When asked that way, the question gets re-framed and the answer starts informing the choices we need to make.

I'll be the first to say that not all tax dollars are used wisely. And the ''pork'' that gets attached to most appropriations bills in Congress (or in State legislatures) is disgusting. Anti-tax militants love to highlight all those earmarks and amendments that spend huge amounts of public funds on obscure programs aimed at benefiting a small elite with usually no lasting value.

What is desperately needed is a bottoms-up budgeting effort to reset what we should expect from our government and what we're willing to pay for it. Next to each line item should be some kind of benefit statement, i.e. why is this here.

And I mean everything. Let's carve up the hundreds of billions of agriculture subsidies and understand where this money is going and what it's buying us. Are these subsidies encouraging responsible land use? Sustainable farming practices? A healthy food supply for the nation? The brilliant movie Food, Inc. argued the system is actually encouraging the opposite.

How about the hundreds of billions spent on defense? Where is that money going? How much of it is actually used to secure the nation's borders vs. funding offensive efforts away from our shores? What is the benefit statement, short and long term, for these investments?

In the end, what I'd love to see is a 'Bill of Rights'-like charter, maybe even a constitutional amendment, outlining the primary responsibilities of the government to the people of this country. Imagine seeing things in there like insuring a healthy food and water supply, access to clean and renewable energy, healthcare for all regardless of ability to pay, etc...

We take some things for granted. Like everyone expects the fire department to show up if their house is on fire, whether poor or rich. We all accept that the nation's roads and highways are for everyone. We all hope for (this one becomes questionable) equal treatment in the justice system.

Yet we've come to accept some blatant inequalities as fact of life. Ability to pay defines the type of healthcare you have access to, the quality and reliability of the food you eat and water you drink, even the air you breathe to some extent.

Al Gore, in his award-winning documentary, states that all research, data, facts about climate change point to an 'inconvenient truth'. This can be said for other things as well.

The US has led the world in many areas over the course of its history. It has never failed at anything when it pursued clearly defined objectives and applied the necessary amount of resources, time and focus to it.

Let's challenge our leaders to set their sights on ambitious, challenging and most importantly noble goals that will show the world we can muster our ingenuity and resources to produce the kind of free and equal society all should aspire to. Now there's something to get excited about!

Go solar!

“I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power!” Thomas Edison said this. In 1931.

Humans have long understood the power of the sun and its connection to life on earth. Early civilizations, from the Egyptians to the Aztecs, worshiped it as a deity.

For a few decades now we've known that we could harvest the sun's energy to generate clean, renewable energy. Yet much less than one percent of our energy supply comes from solar.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, enough solar energy strikes the nation in a single day to power it for a full year. Read that again and think about that...

I was reading earlier that solar seemed ready to break through in the early 80's after the Carter administration funded research into it. But then Reagan apparently killed all the funding and advances stalled. I wonder what lobby was behind that decision (big coal? big oil?)...

Seems like things are moving again, at a rapid pace. Lots of funding is fueling lots of innovation and technological advances. Subsidies are making solar commercially viable, something it will need for a while until a certain scale can be achieved.

One type of project that I find just brilliant: Making covered parking out of solar panels. For anyone living in the lower half of the US for example, where the sun is abundant, you know how painful it is to get back into a car that's been sitting in the sun. Many places - malls, employers, airports, etc... - have huge outdoor parking lots with no covered parking. What if we could cover all these parking spaces and pay for it by licensing the 'roof space' to electricity producers? Truly seems like a win-win.

Other examples are big 'box' stores like Wal-Mart's or grocery stores using their huge flat roofs to generate at least part of the power needed to run the store.

There is no limit to the ingenuity of human beings and the marvels that modern-day engineering can produce when enough time and resources and focus are applied. Let's make clean, renewable energy the challenge of this generation, let's succeed and make that our gift to the next hundred generations.