By now everyone a casual net surfer or a serious professional in the web world must have seen this video on YouTube.
The prime takeaways of this video are:
• By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year have met via social media
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
2009 U.S. Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction
• 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees
• In 2009, Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
People adapting to social media sites in such exponential numbers indicates the shift to the way people want to interact and initiate any conversation or deal, make friends, keep in touch with relatives overseas, discuss about some product, service or brand, get after sales attention or make celebrities eliminate the dependency on journalists and print media and directly connect with fans.
The merging of the real world and the virtual world is a constant evolution happening right from the day people started using the internet. Some time back email management was a task which needed training and setups at the offices in the corporate world. Today majority of these corporate people who may not be tech savvy flash a smart phone with ease for receiving and sending emails.
As we all know Mark Zuckerberg started working on Facebook so that all his college mates could remain connected to each other. Other people started using the Facebook for the same reason and today it has become such a phenomenon that every one has a Facebook account and thereby an online identity. It was Facebook that created such a stir in the online social scenario. But, it could have been any site which would have offered the features and the accessability like Facebook and could have been an overnight success.
What I mean to say it was not Facebook but the idea of keeping in touch, interacting and sharing online with so much ease which was a big hit. So it created an online social culture which was accepted at an universal level. Google achieved for search what Facebook achieved for social media.
Social interaction is nothing new, since ancient times humans have been interacting. Every one must have read the sentence which is usually the first sentence uttered in any lecture on Sociology, Psychology, History or Moral Science - ‘Man Is A Social Animal’.
So the urge to communicate, connect, interact, share is very basic, normal and at the core of human psychology only it is the medium which varies from time to time.
Hence online social media is the new way people want to connect personally or professionally.
Facebook may be a fad, Twitter may be a fad as only the future developments will tell us which social media site will have a longer online life . Tomorrow it may be an XYZ site which catches the fancy of the netizens but the fact remains that using online media for personal or professional interaction is here to stay and evolve.
Keeping the online internet marketing aspect in mind which is one of the professional interactions which has an added flavor of reaching out to everyone at a subtle personal level, according to me Social media is here to stay as the new marketing mantra.
