THOUGHT (aka Centric's Blog)

The other argument we hear about social media is that, “Well, isn’t this just another web boom all over again? Isn’t it just a flash in the pan?”

Well, even if it is a web boom all over again, consider this: how dependent are you on multiple companies that simply didn’t exist a dozen years ago? Companies like Google? Yeah, there was a bust, but the first web revolution changed the world.

To see how deeply entrenched social media is, all it takes is a quick trip over to Alexa. Out of the top 10 US websites, 6 are social. Out of the top 10 global sites, 7 are social.

This isn’t a blip on the radar. This is a massive, well-entrenched global shift.

So, ask yourself: can I afford to be invisible in the largest sites in the world?

This is the first post in a short series "blowing up" common myths about social media. These are real short and easy to digest. I hope you enjoy!

One of the big things we hear when we start talking about social media is that “it’s just for kids. Our audience is older/more sophisticated/moms/retirees, so they couldn’t possibly be on Facebook or MySpace or YouTube.”

That sounds totally reasonable. It’s also almost completely wrong.

Let’s look at the raw numbers:

• 37% of US adults engage in social networking every month, excluding teens (eMarketer)
• 70% of teens use social networking every month (eMarketer)

Pretty impressive numbers. In fact, if you do the math on the adult number, you’re looking at over 100,000,000 people in the US alone. One hundred million adults who use social networks every month.

And social networks are only a small part of social media!

So, ask yourself: is a pool of over 100 million adults—remember, this excludes teens—big enough to fish in?

Source = eMarketer

When I took the tagline of the "Agency of Change" last year, I had no idea how challenging a position this was going to be.

(Or, in English, "Wow, people really don’t like to change, do they?")

It may be ingrained in us. Consider the Newsweek article from 1995 that saw wide re-circulation this weekend, entitled, "The Internet? Bah!" It held such screamers as:

"The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

And:

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."

I’ll bet the author of that Newsweek piece wished that the magazine was still only physical, and that his article was comfortably moldering in garages and landfills, rather than splashed on the screens of 1.3 billion potential viewers.

But that’s been done to death. Let’s turn the timetable back a bit farther, and look at a story from 1957, where a character opines:

"Take this television they’ve been talking about, oh, for years now–and they haven’t got it yet. Who knows if they ever will?"

I’ll be willing to bet that if you could hop into a time machine, set the dials for somewhere in the 18th century, and drop into a parlor conversation of the day, there’d be plenty ready to decry the newspaper as being a waste of paper which would never catch on!

But, like it or not, change happens. Resist change, and younger, nimbler competitors will use it to their advantage. Sit back and say, "My website follows current best practices and benchmarks well against my competitors," and someone will find a way to do it better. Scoff at social media and say, "Well, it’s only for kids," and someone from your competition will be following Forrester or ComScore and know it isn’t "just for kids," and, in fact, 49% of US adults are expected to participate in social media this year.

Scary? We don’t think it has to be. Welcome to change. The change that brings opportunity.

Okay, so we’ve had some internal (and client) comment on Today is the Day the PC Died. Here’s an example: "Okay. So let’s suppose you’re right, and the PC really is on the downslope. What does this mean to me, beyond ‘Thou shalt go and develop a iPhone app, pronto-ish?’"

Fair enough. What does it mean–to everyone, and to marketers in general?

Well, first, the more I think about it, the more this really is a watershed event. This marks the first step in making technology part of ourselves. And that changes everything.

Follow me for a sec.

Think of how you use your computer today. You sit down, shake the mouse, open the web browser and go to YouTube. Or you use Office to make a presentation. Or you go on Facebook to see what your friends are doing. Then, when you’re done, you stand up and walk away from the computer.

Or, if you have a laptop, you drag it out of your messenger bag, plug it into the wall, open the lid and wait for it to find the wireless connection, then do your YouTube/Facebook/Office/Final Cut/Flash/whatever. And when you’re done, you close the lid, put it to sleep, and stuff it away in your messenger bag.

In both cases, you separate yourself from the computer.

In an iPhone-esque world, your computer is in your pocket, it’s always a half-second away from being turned on, and it has many different ways to alert you to its presence. The computer has become part of you. And when you add highly capable apps for productivity and games, as well as higher-speed data, you now have a constantly-connected, intelligent, extremely high-functioning link to, well, damn near anything in the world.

It’s now trivial to look up information on Google, play games with friends, communicate with voice and photos and video, add metainformation to the growing geographic and regional databases, respond to email, create new spreadsheets–half a million things are now seamlessly integrated with your life, rather than being a car trip or a laptop-startup away.

I’ll repeat: the computer has become part of you.

Let’s extrapolate this out. iPhone-esque technology becomes smaller, faster, more ubiquitous. At the same time, future display technology allows us to project data into our eyes, creating overlays on the real world. And, at this point, the distinctions between our own capabilities and those of the network begin to blur. We’re constantly connected. There’s no reason not to use your Google Ambient account. And, in fact, unless you turn it off, it’ll probably work constantly and helpfully in the background, instantly recognizing objects and classes of objects (like cars, faces, friends, and more) to let you know what’s going on with them.

"Wow, that’s a lot of information," the dinosaurs here say. "And I can see the potential for spam and abuse."

Yeah, and welcome to the early 21st century. Yes, assimilating augmented reality overlays may represent an order of magnitude increase in the amount of information we have to process. But that’s what today’s millennials (and post-millenials) have been training themselves for. Watching TV while doing homework, listening to music, and talking to 3 friends via IM is a great start on managing information overload. They’ll treat these augmented realities as part of themselves in very short order.

And for marketers, that presents an interesting conundrum. How do you market in an environment where computers have become part of everyone, and media itself has become personalized? People tend to guard their personal environment with much greater care than, say, a web page. AdSense ads won’t be tolerated when they’re in your field of vision, or even if they’re flittering around the corner of your eye. 3D overlays of fantasy-lands to explore in real space may be a better marketing venue.

But, no matter how you look at it, the rules are changing. Fast. What are you doing to keep ahead?