Sent to you by Joe via Google Reader:
The year 2009 has been quite an eventful one, and would be remembered for a long time for the action packed days..we've seen it all the … Government bailouts, companies being bought or dissolved, CEOs getting sacked etc etc..inthe middle of it this there has been something that has seen a tremendous growth - A beast called Social Media, digital consumer today has fuelled the engines of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other similar portals so much so that if you were to look at the following stats you would agree there is that there is something that is happening around us that neither the end customer nor the companies around can afford to ignore.
( Data compilation courtesy- econsultancy)
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size
• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites.
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people... In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it's often hotly debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopaedia.
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.
• It's been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year.
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.*
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.
Who can forget the famous YouTube video, "United Breaks Guitars." , with 7 Million views Dave Carroll did more damage than United airlines could have thought. It would not have costed United anything around $ 1800 to fix or replace the Taylor guitar , however what they suffered was a lot of negative mention on blogosphere, news coverage and much more for first breaking Dave's guitar and then not agreeing to accept the claim. Times UK went on to report that this 'Bad PR caused United Airlines' stock price to suffer a mid-flight stall, and it plunged by 10 per cent, costing shareholders $180 million.'
On the other hand we saw the much awaited Zappos sale to Amazon, a small shoe maker shot to fame by brilliantly using the power of Facebook and Twitter to market themselves. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has nearly 1.48 million followers on Twitter, and the company's official Facebook page has almost 21,000 fans. On their webpage, they have 500+ employees tweeting regularly ( total employee strength of 1500 ) they tweet regularly about what they're doing at work etc etc…. their valuation at the time of Acquisition 1.2 billion. My earlier blog covers this in detail
My favorite however is Ford and their Fiesta Movement. Ford as we know apart from Starbucks, Wells fargo, Dell ( my other favourites) has a very focused Social Media strategy and they are betting big, no wonder their online figures talk about their popularity – more than 1.8 million YouTube views, more than 270,000 Flickr views and more than 1.8 million Twitter impressions, resulting in more than 13.2 million interactions. It is interesting to see their last Qtr results ( a big positive shift ) and I would be keen to know how much they attribute to the future positive figures to the good work Scott Monty and his team are putting up.
The gone year has seen a huge shift in the Digital consumer's behavior and the figures above and the stories are just a small reflection of how customers today are changing the face of Company- Consumer conversations. We are already seeing a lot of companies take a serious note of this subtle change and starting to reach out to their customer on their ground, 2009 has seen most of the Fortune 500s investing more aggressively on blogs, forums, videos etc than ever before and am sure going forward this would only bring about a dynamic shift in broadly three areas: greater honesty about products or services offered, transparency in style of working and finally more Company Customer Conversations as opposed to static marketing /advertising push based approach.
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