August 16th, 2009
Social Media Revolution?
Here’s another YouTube video - ‘Social Media Revolution’ - conflating a lot of stats in order to make a case for ‘Social Media‘ being the ‘biggest shift since the industrial revolution‘.
Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us started this style of delivery and really amplified the potency of the Web 2.0 movement in 1997. The latest ‘Did you Know?‘ video is all about the progression of information technology as we race towards the future.
‘Social Media Revolution’ takes the same music and style as ‘Did You Know?’ to leap to various conclusions in what is a coarser version of the previous two multimedia efforts.
While it took radio 38 years to reach 50 million users, TV 13 years, the internet 4 years and the ipod 3 years, Facebook added 100 million users in 9 months according to ‘Social Media Revolution’. However the only item in that previous sentence that is free is Facebook - and you won’t be seeing it unless you have access to a computer and the internet which aren’t.
‘Ashton Kutchner and Ellen DeGeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire population (sic) of Ireland, Norway and Panama’ while Boston College no longer provide incoming freshmen email addresses.
True, but I’ll bet most of Kutchner and DeGeneres Twitter followers are star struck ‘zombie’ followers with very little interaction (Kutchner follows 192 people on Twitter, DeGeneres 26 - this is a broadcast model).
Boston College have cut the expense of email servers because there are so many free cloud offerings out there that offered an e-mail-forwarding service that will pass along messages to whatever personal e-mail account a student specifies and is the cheaper option, I’ll wager. It’s the economy, stupid…
I could go on nitpicking but here’s my point: Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us was ground breaking and thought provoking, while ‘Did You Know?’ also broke new ground in presenting facts and has been used in plenty of executive briefings over the last few months to demonstrate the pace of change.
How did we get from that quality of presentation to claims that ’social media’ is the biggest shift (in what?) since the industrial revolution? The retread music and borrowed visual style actually does people making sense of the rapid pace of change in society due to technological innovation a disservice: it makes their job harder.
The thrust of ‘Social Media Revolution’ is to attempt to brand marketing communication via the internet as ‘Socialnomics™’ which is yet another book (’How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business’).
Written by Erik Qualman, who is Global Vice President of Online Marketing for EF Education, (’the world’s largest private educator’), the Amazon summary contains gems such as ’social media has officially surpassed pornography as the top activity on the Internet’ as well as more prosaic propositions to help the reader ‘understand the implications of social media, and how businesses can tap the power of social media to increase their sales, cut their marketing costs, and reach consumers directly’.
Why do I keep thinking the internet is slowly being converted into an online variation of TV Home Shopping Networks?
Oliver Marks provides seasoned independent consulting guidance to companies on the effective planning of 'Enterprise 2.0' strategy, tactics, technology decisions and roll out. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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