So you think Social Media is a fad?

One of the videos I saw presented at last Tuesday’s Dell B2B Social Media Huddle was Erik Qualman’s (@equalman) Social Media Revolution (refresh).  Set to the tune of Fat Boy Slim’s Right Here, Right Now, this video gives a whole load of statistics (the sources for which may be found on Erik’s Socialnomics Social Media Blog):

For those who can’t see the video, here are the stats:

• Is Social Media a Fad?
  Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?
• Welcome to the revolution
• Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old
• 96% of Millennials have joined a social network
• Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the U.S.
• Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the Web
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. met via social media
• Years to reach 50 million users:
  • Radio 38 years
  • TV 13 years
  • Internet 4 years
  • iPod 3 years
• Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year
• iPod application downloads hit 1 billion in 9 months
• “We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it.” – Erik Qualman
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the world’s 3rd largest
  [behind China and India, ahead of the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh…]
  Yet QQ and Renren dominate China
• US Department of Education study revealed that online students out performed those reciving face-to-face instruction…
• 80% of companies use social media for recruitment
• % of those using LinkedIn…95%
• The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
• Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway, [or] Panama.
• 50% of mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook
  Imagine what this means for bad customer experiences
• Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé
• Some universities have stopped distributing e-mail accounts
  Instead they are distributing eReaders, iPads, Tablets
• What happens in Vegas stays on
  Facebook
  Twitter
  Renren
  Kohtakte
  Flickr
  YouTube
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world
• While you watch this [4′ 26″ video] 100+ hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube
• Wiki is an Hawaiian term = Quick
• Wikipedia has over 15 million articles
  Studies show it’s as accurate as Encyclopaedia Britannica
  78% of those articles are non-English
  If you were paid $1 for every article posted on Wikipedia you would earn $1712.32 per hour
• There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
• Word of mouth [leads to] World of mouth
• 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
• 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands
• Do you like what they are saying
  about your brand?
  You better…
• People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
• Only 14% trust advertisements
• Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• 90% of people skip ads via TiVo/DVR
• Kindle eBooks Outsold Paper Books on Christmas [2009]
• 24 of the 25 Largest Newspapers are Experiencing Record Declines in Circulation
• 60 million status updates happen on Facebook daily
• We no longer search for the news, the news finds us…
• We will no longer search for products and services
  they will find us via social media
• Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
• Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like Mad Men
  Listening first, selling second
• The ROI of Social Media is [that] Your Business Will Still Exist in 5 years
• Still think social media is a fad?
• Welcome to the World of Socialnomics
• Are You Ready?

The video is really an ad for Erik’s book (Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business) but those statistics are pretty compelling… so, do you still think Social Media is a fad?

Me neither.