Social Media is Bigger Than Online Porn; the Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution

Aug 17th, 2009 by Brett Greene

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Socialnomics has put together a video driving home the reality of how social media is fundamentally shifting how we communicate, connect and consume culture in the 21st century. Share it with anyone who tells you that social media is a fad, technology is isolating people rather than facilitating face-to-face meetings, or that Twitter is stupid.

One of the most significant shifts that social media is driving is the spirit of collaboration rather than competition in some business spaces and in intellectual property systems. These are both driving scalable innovations that will benefit everyone. What you don’t know won’t hurt you, but it will leave you in the dust as life moves forward with amazing changes.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
% of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
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 & brands
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 that can TiVo ads do
Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

The above statistics and “Social Media Revolution” video tell the story, social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Please feel free to share with any non-believers!

If you still don’t understand what social media is this will help:

Tags: bebo, facebook, industrial revolution, myspace, orkut, Social Media, social networking, socialnomics, technology, twitter, youtube

Posted in Advertising, Beliefs, Books, Consumerism, Influence, Marketing, Media, Politics, Social Media, Spin, Videos

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12988 Responses2009-08-17+13%3A43%3A53Brett+Greene to “Social Media is Bigger Than Online Porn; the Biggest Shift Since the Industrial Revolution”

on 17 Aug 2009 at 10:26 am1DawsonBridger

Hi there,

So I’m the guy who said that your blog post was hyperbole. While I admit that when I wrote that tweet I hadn’t yet looked at your post, I was reacting to the the main thrust of your tweet–that social media will change societ to an extent not seen since the industrial revolution.

I do generally agree that social media is more than a fad, and part of a longer-lasting trend. Social media has, and will probably continue to be, a widely adopted technology that lets people interact and share information in new and novel ways. What I reject, however, is the idea that social media will change our society to the same extent as the industrial revolution, which brough millions if not billions of people out of poverty, went on to lay the foundation for our current ‘technological age,’ as well as fuelled the over-production and consumption of goods which caused the current climate-change crisis. Those are big boots to fill!

What I see as the over-emphasis on the importance of social media reminds me of the book called “The End of History and the Last Man,” by Francis Fukuyama, where he said that democracy has defeated all its competition and represents the final stage of political evolution, to bastardize the entire thesis of his book. He has since (it was written in 1992, and generally disproven on Sept. 11th, 2001) been shown to be wrong, and is slightly apologetic about making such a crazy claim.

While radio, telephones, TV, and the internet, to take a few examples from the video you posted, HAVE had a large impact on the ways we relate to each other, how we consume, and the information we share, they are, at their base, just new ways to communicate/interact. It’s the outcome of these interactions that are truely revolutionary.

Also, my other concern is that social media may fall out of favour (slightly) if it is taken over by social marketers who turn it into a site solely for gurilla marketing campaigns, rather than a global meeting place. But I digress, the most troubling part of the whole argument about the importance of social media goes back to the fact that is a medium, and not, in itself, action.

To take formal education, as an example (I just finished 6 years of undergraduate and graduate education, so I have some expertise here), and go against the argument of the video, online work and social media connections are no replacement for face-to-face learning. While online courses are gaining in popularity (they’re cheaper to administer than real-life lectures), the value to students is usually lacking.

But I want to get back to my main point and argument here, regarding social media’s final impact on society. Think about the role that the Twitter played in the recent protests in Iran. Iranians who were taking part in protests against a government they believed rigged recent elections were tweeting information about the unfair elections, and their mistreatment at the hands of government authorities. While Twitter’s role did help to get knowledge about this cause out to the world, it was those people who were courageously protesting in the streets that made the story–Twitter just reported it.

True revolutions are not about changing the ways we interact, but the way our interactions change the world. At best social media will be a peripherial player to the next ‘industrial revolution’ we see as a global community. But at least it’ll be a great place to meet and disscuss those events!
on 17 Aug 2009 at 11:54 am2Brett Greene

Dawson, thanks so much for your well thought out comments. I understand how you see social media being less of a shift than the industrial revolution. At the same time, I can’t think of anything since the industrial revolution that will have as great an impact on how societies communicate, interact, collaborate and go about most of our daily tasks. It probably is a bit hyperbolic to state it in relation to the industrial revolution, but it’s not far off.

Marketing online will learn to be a two-way conversation with interested parties or it will not only be ineffective and innocuous, but will drive customers away & generate bad word of mouth. No matter how big a slice of the social media marketplace it takes, it can’t overtake the global meeting place aspects that you mention.

Social media is a medium that facilitates action and as a conduit it allows great things to happen that would otherwise not happen at all or would take much longer. I’ve had social media conversations with CEO’s, experts and teenagers that I wouldn’t have ever had access to, but who have significantly helped me with business and computer problems. Companies like Zappos, Comcast and Dell are shifting what’s possible with customer service and sales operations with social media strategies.

When you mention the face-to-face learning aspect it reminds me of how social media is looked at as a ‘versus’ proposition to IRL (in real life.) I disagree with the positioning of it replacing anything and see it as an ‘addition to’ IRL and how we’ve always gone about living. Personally, Twitter has facilitated more personal and professionally beneficial relationships for me than anything I’ve ever done. Most of those relationships started online and moved to IRL and now go on both online and offline, while many of them have remained only online and are still valuable.

In the Iranian example using Twitter, tweeting was an online action that protesters used to share their offline actions in ways that impacted millions of people who would have not known what was happening there. The revolution was both in individuals courageously protesting as well as in Twitter helping to change the world by giving online megaphones to the individuals which allowed them to reach millions of others.

I agree with you that we’re not there yet, but at this point it’s a significant player that may just yet become the next industrial revolution (in how powerfully it alters so many aspects of our lives) by what new actions it allows us to take and how magnified our efforts of influence can now be.
on 17 Aug 2009 at 12:29 pm3DawsonBridger

Hi again,

That’s a great rebuttal. I have to say I don’t find myself TOO far off your position, but there are some small but significant problems I have with the revolutionary nature of social media (I’m getting away from the direct reference to the industrial revolution, because as you’d probably agree, it’s hard to compare ‘epochal’ moments).

You said you can’t think of anything that has revolutionized communication to this extent since the industrial revolution, and I think you’re right (although how many times has THAT been said, with TV, the telephone, radio, email, etc.). I’ll give you that social media is different, allows for a greater democratization of communication, but that really it’s just a new, stronger form of previous iterations of mass communication.

I think it’s perhaps too easy to get caught up in the ’supremacy’ of social media, and blow it out of proportion. Now it’s always difficult at the beginning of a ‘revolution’ of this sort to see the long term implications, so we’re both looking into the crystal ball here a little bit, but I’m not sure that social media will play that large a role in changing our global culture. It will allow us a greater chance to interact, and who can know precisely what those interactions will create, but I’m not sure what role it will play as a ‘driver’ for those outcomes.

What we’re talking here is about causality, right? And I’m not sure if I’m totally comfortable saying that social media will be the driver for change you see it as. Part of the problem with this sort of technology is what we make of it, so perhaps this is my pesimistic side coming out. I worry about the marketers co-opting social media, as I mentioned, but also peoples’ general simplistic nature, and that there is the real concern that social media will mostly (obviously not entirely) just become a megaphone (to use your term) for peoples narcacism; a place to post photos of bar nights and beach-wear, plan parties, and waste time.

You say you have made great contacts through social media, and I don’t doubt that, but I think most (North American) people won’t be as efficient. I do think, however (as an International Development practioner), that there is greater potential in developing countries to truly make revolutionary use of this technology. So, and this is really just personal, but I will wait to see what others can make out of social media, before I put it on too high a pedestal.

And maybe then we’ll find out if the revolution will be–or won’t be– Twitterized, blogged, or Facebooked (all respect to Gil Scott Heron).
on 17 Aug 2009 at 12:33 pm4DawsonBridger

Oh, and by the way, I did really like your ‘in-addition to IRL’. I think I, and others, often overlook that important codicile. Social media IS in addition to real life interactions, and strengthen them. It’s no replacement. And I’ll remember that.
on 17 Aug 2009 at 12:51 pm5Brett Greene

Dawson, thanks for your additional comments. It’s helping me to stretch my thinking and I appreciate that.

In response to your pessimism about the marketing angle, I share that with you. I counter it for myself with (hopefully not blind) optimism that the obnoxious marketers will fade into the noise.

Since Twitter search is arguably the current leverage point for accurately influencing and targeting audiences, and since we can ‘unfollow’ people, I hope that marketers and others who authentically connect with audiences who value them will prevail in the signal.

The marketing spam on Twitter annoys me and I just block it out and focus on the conversations, people and companies that use social media responsibly like a good friend or neighbor.

Your views help me to not go too over the top. Since my loves are psychology, communication, relationships, marketing and technology I’m in heaven on social media and I’m not the typical user. I spend time with a lot of people from 20-70 years old to keep in touch with multiple perspectives, but my enthusiasm for social media can override good critical thinking sometimes.
on 20 Aug 2009 at 9:08 am6Brett Borders

Sometimes I think the “social media revolution” is over-hyped, but there is an undeniable shift in the way things are done – and the numbers you list make for a compelling argument.
on 24 Aug 2009 at 6:31 pm7brettgreene

Brett, "Bigger than online porn" says it all. LOL
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