It is an interesting time for social media.  Fifteen years ago bulletin boards and  forums were the only platforms available.  Three to five years ago blogs, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook were carving out a niche.  This week Google announced Buzz which was added to the internet social landscape along with Twitter, Side Wiki, Wave, SlideShare, Vidler, Vimeo, UStream, Ning, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed, etc.

The entire web is getting more social by the second and user generated content is king.

Social media is still looked at as a fad by some, a necessary business tool with unproven value by others and a deeper way to discover great people to have great relationships with by millions.  Marketers and PR folks are racing to figure out how to use the tools, but are mostly using old school tactics and ignoring the strategy needed for long term gains.

A handful of companies are actually using social media to authentically deliver better customer service, listen to people and make their businesses and bottom lines better.  A mountain of critics who don’t use or understand social media are still ignorantly claiming that it’s stupid because it’s just people announcing when they go to the bathroom.  (Note to self  – don’t criticize what I don’t understand.  And definitely don’t do it as if I have a clue about what I’m talking about or I’ll look like an idiot.)

The revolution in communication is being ignored while the focus is on the revolutionary technology.  After the mainstream called social media stupid for five years, the pendulum swung to claiming that it’s the new great hope for advertising, marketing and PR.  Now we are now making our way to the middle.  This is where we start to realize that daily use of social media is like daily use of a cell phone or a car.  It’s just part of how we live today.

Websites have become media properties (which most have not realized yet), publishing is  now dominated by individual passionate influencers, and social media is lubricating a massive transition from top dogs having power to passionate participants creating what matters to the public.

In five years the term social media may fade away because we’ll wake up to realize that: 1.People are inherently social (well over 75% of your day is spent communicating with other people), and 2.  All media has become social (even CNN and newspapers use blogs, Twitter, etc. to connect with viewers and readers).

Calling media ‘social media’ is like calling water ‘wet water’.  The more you use it, the more you’ll live it and the more connected, tuned in and turned on you’ll be.

I just read a London Telegraph article mistitled “The Social Media Revolution is Going Nowhere.” It included statements like

No wonder the company has yet to make any money, while Facebook, too, has yet to deliver on its financial potential. None of this is to say, of course, that the internet hasn’t had a profound impact on individuals, companies and interactivity – but the fact that typical Twitter users are older than initially believed means that businesses will need to rethink how they use it.

I wrote the following comment to the article and felt it was worth reposting here:

The trouble with this, and so many other articles on Twitter, is that it’s a myopic view. There are so many different valuable ways that social media is being used and opening previously closed doors of connection and collaboration.

Have you watched the latest viral video on what’s happening right now with social media? http://bit.ly/11gDZC

Yes, 40% or more of what’s on Twitter is babble. So follow people who provide the signal you want and unfollow the noise. Isn’t what traditional media gives us arguably 40% or more babble and nonsense? That’s part of why more people choose not to give so much time to traditional media. If you don’t choose your friends and co-workers wisely isn’t 40% of what they talk about just babble? When humans communicate it’s never 100% valuable content.

As far as the ‘tips’ at the end of the article, they’re in the same vein of all ‘tips’ given for social media. They all boil down to ‘don’t be an idiot and use online communication and relationships with the same common sense way you handle your offline relationships.’ ‘Duh.’

Something people miss a lot in trying to cover this space is that it’s a ‘both/and’ proposition to traditional media and offline communication tools. It’s not ‘either the old way or the new way.’ There are times where each is helpful and they compliment each other like allopathic medicine and alternative medicine.

The perspective that social media has to be judged as better or worse than other ways of connecting is a false starting point that leads to more false opinions based on limited information and even less experience using the tools.

I’m guessing that the author of the article and the authors of the negative comments are not daily social media users. When you’re using these tools regularly you tap into their worth and understand as well experience the personal and professional benefits of using social media.

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stats from Video (sources listed below by corresponding #)

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. 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.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. 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
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

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

Click here to view the embedded video.