Social Media Revolution
The other day I was in my Marketing 300 class and in between deciding what I was going to have for lunch and determining how long it had been since the boy next to me had last showered, my professor caught my attention. My Professor had attended a social media marketing conference the previous weekend and was excited to share some of the highlights with us. She loaded up YouTube (how else are you going to teach college students these days?) and shared with us a slightly disturbing video.
The video was called 'Social Media Revolution' and demonstrated just how important the social media was becoming in our lives. Now this should not come as a shocker to anyone, however, the statistics and alarming rate and velocity at which the social media is expanding did alarm me. Social media is being used for everything these days, job-hunting, socializing, romanticizing, education... and while most of us could see this coming, I don't think most people realize just how important this new social media revolution actually is. The video showed that 78% of people trust their peer's recommendations, while only 14% trust advertisements.
This got me thinking as to how marketing is going to change with this new revolution? It will no longer be about getting the best ad space, but how well social media is utilized to get the product known. You only have to piss off one person to get a bad name for your product. There are 60 million status updates a day on Facebook and these could be containing the positive or negative messages associated with your brand. I know that I have posted a few statuses myself concerning products that I was unpleased with (most of them we ordered off infomercials, so I guess that could just be my fault.) I have also avoided certain establishments because my friends told me how terrible the service was. It is all about getting the message of your product into the right hands, the hands of the most influential people, the hands of the children of the social media revolution.
I highly recommend taking a few minutes to watch this video (it has Fatboy Slim playing in the background so it is well worth your time.) Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng&feature=related and let us know what you think of the social media revolution!
