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How Social Web Platforms Are Replacing Email
Welcome to what I call the Facebook and iPhone and Twitter era. Just a few quick stats for you: Over 300 million people on Facebook, up 153% from last year. But not only are they signing up they are logging in. In fact people are spending over 8 billion minutes a day on Facebook. That's an incredible amount of time and whatever business we're in whatever role or function we may play we need to be where our audience is. We need to communicate through the channels preferred by those audiences whether it's internal audiences with our employees or external audiences with our training and services partners or our customers.
Twitter and iPhone show similar spectacular growth. 58 million users on Twitter today and nearly the same amount on the iPhone and so the question is, is email dead?
I spoke with a lot of younger people in college and high school in researching while I was writing the Facebook Era and I was astonished to learn that many university students say just don't use email. They'll use email occasionally to communicate with their parents, or professor, prospective employer, other so called adults but with each other they're using Facebook, Facebook wall posts, Facebook messages and they're using SMS and that has real profound implications for how we as organization leaders communicate whether it's to recruit someone or market or sell to someone so on and so forth.
But it's not just a snapshot in time this growth has been going on for the last 5 years. It's really incredible to watch. You can see these picture you know story book hockey stick graphs for both Facebook since it started on the left as well as the iPhone and iTouch subscribers on the right. So it's incredible momentum being led in a social space by companies like Facebook and being led in the mobile space by companies like Apple with the iPhone.
But although in 2007, in May 2007 when I was in Hong Gong Facebook was largely a college student site that's no longer the case. I mean certainly you can see on the graph on the right that young people between the ages of 18 and 25 still comprise the largest group 29% but you'll see that the group 26 and 34 isn't far behind and the fastest growing group is actually people between the ages of 35 and 49 and surprisingly the second fastest growing group are women over the age of 55.
This is really significant because all of us in technology know that this group of older women traditionally was extremely hard to reach. The older women 55 and older they were technophobes, in general people like your mothers and grandmothers they generally did not sign up for technology services as soon as they came up but they are signing up in mass for the iPhone and they are signing up in mass for Facebook and so it really goes back to what the previous panel talked about which is that social media enables us to be people centric rather than technology centric and it makes these technologies approachable and feel like they're part of everyday normal human interaction.
And so as a result CXOs are responding, CMOs are responding, CIOs are responding, CEOs are taking the lead and in a time when we are being cautious about the economic recovery and slow to expand our budgets again we still see budgets staying the same or shrinking in some cases but the 1 area that is growing for people is social media and that's where people are a lot of executives are investing their time and money.
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