Your business needs to be social now – not some day

Today, consumers want more than content online, they want to make a human connection. This means it’s no longer enough to push your product information out to your consumers. Today’s geo-located, email checking, text messaging, status updating, smartphone toting, trigger happy ‘social consumers’ are ready to engage with you. i.e. if you are ready to engage with them.

A recent study about small to medium sized organisations showed that 44% of entrepreneurs were using social media to attract new customers (35% Facebook, 15% LinkedIn, 10% Twitter, 8% blog, 8% YouTube).  For overall marketing strategy, the top strategies were company website, search engine optimization and online social networking.

The above makes sense when you consider the following stats:

1. Over 500 million global users are active on Facebook every month
2. People spend over 500 billion minutes per month on Facebook
3. More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day
4. More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared each week
5. During the second half of 2010, LinkedIn’s membership base grew, on average, by 1 million new members every ten days
6. Registered users of LinkedIn grew from 55 million at the end of 2009 to 90 million at the end of 2010. Page views grew from 2.8 billion to 5.5 billion
7. LinkedIn Today delivers a customised online newspaper that is assembled by algorithms, rather than journalists
8. Twitter is the fastest growing social networking site on the internet, with north of 110 million registered users
9. New users are signing up at the rate of over 300,000 per day
10. 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month
11. Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API
12. Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day
13. Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day
14. Of Twitter’s active users, 37 percent use their phone to tweet
15. 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (i.e. via third party applications.)

As if the above is not enough, this is just in.

Pepsi has introduced a ‘Social Vending System’, a networked vending machine with large full-touch screen designed to enable consumers to connect with Pepsi brands (and one another) at the point of purchase.

Novel features of the system include provisions for a patron to ‘gift’ a friend by selecting a beverage, then entering the recipient’s name, mobile phone number and a personal text message and, if desired, a short video recorded at the machine.

The gift is delivered with a system code and instructions for redeeming it at any PepsiCo social vender. The recipient may thank the original sender by dispatching a gift in return, or ‘pay it forward’ by presenting a beverage to someone else. The machines are equipped for remote monitoring, giving operators the ability to manage inventory levels and schedule deliveries remotely. Digital content also can be updated online, allowing easy changing of messages and media content.

This certainly gives KISS a new definition, Keep It Social Silly.

Send your comments to sharad@cyber-gear.com