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content has been around for millennia. The first evidence of social media was the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave paintings in the Ardèche department of southern France. They date back to 30,000 BC. We’re talking Upper Paleolithic era here. Those paintings were people connecting and communicating with other people. Twitter on a sandy wall.
That’s all social media is. The medium has merely changed—from prehistoric paint to present-day posts. The difference is the speed and scope of the communication. Cave paintings reached some, social media reaches all.
Humans have waited a long, long time for this. For thousands of years the church controlled the message, followed by the printing press, then the mainstream media. For the first time in human history, you control the message. These tools of social media—YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs—give you a louder and stronger voice than you’ve ever had. Reflect on that for a moment. Consider how fortunate we are to be alive at this time, empowered by these tools.
Social media is here to stay because people will never give up that power. It’s no dot-com bubble. It’s freedom and democracy. We’ve seen governments try to quell this people-powered movement. It never works. Ladies and gentlemen, the genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in.
Let’s talk about business for a moment, as that is a primary focus of this book. What an historic, enthralling time to be in business! We are in the midst of one of the most seismic shifts since the Industrial Revolution. If I told you ten years ago that technologies would one day exist to allow you to listen to past, current, and future customers in real-time; to let you reach millions of people with your content without having to go through gatekeepers like publishers; to foster lasting relationships with influential figures; or to build a thriving business using a worldwide video platform, with enterprise-level analytics, that would cost you nothing but your time, you would have thought I was an inveterate liar, a quixotic dreamer—or both.
You are empowered with an array of jaw-dropping technologies that enable you to be heard on an unprecedented scale. They’re easy to use and they’re right at your fingertips.
How you use this power is up to you. You can connect with people you would never have the opportunity to meet; you can drive your business to great heights; you can raise awareness and money for a charity dear to your heart; you can even parlay your passion into a viable business. The playing field is more level than ever. We all have access to the very platforms that powered Barack Obama to the White House in 2008. Imagine that.
Social media is now the #1 online activity with almost one billion people taking part. Those numbers are rising at a jaw-dropping rate. In a span of three years, social media has brought together one in six humans on Earth. That figure includes the roughly one billion people who don’t even have an Internet connection yet.
To reach 50 million users, it took:
Radio: 38 years
TV: 13 years
Internet: 4 years
The iPod: 3 years
Facebook recently added 200 million users in less than one year. Marinate on that for a moment. That’s roughly 385 new sign-ups…every minute.
Social media is no small movement. It has already permanently and profoundly altered the way we connect, communicate and consume content. It is the fastest growing form of communication in human history.
If it were a country, Facebook would be the world’s third largest, with a “population” of almost 800 million. Approximately 300,000 people join Twitter—every day. YouTube serves over three billion videos daily, with more content uploaded in one month than the three major U.S. TV networks created in sixty years. Like the Big Bang Theory, and the expansion of the universe, social media is “banging out” at an accelerative rate. In other words, it has been growing faster, faster.
Social media is a human-powered movement, both in style and substance. The very forces that drive us as humans drive social media. After Abraham Mazlow’s two foundational levels of “physiological” (breathing, food and water) and “safety” (of body, family and health), our most fundamental needs are “love/belonging” (friendship and family) and “esteem” (self-esteem and respect from others). The needs to connect, belong and be heard are primal ones. In this way, social media satisfies our very soul.
That’s where we are. But, how did we get here? Was it more of an evolution—or a revolution? It was both, really. Social media as we know it today has been around for several years now, but a few events tipped it.
The first social president
In 2004, most Americans hadn’t heard the name “Barack Obama.” Yet within a span of four years the man would become the most powerful person on the planet. In. Four. Years.
How did he do it?
Barack Obama has a gift for soaring oratory; few can deny that. But Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google Website Optimizer helped take him from eloquent senator to President of the United States. Barack Obama rode the wave of social media from Illinois to Washington.
There was a time in the Democratic presidential primary when Obama wasn’t even factoring in the top three candidates. Slowly but surely he climbed his way into contention with Hillary Clinton, who still maintained a double-digit lead with months to go before the Democratic nomination. Few experts gave Obama a chance. After all, he was a relative unknown up against one of the most well-oiled, well-funded and well-entrenched political machines in generations.
Obama and his team not only caught Clinton but they proceeded to utterly outfox that political machine, and Obama became the Democratic nominee for president.
During his campaign for president, Obama shifted into high gear with social media. While John McCain and Sarah Palin stuck to the tried-and-true tactics of raising money and garnering support—and derided Obama for being a “community organizer”—Obama and his team were getting busy. They were generating millions of views on YouTube; creating a horde of fiercely loyal supporters on Twitter; bursting Facebook at the seams with too many “fans” (Facebook had to re-write code to accommodate it); and using advanced methods like multivariate testing on Google Website Optimizer to hone his website into a money-making juggernaut. In September 2008, within 24 hours of Palin mocking Obama, his campaign reportedly raised $10 million.
Obama won the presidency because he built a colossal campaign fund, and he activated an army of advocates that cut across all segments of society. His theory that digital connections were in fact real ones was right. He put it to the people, and they carried him to victory. Barack Obama’s mastery of public address—and his masterful use of social media—powered him to the presidency.
This is one of the key points in this book: Obama put it to the people, and they carried him to victory. Alone, you can only do so much. Win the hearts of your customers, inspire them to get behind you—and you can make movements.
Mumbai
In November 2008, as gunmen and police engaged in a shocking three-day battle in Mumbai that left more than 100 dead, social media sites were crackling with news, rumors and pictures of the mayhem. Mainstream media outlets fell over themselves trying to catch up with social media’s coverage of the attacks—but Twitter users moved at the “speed of social,” tagging posts with information and commentary on the crisis, transforming a platform normally used to connect with friends into a real-time, human-powered news network.
While the mainstream media was saying, “We’re coming! We’ve got this,” the people were saying, “We’re here. We’re already getting this.” No organization or industry, however powerful or pervasive, can compete with humanity. The new generation of smartphones is transforming people into live