End of Business Business as Usual – Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed – A Brief Summary
In The End of Business as Usual, author Brian Sola explains the sea change in business caused by the advent of social media, Sola represents a huge challenge for those of us who have yet to join the Facebook, Twitter revolution. and Linked-in. He caught my attention with the statement that 65% of the millennial generation born between the mid-1970s and late-1990s are offline while awake. less than an hour a day! Less than that “creates an eerie sense of disconnection.”
Taking Seth Godin’s permission marketing concept even further, Sola asserts that it’s not about companies connecting with customers, it’s about customers deciding if they want to connect with the company now and over time. The Internet explosion required successful email marketers to win your reader’s permission through the recipient’s subscription agreement to receive the ad; a far cry from the intrusive and aggressive Madison Ave-type advertising classically seen on television. Over the past ten years, we have learned how to integrate permit marketing into our offerings and our general marketing campaigns. And we found that we were adaptable and willing to change.
Guess what? It is time for more changes if we want to compete in the 21st century. Here’s why.
The Millennial buyer is not only interested in giving permission to the companies they want to know about: they wait partner with them, says Sola, more than a simple business relationship, these younger buyers expect What the company with which they do business so that they can share and publish their shopping experiences with their friends and networks, estimated at an average of 130 for each Facebook user. When they have a problem, they are not interested in dealing with their customer service departments, they expect to hear from someone at the top. Ranging in age from 17 to 32 in 2012, this group included 25% of the online shopping population. .
In both 2010 and 2011, Facebook overtook Google as the top search term – people are increasingly interested in other people and their relationships. The results?
Americans look for our information from different sources. Television viewers are declining, subscriptions to traditional newspapers fell 9% in 2010, even more in recent years. The combined subscribers of the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, and USA Today have fewer than 5 million subscribers, while Facebook is home to more than 750 million residents and more than 200 million people use Twitter as their primary mode of communication. Interestingly, the isolation predicted by increased Internet use during the 1990s does not appear to hold into the 21st century: Pollsters find that more than 50 percent of respondents feel more connected now than before the rise of social media. The increased sense of “connectedness” is apparently more than a virtual phenomenon.
In 2008, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced a formula later known as “Zuckerberg’s Law” when he explained that social media is simply about connecting with people we know and predicted that with each passing year, people will share the double the information. Think about that for a moment; a doubling of the information shared every year. According to Nielson, Americans in 2011 spent a quarter of their waking hours online and Facebook measures more than 700 billion minutes per month spent “Facebooking.”
These numbers are staggering, and the marketing implications are profound for those whose products are shared, liked, and published.
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