NPSC Blog

A lot of the (offline) feedback I have been getting about this blog has been along the lines of, “why are you so obsessed with social media?” And it is a fair question. There are plenty of other areas of public affairs that I could post about that would probably be of more interest to many public sector communicators, but I focus on social media for two reasons. One, because most of the other areas are already pretty comprehensively covered elsewhere, and two because – given our collective understanding of social media and its phenomenal growth – we have quite a bit of ground to make up.

So let’s take a look at the growth of social media, and see if we can draw some conclusions about how it is shaping our work environment now, and what it may be like in the next couple of years.

When Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp purchased Myspace in 2005 (for US$580m) the site was seeing 14 million unique visitors a month. At the time he remarked, rather presciently,

We’re looking at the ultimate opportunity… the Internet is media’s golden age.
Wired

In May 2006, there were 51 million unique visitors to the site. Shortly thereafter, in a controversial post (the methodology has been likened to apples and oranges) Hitwise declared Myspace to be in #1 position for all Internet sites.

Setting aside the premature announcement of Myspace’s ascendancy, what is clear is that social networking sites are enjoying a huge swell in membership and are exerting considerable influence in how people interact and shop on the ‘net.

In fact, if you look at the combined total of unique visitors to social networking sites, the numbers per month are around 80 million, and that the ages of these visitors is shifting, with more than 50% of visitors to Myspace now 35 or older.

Social networking has become so popular that recent statistics released by Hitwise show that this year (if it hasn’t already happened) social networks will overtake adult sites as the most heavily trafficked in the US.

Even if you accept the notion that a lot of the adult traffic is now peer2peer and as such is not tracked by Hitwise et al, this still marks a watershed moment in media and in the Internet specifically.

And this is just the social networking sites. It doesn’t include blogs (70 million and 120,000 being created every day), or wikis or the other giant presence in this space, YouTube and other video sites: in July 2006, YouTube served 100 million videos per day to over 63 million unique visitors.

What does this mean?

I think we can safely draw a couple of conclusions from these figures, even if the methodology is a little suspect. First, this is about a social and cultural change. Yes, the catalyst is technology, but to continue to disregard the overwhelming evidence, and influence, of the growth of social media would be foolish.

Second, this rate of growth is only going to increase. This isn’t a passing fad, it is an evolutionary leap in the way people are communicating with each other. One way or another, all of us are going to have to confront, engage and understand what social media means for us and our agencies.

The Digg Revolution

By way of an example of the power of social media to give people an avenue to share their interests and passions, read this Read/Write Web post on the events last week on Digg. It is a salutary reminder of how quickly the media landscape is changing.

Photo: Claudecf