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By Michael Neubarth
"To tell the truth, it's fast and fun but I wonder how we can all handle the incredible overload of information."- from "Tweet Tweet: Confessions of a Twittering Newbie" by Danny Schechter.
You may have noticed that a full-blown social media craze is upon us. In particular, a Twitter industry has sprung up seemingly overnight, including an avalanche of books and videos ("Six Twitter Video Tutorials!").
A cartoon in The New Yorker shows a man about to be executed by a firing squad. The captain offers the man a small handheld device like an iPhone and asks, "Last tweet?"
Indeed, the news media is stoking the phenomenon with a steady stream of clips, reports, and studies about who is using social media, the mores of social media, tales and foibles of social media, and new milestones of social media. Everywhere you turn, it seems, social media pundits and mavens are offering tips, opinions, and services.
As The New York Times reports, "The position of social media specialist, introduced by companies like Comcast, General Motors, and JetBlue Airways, has become the hottest new corporate job among the Twitteratti."
Business Boom
As the popularity of social media skyrockets, a new study by Josh Gordon of Sales 2.0 shows that business use of social media is surging as well. A shift is occurring in the way businesses want to use social media-with the pendulum swinging from public relations and brand image building to sales and customer prospecting.
While the top four social media services used by businesses are LinkedIn (79.3% use it), Facebook (77.2%), Twitter (75.3% ), and miscellaneous blogs (68%), it is Twitter that has been garnering the most attention. And with good reason. Twitter's growth in size and mindshare has been astronomical.
HubSpot, which regularly surveys Twitter and releases a "State of the Twittersphere" report, found that while Twitter was growing at a rate of 5,000 to 10,000 new users per day in 2008, the growth is now so large that "it has reached a point where it is futile to attempt to generate a flat growth rate number." The graph goes almost straight up.
The latest surveys show Twitter has grown from four million users in 2008 to 32 million users today. A survey by Sysomos Inc. shows that 72.5% of the Twitter users joined during the first five months of 2009.
"Wow! Boy, Twitter has grown. A year ago Twitter was a relatively small community of techies and web 2.0 geeks, now it is going mainstream," reported HubSpot in "State of the Twittersphere" for 4Q 2008.
Join the Crowd
As the popularity of social media has soared, organizations large and small have been scurrying to jump onboard and make the social media scene. This represents a turnabout in attitude by businesses.
As Gordon says, "It was not long ago that many organizations discouraged employees from visiting social media sites, with many of them blocking access to sites outright." Today, more organizations encourage the use of social media than discourage it. Gordon's findings show that "41.2% of businesses now have employees whose job function includes spending time on social media sites, while only 9% of companies is blocking internal access for employees."
In his study, called "The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications," Gordon surveyed 632 social media professionals who are members of the Social Media Today online community, collecting the data between March 13, 2009, and April 4, 2009.
The study found that while more companies are engaging in social media, relatively few companies have imposed guidelines and restrictions on the use of social media, "Whereas 41.9% of organizations report that they have no corporate policy of any kind regarding social media, 21.8% report having a formal policy for employees who want to blog."
The New York Times caused a stir in the blogosphere recently when it appointed Jennifer Preston as its first Social Media Editor. "It has come to this; the flagship institution of traditional journalism now has an editor level position dedicated to new media," wrote Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb. "How's this for a dream job? America's paper of record has reassigned one of its editors to be the in-house expert on Facebook and Twitter," wrote Paul Boutin on DigitalBeat.
Just before Preston's appointment, The New York Times imposed new social media rules for its staff following a Twitter incident in which sensitive information was transmitted to the world via a stream of Tweets during a newsroom strategy meeting.
Other news outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, also have instituted new policies governing social media use. In disclosing a leaked copy of The Wall Street Journal's new rules for social media, the gossip blog Gawker posted humorous side-by-side examples of reporters who have transgressed the official rules in their Tweets.
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