Social Relevance

I recently found myself at a career fair in Detroit. While there, I visited nearly all of the booths that were looking to hire. I honestly could not believe my ears as I walked away from just about every booth.
1) The majority of those companies were just looking for poor schmucks to work commission-only and sell insurance or products no one wanted.
2) When I asked if they were looking to hire anyone for social media marketing all but two or three told me the same thing: "we don't really do any of that."
WHAT?!
I thought it was some sort of bad joke until I realized these people were dead serious.
Social media has overtaken pornography as the number one activity on the web (there's room for plenty of jokes there).
1 in 8 couples married in this country met via social media...that number is only expected to grow.
Many people dismiss social media as a fad, saying it won't last. They couldn't be more wrong.
The growing importance of social media is simply staggering. The fastest demographic on Facebook is women approx. aged 55-62. If Facebook were a country, in terms of population it would be the third largest on the planet! Let's look at the number of years it took various media to reach 50 million users shall we?
Radio: 38 years
TV: 13 years
Internet: 4 years
Ipod: 3 years
Facebook: 200 Million users in less than ONE YEAR.
THAT'S JUST FACEBOOK FOLKS!
Social media is allowing word of mouth to reign supreme once more. If someone is not happy with an experience or a product they will open up about it. If you're reading this and saying "what can one person do?" The answer is a hell of a lot.
A recent survey showed 78% of people trust peer recommendations. A mere 14% said they trust advertisements. How ya like them apples?
Think of all of the friends or followers one person may have on Facebook or Twitter. One good---or bad experience could translate into thousands of people hearing about it.
If we're to expand our business we MUST listen to what other people are saying and we must have a conversation with them. Use the blogosphere and sites like Technorati and Digg to find out what's being said about your company. For the most part, people will still be more apt to positively talk about an experience or product instead of being negative. Use that to your advantage!
I'm still very much a PR and social media marketing newb (yup, just said newb), but back when I started really getting into social media I could visit a Barnes & Noble or a Borders and see just a few books on the topic. Now? Now I go and see entire shelves dedicated to the subject. That tells me there's more and more people are joining this new form of communication and talking about their experiences on the web. It seems that as a company or organization you can either join the conversation now and take advantage of this growing---and normally cheap opportunity to engage customers, or you can play catch up to your competitors down the road and lose out on customers now.
I think the right

GK

(All facts and numbers used are from the Socialnomics Youtube video posted here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng)