Forces of Change

Technology

The major change in technology in the last several years has been the rise of social networking.

Forrester says, “Social technologies continue to grow substantially in 2009. Now more than four in five US online adults use social media at least once a month, and half participate in social networks like Facebook. While young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of social applications, the most rapid growth occurred among consumers 35 and older.

This means the time to build social marketing applications is now. Interactive marketers should influence social network chatter, master social communication, and develop social assets — even if their customers are older.”

Daniel Nations sums it up this way: “The social web represents a fundamental change in how we use the Internet. Instead of using it as a tool to look up information or purchase merchandise online, we are inserting ourselves into the web and using it to connect with other people.

“This change has had a far reaching effect that has touched a number of different areas from the use of social networks to create our own special place on the web to the use of wikis to collaborate and create a global collective intelligence and repository of knowledge.

“Think about this: Wikipedia is many times larger than the full set of Encyclopedia Britannica books, is completely free, and according to a 2005 study by Nature, is just as accurate. This demonstrates the power of the social web.”