What is the current maturity of social media?

Grant Leboff:  David is the co-author of “The Business of Being Social”, and when you open the book the first thing that strikes you, or struck me in any case, is that your opening is called ‘welcome to the social media age’ and I think that resonated with me because we’re in a time now were social media is really starting to come of age. So I just wanted you to expand on your views of where we are now and the maturity of social media.

David Taylor:  I think Linkedin is the eldest, its ten years old, it’s had its tenth anniversary. The youngest major one is Google+, but there’s ‘Vine’ (www.vine.com) which is obviously coming online. There’s ‘Keek’ (www.keek.com). There’s new social media sites coming online all the time.

I think over the last ten years the technology and the accessibility of mass media has changed and people are now getting used to the fact that people can say anything, anytime, anywhere, and from a mobile device. And I think that is probably a key thing. When we’re talking about the social media age arriving, it’s really the advent of 3G and universal access of Wi-Fi. Now it’s almost accepted as much as the air we breathe and the water we drink, that we have our Wi-Fi or we have internet access, so internet access is universal from mobile devices and mobile devices.

You’re not on the social networks, you’re in them.

So you don’t have to go to a computer, switch the computer on, go to a website, and log into that social website. You’re in it, you’re in it all the time. So if someone messages you, or tweets you, or says something on your page – you know – and that universality, and the fact that something like Facebook is no – I believe; 40% of the world’s global population is on  the one site, Facebook – so 1.1 billion people, are now on this site, that is an enormous amount of the world’s population and really, what it’s doing, is its throwing up all sorts of potentials, challenges, all sorts of new ways of doing business, new ways of communicating and, I would say, unfortunately there is a time lag.

The technology has moved so fast that people haven’t really quite caught up and they don’t really get this central point which is, I call it, the democratisation of the means of broadcasting. You don’t need the BBC, or a local newspaper, or The Times to broadcast what you want to say, you do it yourself whenever you want, and if you’ve got a platform you can use it, and people haven’t really grasped that because it’s got so many implications. And that, in a nutshell, is the social media age.

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