Quick! Guess how many of the world’s young people live in developing countries? According to the World Bank, over 90% of the world’s young people, a group between age 15 to 24, estimated to be 1.2 Billion live in the developing world. And almost 27% of this group live in South Asia, followed by 17% in East Asia.
But, the World Bank is wrong! An overwhelming percentage of this same population lives on Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Twitter, and behind the Great Wall of China on QZone, Sina/Tencent Weibo, and WeChat. Young people across the world are united in their use of social media, preferably over mobiles and smartphones, and there’s more about it in this excellent piece on Mobile Marketing in India.
And now with Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder, acquiring Washington Post, the editorial story gets digital wings. It’s no longer going to be about “like’ing pictures of a pet, laughing at pictographic jokes on Timelines, or commenting and sharing food, travel and fashion tips on Facebook. With over a 100 Million active users a month, and a billion users globally, Facebook is no longer a social network, it’s a world in itself and perhaps, as large as the group the World Bank study highlights.
Twitter has gone from people chatting with complete strangers and discovering serendipity as well as traffic updates, to the channel that is breaking all other breaking news channels. TV, print reporters are discovering more news tips and leads there even as the overall discourse is still guided by fans of Music, and Filmstars, a few sportspersons, and authors.
Indulging in the Rahul-Modi debate, or amassing opinion in favor of Durga Shakti, social media is constantly changing the level at which people interact. Be it the excitement around the birth of Britain’s royal baby or the cynicism around Shahrukh Khan’s surrogate child, we are missing critical signals, thanks to the #hashtag noise in the space. In the madness and the clutter, everyone in the world is desperately trying to be heard better and more. There is a method to this madness, and understanding that method will ensure that meaningful communication happens.
At Digiqom, we have been enabling this remarkable progress in helping the world communicate better. Our understanding is that Person to Person sharing, which underlies social media, is disrupting traditional top-down approaches and bringing in new understanding through crowd sourcing activities and big data analytics.
Some of these design principles come into play while studying the firehose of BIG data that is social media. Defining the filters to distill signal from noise, and then bringing in those insights when we design campaigns for our clients, is something we are constantly engaged with. We love it when these projects demonstrate a paradigm shift to our clients; from Adspace Burn to Earn, from impressions to expressions, from likes, tweets, comments, shares, to footfalls, sign-ups, and revenues. Yes! We are delighted to see eyes light up at the A-HA moment. We’re delighted to be pushing the envelope, that we call Community-powered Commerce.
And while we have been sharing a lot of micro-updates with you on Facebook and Twitter, we want to talk to you more about what’s happening around us in the VUCA world we live in and listen to what’s keeping you hooked on. Here’s one more step from us to help you stay at the center of all the action – an informed digital community of peers. Presenting to you the Qommunique, our monthly inter-active newsletter for sharing interesting stories about the world, from inside and outside Digiqom.
I would love to get your feedback on this issue, and what you would like to see here in the forthcoming ones. Subscribe here.