According to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ video from Socialnomics, 96% of Generation Y or Millennials (born between 1980 and 2000 or thereabouts) are part of an online social network and yet the fastest growing segment of Facebook is females aged 55-65 years old.

Ashton Kutcher and Britney Spears have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Sweden, Israel, Switzerland, Ireland, Norway and Panama, and half the mobile internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old and email is considered old technology by a significant number of them.

We are connecting, communicating and revealing personal and professional details about ourselves more openly than ever before. In the time it takes to read this post around 50 hours of video will be uploaded to YouTube, the world’s second largest search engine.

We tap out information about ourselves at the stroke of a key and yet rarely think about the damage that can be caused to our reputation, both online and off, by posting careless remarks and images.

Even if we don’t write the words ourselves, others are writing about us, and in this digital age of instant upload it’s worth remembering that the camera is always rolling, the microphone is always on, and there’s no such thing as ‘off-the-record’.

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New Year resolutions happen every year, but predictions generally only occur at the turn of a decade. Knowing what might happen before it actually occurs would certainly be handy.

If we could predict what might happen it would certainly give us a competitive edge.  We could be ‘one-step-ahead-of-the-game’, give us an opportunity to maximise every opportunity and put all our efforts into those things likely to generate the greatest reward – whatever we might want that to be.

Moving from the ‘noughties’ to the teen years of the 21st Century  gives us a opportunity, not only to look back on what happend between 2000 and 2009 – think iTunes, the social media explosion and wireless internet – but also to look ahead and predict what might happen during 2010 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Think social media doesn’t matter to you, your business or your reputation? Think again!  Socialnomics’ ‘Social Media Revolution’ clip on YouTube is doing an excellent job of showing how important social media is, and will continue to be, to all of us – both as consumers and product and service providers.

There are currently more than 200 million blogs with 54 percent bloggers posting content or tweeting daily.  Around 34 percent of these bloggers are posting opinions about products and brands online. What might they be saying about you?

It’s worth giving it some thought as around 78 percent of consumers trust peer recommendations, but only 14 percent trust advertisements.  I wonder why?!

Now, you might think ‘all this web stuff’s not for me’ and you may be right. But celebrities Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres currently have more followers on Twitter than the entire population of Ireland, Norway and Panama. Read the rest of this entry »

Why is it that ghost-writing of a book is deemed acceptable but ghost-blogging or ghost-twittering isn’t?

Maybe it’s to do with the fact that many people might accept that some level of skill is required to actually write a book, whereas composing a 150 word blog post or 140 character tweet can be done ‘off the cuff’, so to speak.

Whether this is true or not, many of us prefer not to be deliberately deceived. Being ‘time-poor’ is no excuse.

Far better to be up-front and open about who exactly is tweeting or blogging under a specific identity than try and hide behind ghost-bloggers or tweeters.

Head of marketing at the University of Otago, Associate Professor Ken Deans, noted in a recent New Zealand Herald article that he believed ghost-tweeting was unethical.

“It’s about trust and mistrust. If someone else is writing for the CEO, that’s unacceptable.”

One Tweeter who’s clear about their identity, and who’s tweeting on their behalf, is New Zealand Prime Minister John Key (johnkeypm). Tweets placed by staff are prefaced by ‘via staff:’

Does this make the information any less readable? No. It simply means the reader knows who’s placed it and ensures Key is not caught out by curly questions that might arise as a result.

So if you’re tempted to blog or tweet using a ghost-writer, be mindful that not being open and honest in your communications could back-fire big time, and instead of building trust and creating valuable conversations you could find yourself distrusted and branded a fake.