Speaker for January 7 – Karl Keller
Karl Keller brought today’s program on “Social Networking for Fun and Profit.”
What’s this about Twitter, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn? Karl began with a review – the Internet is just 40 years old, and has 1.7 billion users. Every day, people look at 30 billion web pages on the Internet.
Social networking is beginning to take over from email volume. Twitter and Facebook are giving us something new. We’re in a profound change in the way we communicate. Karls’ advice for using these tools: be careful what you say and how you say it, and check it over before you send. Finally, watch out for that “send all” button.
Facebook has about 350 million users and the average user spends 55 minutes per day on it. Twitter has about 18 million users, spending on average 19 minutes per day on it. About 60% of new Twitter users quit within the first month. LinkedIn is business oriented and has about 50 million users. Each of these sites is similar, but generally used for different purposes. Twitter is a “real time” posting of short messages (140 characters max). This type of social networking is, or can be, two-way.
One-way communications include Blogs (short for web-logs), which are one person’s self-published writings on any subject. Youtube is an Internet site where videos can be found on almost anything, including just-for-fun as well as business purposes. Wikipedia is a free on-line encyclopedia where anyone can contribute. For this reason, it’s “reader beware” although Karl says the information is mostly reliable. Podcasts are typically from radio stations or other broadcasters, where interviews can be downloaded to your computer or iPod.
Karl also mentioned Google, whose last quarter’s revenue was $5.9 billion, mostly coming from a share of the advertising revenues. These are all potentials for marketing, from the “finding” stage, to turn people into prospects, then into customers, and then to keep the customers. For those who may want to set up a social networking site, we were advised this is a recipient driven network. The listener can shut you off and nobody will know. Keep your material interesting, relevant and compelling to the listener.
Thank you, Karl, for informing us about this huge and growing social networking phenomenon.
== Rocky
