(Don't worry...this blog post gets around to the great Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap. Read on.)
For professional reasons and occasional morbid curiousity, I adopt nearly all new forms of media. Heck, I even became a "citizen" of Apple's doomed eWorld in 1994. Before that, America Online. I think my first email address was on CompuServe. I tried SecondLife for about ten minutes. During each of these follies, I often experienced brief "Hey, this might be big" moments. Today, I'm in the middle of two of those moments with regards to Twitter and Facebook.
So how big are these two? Let's put this in perspective purely by the numbers. In December of 2008, Twitter had roughly 4 million users. Facebook now has 175 million users. The global Internet has 1.5 billion users. The Internet's reach is 23% of the global population. (In North America, the Internet reaches 71% of our population.)
When you are a member of one of these "crowds" it feels as though the world revolves around itself. To people on Twitter, it often feels overwhelming how many people SEEM to be on Twitter. I have over 600 people following me. That's ridiculous! 600 people? Many others have tens of thousands of people following them. That's a pretty big crowd. But how big? Out of 1.5 billion people, 10,000 isn't that many.
But let's examine my tiny little 600 person follower list for a moment. If, for example, I have several people following me on Twitter who each have tens of thousands of followers, and one of my posts or "tweets" is found to be compelling to one or more of those mega-users who then decides to foward my message ("retweeting") to his or her list of followers, then I've extended my lil' ol' 600 people to potentially tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, all within an instant of a 140 character post. In what medium other than this small 4 million person community could I possibly achieve this? None, really. (Or in the paraphrased words of Spinal Tap's guitar great Nigel Tufnel, "When those other bloke's can only turn their amps up to ten, where can they go? I can go one louder." See? It took a while, but there it is. And, please. Enjoy the video.)
Facebook as well follows a similar mathematical pattern. The average Facebook user has 120 friends. These networks tend to attract people of similar demographics (college buddies, work friends, hobbyists, etc.), so when a message is forwarded or linked to within a Facebook friends network, a rapid compounding effect can take place.
As a marketer, I need to be careful about putting social media in perspective. For niche companies -- especially business-to-business and non-profit organizations -- social media can be the critical link to niche audiences. (Think about it: most B2B companies have thousands of customers, not millions.) Because of the forwarding or sharing nature of these networks, a compelling message can get passed along briskly to the proper people in a tiny fraction of a cost. (At my company, we've run the numbers: the cost of a message to a consumer using Twitter is 0.008 cents per contact; Facebook is 5 cents; email is 36 cents.) For an organization that doesn't need to reach a total mass market, the financial arguments for social media are inescapable. Finally, early participants in these networks are often writers and media people themselves. Ask any reporter where they're scooping stories, and a large percentage of them will say that the speed of Twitter and other social media give them the edge. Communicating directly through these networks is leverage to other media.
So how loud is the crowd? Depends on your crowd. For Coke? A small voice crying in the wilderness, perhaps. For most businesses and organizations? Social media turns it all the way up to 11.
(Follow me on Twitter, if you like.)