Happy New Year!
The latest monthly Nikkei BP Column, NetMarketing Online (in Japanese) “US NetMarketing Chawa” Jan. 12th column titled “Social Media – Ringing Out the Old Year, Ringing In the New Year” reviews how social media changed how people communicated this past year. It was big news on Dec. 8 when Dell announced that Twitter alone brought in $6.5 million in sales over the past 2-1/2 years. You could say during the last year, social media’s use for business marketing became firmly established, and social media’s importance will continue to rise this year. The column (in Japanese) begins as below.
Jan. 12 “Social Media: Ringing Out the Old Year, Ringing In the New Year“
Facebook’s Population 3rd in the World After China and India
2009 can be simply put as “the year social networking went mainstream.” In the U.S., social media played a role in many aspects: in society – it transformed how people communicated with each other; in politics – it brought democracy in communication as demonstrated by Obama’s administration and Iran’s presidential elections, and in business – it created a platform where business and consumers could communicate in real time. Facebook, with 350 million active users worldwide, now ranks third in the world in terms of population after China and India. Active users in the U.S. alone passed 100 million as of Dec. 7, 2009, and according to the Hitwise study, “Top 10 Social Network Sites & Forum Sites,” Facebook clearly surpassed MySpace and functions as the online destination and utility for nearly 50% of Americans. (The column continues in Japanese.)