The numbers which are flickering across the screen are definitely impressive. And they are all about the Internet and social media. After merely three years, more than 50 million people listened to their favourite music on an iPod, while it took radio 38 years to reach the same number of users. If the social network Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s 4th largest according to the number of 300 million members. And if the makers of the hands-on encyclopaedia Wikipedia were paid $1 for every posted article, they would earn $156 – per hour.

This firework of numbers is ignited in a four-and-a-half-minute web video on YouTube. The dense and grand tunes of Fat Boy Slim’s ‘Right Here, Right Now’ lend additional weight to the inserted text passages. However, the statement is clear anyway: social media is here, right here and right now! Like no other means of communication have Internet and its social component established themselves in society. The times when the World Wide Web was a playground for geeks and nerds has come to an end. Today it is one of the most influential media in the world.

The trend is irreversible
The video does not supply references of any kind where these statistics come from, which is ok since most residents of the digital world have come across these numbers before already. Even though many numbers have to be taken as a rough estimation and approximate value and the representation of the polling results are in need of improvement (what kind of companies are we talking about when saying that ‘they’ are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees?) there is no doubt about the overall trend: social media have cut their way into the lives of teenager as well as of best agers who are increasingly exploring this medium.

Fatboy Slim has been chosen as background music. Those who understand German may have opted for ‘Gekommen, um zu bleiben’ (Come to stay) by the pop-rock band ‘Wir sind Helden’ from Hamburg. Admittedly, an international audience would be left out in the cold but the lyrics are very fitting and make clear: social media isn’t a fad. Individual channels like Twitter may disappear over time but the concept of an open, global exchange of opinions won’t. There is no denying it: social media is an important factor in corporate communications!

One last surprising fact for all those who are still not entirely convinced: social media is the number-one activity on the web and has put porn on rank two…
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