Online Social Networks and the Future Generations

We live in a world of approximately 6.9 billion people where every single person is unique. The amount of aspects that make a person unique is unlimited. Things such as race, ethnicity, and religion are good indicators of our planet’s diversity.  For the past couple of years, there is a particular behavior that seems to go beyond the barriers of those indicators and has been implemented on the daily routines of people from all over the world: The use of social medias. Discovering some statistics about social media usage is astonishing. Approximately one in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook, spending 700 billion minutes per month on the website. Twitter, for example, is handling 1.6 billion queries per day. Recently, when Apple’s co-funder Steve Jobs passed away, over 2.5 million tweets about him were sent out in just 12 hours. These figures demonstrate the importance of online social networks on society nowadays.

            With the increase on the importance of Internet and its accessibility, people are spending more time connected than ever before. The continuous expansion of the Internet propels the exploration of online social networks on every layer of society. Social network accounts for 22% of all time spent online in the U.S., for example.  The amount of features available on social networks has been growing significantly, making them more than a place to socialize.  Facebook, for example, offers Netflix members the opportunity to share what they are watching from Netflix with their friends and to discover what their friends are watching, which is a nice way to find out about good movies. People have been using social medias to entertain themselves, discover great things through their friends, share their thoughts and meeting people they have not seen for a long time.  Companies have been exploring the success of online social networks to promote their products and services intensively, due to several factors such as the facility to reach their target markets more precisely.  People not only get to know about new products, big sales and special events, but they can also share them with their friends, which is great for companies. So what is the future of online social networks and what are the consequences of their expansions on our society?

            It is obvious that online social networks will continue to grow tremendously. Although social networks tend to facilitate the socialization process, there is a significant level of social isolation and the appearance of new pathologies related to the Internet growth.  It seems strange, but some teenagers who spend a significant amount of time relying mainly on social medias to socialize have a propensity to have problems to socialize with other people out of the Internet. Relationships over the Internet are usually superficial. Although people may have over a thousand friends on a social media such as Facebook, the majority of them are so superficial that you don’t even talk to them on a regular basis. The next generations may experience relationship problems due to the lack of bonding or insecurity. Recently, I met a 16-year-old boy at a friend’s house. It was amazing to see how the teenager had to constantly check his profiles in a compulsive manner.  Ignoring everything and everybody around him, he preferred to get online in order to entrain himself, while everybody else was having a good time. It is very interesting to notice that when some people look at a great sunset, for example, their first impulse is to take a nice picture and upload it on Facebook or Instagram to share with their online friends or followers, rather than just taking a picture to remember that wonderful moment. I believe it is great to use online social networks and explore their great features. It is clear that they will continue to expand and having them is almost a social norm nowadays. It is important; however, to always remember that there are other ways to socialize and meet new people. Rather than poking old friends through Facebook, why don’t we make a call to see how they are doing?

Here are other amazing statistics about social medias: 20 Stunning Social Media Statistics

To buy or not to buy? Let me Google it so I can decide

I heard one of my friends saying once that he considers Google his best friend. The reality is that the amount of people relying on the Internet as their main source of information increases intensively.  Due to this trend, defining Internet as a key element on buying decision process for businesses across the globe is inevitable.  Apart from comparing prices, customers have access to valuable information about the characteristics of a particular product that they may be interested. In addition, customers can have access to customers’ reviews, which describes their experiences with the particular product. Customers can even have the option to check on Youtube for unboxing videos, which consist of people unpacking new products, especially hi-tech consumer products and describing what comes with the product and how it was packed. It is almost an overdose of information.

E-marketing is way more than just an alternative to promote a product, it became a necessity. Let’s consider the music industry for a moment. The industry had to modified itself in order to survive. With the invention of mp3 players and the facility to simply download songs that you like online, big record companies had to adjust themselves. Today, record companies explored intensively the Internet in order to promote their artists and generate profit.  They create Youtube channels to their artists and, by using video clips and other extra materials, promote new songs and albums. After watching a new song that you liked, you can conveniently purchase the song on iTunes simply clicking on a link below the video. It is an instant response to an effective promotion strategy and a sign of the importance of e-marketing on the industry.

Marketers bombard customers with a humongous amount of information about their products and services. Today, the ways used by marketers to promote their products over the Internet go way beyond pop-ups, which I considered one of the most hated advertising technique ever used.  With the Internet growth and the advance of social medias, companies can promote its products very effectively. Youtube, Facebook and Twitter became giants and not participating on these social medias is a tremendous mistake. Apart from being a low cost marketing if compared to other ways of promotion, social media marketing takes advantage of the rapid velocity of the spread of ideas on social medias to get results faster.  Tools such as an effective viral marketing tend to enhance a company’s branding significantly.

 I believe that everyone that uses the Internet today have relied on it to either get information or purchase a product online. It happens to me all the time.  Last week, for example, I was about to watch a Youtube video, when a pre-roll video ad started to play. I know that there is a significant amount of users that hate them, but I think that it is a great of getting to now new products. The pre-roll video ad was a movie trailer of a new movie, which was about to be released.  It was not the first time that this type of ad caught my attention and made me watch the movie later on. Pre-roll video ads on Youtube, affected my buying decision processes several times and it is proven to be an effective way of promoting movies and albums.

E-marketing gets more importance every year, and it seems that it will continue to grow for a long time. But how can the effect of e-marketing in the purchase decision process be a bad thing? I do not think that its expansion is bad. E-marketing is necessary and its good to have the possibility to get to now new things at the comfort of our homes. Therefore, let us continue to enjoy the marvelous convenience of the Internet to help us on our buying decision processes.  

Here is a very interested article about Pre-roll video ads and their effectiveness: Pre-Roll Video Ads Still Hated, Here to Stay

Internet and its Cookies

     As you read this post please do not panic, but there is something you, as an Internet user, should know. You are probably reading this post without knowing that you are getting tracked.  As I said, there is no need to panic. Well if you really think about it, you might have at least some considerable reasons to be worried about it.  As Internet and e-commerce evolves, sharing information at insanely speed rates, marketers realized that it would be the best way to do behavioral targeting.

      The amount of money spent on behaviorally targeted online advertising has increasing tremendously, especially in the United States. Most of this increase comes from tools such as Google’s AdWords, which became Google’s main source of revenue. Using AdWords, marketers can insert demographic targeting preferences, for example, and Google places the company’s ads on what they see as important sites within the content network. This is great for consumers as well. Let’s consider a man who is looking for a new car through Google. When he types in the specific car brand he is looking for on Google’s search engine, ads of local retailers will appear right next to the search results via AdWords, making it much easier for him to find a good deal closer to his location.

      It is quite interesting to think about how your information is tracked. Here is where web cookies come in.  The name cookie comes from UNIX objects called magic cookies. You might be asking yourself: What is so magical about them? Well, these cookies are stored on your computer by websites in order to keep an eye on your activity on the site.  The controversial part of this is that all the user’s activity on the Internet is tracked, and most people despise being monitored, especially on the Internet where there is a strong sense of freedom.  

     It seems that behavioral targeting on the Internet will continue to track our online experiences. According to some predictions, the amount of money spent in the United States on behaviorally targeted online advertising will increase severely next year. Although there is a significant amount of people worried about privacy issues regarding behavioral targeting, it seems that there are more pros and cons in this whole issue.  Apart from benefiting the advertiser, it makes the life of Internet users so much easier. If people are still too worried about cookies, they can easily refuse to receive them. Refusing to accept cookies from web sites would not harm your computer, it will just make your Internet surfing less personalized. So when you surf on the Internet at home by yourself, be aware that might be a lot of people monitoring your whole online experience.

Here is a very interesting article about how spending behavioral targeting will increase next year:
Behavioral-Targeting Ad Spend Poised for Growth, with Help from Online Video

E-Commerce: Threat to Traditional Sales

One of these days, I was having a conversation with my grandmother, a 73 year-old lady who misses the time when families would get together every night to listen to the radio. A time when the power of technology was not so striking as it is today. At the end of the conversation, she mentioned something that really caught my attention. She said: ‘’Your generation is too much into these things (electronic devices). You can’t live without your cell phone or your computer, can you?’’ We all know that each and every day, we depend more and more on technology. The technological advances that we had over the past couple of years gave us the opportunity to acquire great innovative devices at more affordable prices. I am certain that the inventor of the first computer would never imagine that his outrageous 30-ton machine, back in 1946, would become something so important and accessible.  The development of the computer segment brought tremendous benefits to societies all over the world, creating cultures and trends that transformed the way people look and do certain things.  The demand for more convenient and practical ways motivated the expansion of digitalization of content.

One of the most affected industries by this new trend was the music industry. A great example is Radiohead's digital download self-released album called In Rainbows, released in 2007, which people could order paying a price stipulated by the fan. Although the industry explored the advances of technology to develop new ways of commercializing its products, record company executives resisted to accept the fact that digitalization of content was the future of the industry. For the past couple of years, record companies have been struggling to maintain good profit levels. There are several factors that influenced directly the decline of record companies and the transformation of the music industry, but I would like to mention one that contributed a lot to this situation: piracy. With an enormous amount of possibilities of acquiring and sharing information over the Internet, it did not take long for people to start to share files and information illegally through the web.  When Napster was released in 1999, the industry was not prepared to deal with such issue.  People from all over the world started to download songs or even entire albums conventionally for free. In 2004, with the release of iTunes and the iPod, it became clear that the future of the music industry is on exploring the Internet to commercialize and promote its new releases.

There are several other industries challenged due to the efficiency of the Internet. The book industry is a good example. How could bookstores compete with the excellence of devices such as Amazon Kindle, which enables the owners to acquire new books in a matter of seconds in the convenience of their homes? Another example is the newspaper industry, which now offers online subscriptions that bring the daily news to Computers, Smartphones and iPads. Apart from the convenience, they can use the substantial reduction in paper use that it represents in their on favor, by exploring the sense of ‘’reading green’’.

The transformations provoked in these several industries give us the certainty that other industries would be drastically affected in a near future. Public libraries, for example, are following the same path of the book industry. They will eventually be vanished, since the book contents can be found easily online. The incredible development of the online business brings the idea that traditional sales could eventually die in the future. If online shopping is a reality, threatening the existence of traditional sales in the future, what will happen with the people who will eventually loose their jobs due to this situation? Will governments interfere actively in order to protect employees from loosing their jobs? What would be the dimension of the economic impact caused in the future? The only conviction I have is that e-marketing and online sales will continue to grow at a constant rapid rate, transforming the way people do business around the globe.

Here you can read a really good article about E-commerce being a threat to traditional sales:
Does the growth of online shopping pose a threat to traditional "bricks-and-mortar" retailers?