Not a day goes by these days that we don’t get something in our mail box about social media.
If it’s not another article telling us how to incorporate it into our business strategy, it’s another webinar featuring experts in the field.
And, oh yes, it’s the most discussed topic in boardrooms.
Well, here’s another one – but this one, transcribed from a 10-minute speech given by Morris Sim, CEO of Circos Brand Karma, at WIT-Web In Travel is worth reflecting on if only for the context it gives as to how big social media has become, and why it’s so fundamental to human nature.
First, the Taiwanese-American sets the stage. There’s been an explosion in the last 12 months, he says.
Citing Alexa statistics, he says, Facebook is the second most popular website today, although he was later challenged by Robbie Hills of GroupM Search who says Comscore statistics had Facebook as ranked number five.
“They are growing for sure though,” said Hills.
And growing it is – Sim says Facebook was the number one site in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Bangladesh.
And of the top 20 sites ranked in the last 12 months, eight of them are powered by social media, adds Sim.
AirAsia has 95,000 fans, JetBlue has 1.5 million followers on Twitter and there are 5,000 photos on Peninsula Hong Kong on Flickr.
He’s merely using numbers to prove his point that “the amount of content, the number of people talking” is incredible.
Moving on to commerce, he says one out of every 20 users that are going to Singapore Airlines’ website, or sites such as Wotif, Asiarooms, Webjet and other OTAs, were at Facebook previously before they went to those sites.
He says a battle had been occurring for a very long time and it has to do with “our fundamental need to access information in an efficient manner”.
Traditional media had dominated this access and this had been powered by man until 10-15 years ago when a company called Google kicked the apple cart over.
It put together a bunch of machines, scoured the web, compiled the information and asked the user to ask questions to which it responded with a list of answers.
It worked like a research model – “the way academics would look for material”, says Sim,
“In that sense, when Google came in, it set up a battle between machine and man (traditional media).
“The machine won in the viewership perspective and the advertising dollar perspective. That left a vacuum, data was moving to machines and information was moving back.”
A counterpoint was needed and a classic battle is now ensuing between man and machine, says Sim.
“We as human beings are inherently empathetic – we need to relate to each other and one of the biggest actions we take is to share about what we do and what we are thinking.”
Back to numbers – four billion photos on Flickr, 100 million videos on YouTube, 269 languages on Wikipedia.
Facebook is “all about sharing, sharing, sharing” – two billion new photos a month, 14 million videos a month, 40 million status updates a day, six billion minutes spent in viewership – the average – 30 minutes a day.
“You pick the people you trust and you see only the content you want – the people are the filter for the content. The context is personal to you. You toss out the question and you get the recommendations and referrals.”
And – another number – 74% of users trust peer reviews.
So why is man going to win this latest battle? Sim shares a story:
“On April 18, 1775, a 40-year-old man, Paul Revere, rode from Boston to Lexington to tell everyone that the British were coming.
“What the ride did was emphasise the importance of the timing of receipt of information – man has a fundamental awareness of timing in a different way to machines.”
It is this awareness of time that explains the importance of Twitter, argues Sim.
“Twitter is all about relevance, breaking news illustrates this, it explains its meteoric rise – from 1,000 most popular website to 13th in one year and 60% of its users are now from outside the US.
“It’s a utility to get relevant information out in a timely manner.”
Look at it another way – Twitter allows you to pick who you want your editorial staff to be by following their tweets and unfollowing them as you wish.
JetBlue, with 1.3 million followers on Twitter, uses it as a distribution mechanism to get its rates out. “This is not possible under the search paradigm,” says Sim.
Man’s deficiency is “we cannot process large amounts of data. Machines are optimized to gather, collect and organise data – that has becomes its weakness in this era of information glut.
“Social media and social networks have made it so much easier to process information and recommendations from friends – 4 answers as opposed to 4 million.
“And if the answers come from those you trust, well, you don’t have to do the research work,”
So man or machine? You choose.
About Siew Hoon Yeoh
I’m not convinced (yet) that Twitter works well for sales – Twitter is a push mechanism and I’m not sure that many people purchase travel on impulse.
Meanwhile, although I see that customer reviews help conversions I’m not really convinced about the currency of customer ratings and reviews since in most cases the review says more about the reviewer than the product. How many of your friends have identical travel preferences to you?
Final thought – I see various sources that say Facebook is a fast growing up-stream referrer and so I’m not surprised that 1 in 20 visits to Singapore airlines come via Facebook. But is that not merely a function of Facebook’s huge user base instead of its suitability as a sales lead generator?
There is clearly a role for social media in travel, but todays attempts to use it to sell travel are falling rather short.
Hi Mark, you’re right re: Twitter — though some companies (like JetBlue and Virgin America) are leveraging Twitter fairly effectively to promote deals and to stay in touch with their followers. Your point about Facebook is interesting, though when you look at the other top social media sites (for example, Blogger or YouTube), they don’t manage to refer any significant traffic to Singaporeair.com as Facebook, which would suggest that Facebook’s referral is more than just due to its popularity. Finally, I think a wonderful product for consumers would be the ability for people to find travel recommendations based on people who are like them. Until that product comes along, many travelers do take reviews from strangers into consideration when making their purchase decision, particularly if they’re going to a place where neither they nor their friends/family/colleagues have ever been,