Originally posted on MyBusiness.
In four short years social media has gone from relative obscurity to becoming an integral part of how Australians live their daily lives. Over 60% of Australians over 15 years old are active users of Facebook, and they use the site for over eight hours a day. Twitter has over 100 million active users worldwide; that’s over four times the entire population of Australia. From sharing photos, checking into venues, catching up on the news or reading reviews about a business, social media has forever changed the way we live our lives.
The rise of social media has given rise to the ‘social consumer’. This is the internet-savvy generation that learn about your company through social channels and who expect you to listen and engage with them when they need you. They have increased expectations of how much you already know of them, and they have little problem doing their best to damage your reputation if they’re not happy with the level of service they are receiving.
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Steve Jobs was unique, cut from a different cloth, on a different plane of thinking that set him apart from other CEOs and leaders. Over the past ten years Apple has gone from strength to strength because of his vision, but now that Steve Jobs is gone, can Apple keep it up? I think they can, and I think it’s because the Apple Board knows what drives long-term shareholder value. And you only need to look at the extreme remuneration package that the new CEO Tim Cook has signed up to as proof.
I’m finally starting to see where Google are going with Google+ with the annoucement that they now allow search functionality. It’s all starting to make sense. At the moment when you search or something using Google’s traditional search engine, there is practically no social integration. That’s a gap that Google+ will fill. So if you want to find a plumber that your friends might have talked about positively in the past, you might use Google+ as the search engine, not traditional Google. It now seems obvious that Google are envisioning a time when a subset of searches are no longer done by users at Google.com, but rather at plus.google.com.
