The Social Media Revolution: Recent Developments and Guidelines For Employers To Consider
Now more than ever workers are leading double lives, only not in the way that you might expect. The old distinctions of day job and night job, or office life and home life are fading to the background as we rapidly embrace a new double life: one actual and one virtual. It is almost cliché to cite statistics detailing the staggering growth of social media, but it is nevertheless instructive. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn boast a combined 885 million worldwide users, with Facebook accounting for 56 percent of that figure despite first reaching 250 million users just last year.[1] Facebook is currently the second most visited Internet site in the United States behind Google, while MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn each place in the top 20.[2] Combine all social media and blog sites, and suddenly 22 percent of all time spent on the Internet is accounted for.[3] If use of social media has not already permeated your workplace, perhaps the next IT roll out should focus on ditching the dial-up modems.
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[1] See Facebook’s “statistics” and “press room” pages, http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics and http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?timeline (last visited Nov. 19, 2010); Linkedin’s “about us” page, http://press.linkedin.com/about (last visited Nov. 19, 2010); Jemima Kiss, MySpace Goes Cool, Crisp and Clean in a Last Bid to Recapture Lost Friends, The Observer, Oct 31, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/31/myspace-new-look ; David Murphy, Twitter: On-Track for 200 Million Users by Year’s End, PCMag.com, Oct 31, 2010, http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0, 2817,2371826,00.asp.
[2] See Alexa’s “Top Sites in United States” page, http://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/US (last visited Nov. 19, 2010).
[3] See Social Networks/Blogs Now Account for One in Every Four and a Half Minutes Online, Nielsenwire.com, June 15, 2010, http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/social-media-accounts-for-22-percent-of-time-online/.
