Being in internet marketing, it’s fairly common to run into businesses that tell me they are doing just fine without putting a lot of effort into the internet or social media.  The discussion usually centers around the fact that their business has been around for awhile and their customers don’t really rely on the web or social media to find them.

This certainly sounds like a convincing argument on the surface, but the hard truth is that EVERYONE these days is becoming a consumer of digital media.  And there is no better proof than when this year two of the oldest organizations in the world, the British Monarchy and the Vatican, have taken the plunge and moved their organizations full force into social media.

The Pope learning to Tweet

Papal Tweets & Vatican You Tube Channel?  Really?

The Vatican has done a great job of creating a well conceived plan to utilize digital marketing technology.  Their internet and social media properties now include:

• The Vatican Main Website – While this website has been running for some time, it is very well done with a great deal of information.
• The Vatican News Portal – This news portal is brand new and features a rich media experience including the most recent news, videos, and yes even Tweets!
• The Vatican You Tube Channel – Includes over 1,100 videos on various topics
• The Vatican Twitter Account – The new Twitter account tweets news & events happening within the Church
• Vatican News Facebook – Yes you can now officially “Like” the Vatican.
• Vatican Flickr Page – Includes more than 800 photos of Papal activities
• The Vatican Radio Channel – Publishes podcasts and radio broadcasts around the world.

Weighing the risk / reward of social media

You would be hard pressed to find a more surprising organization that is embracing social media than the Catholic Church.  Opening up to the world of social media certainly seems like a big risk for an organization steeped in tradition and always cautious about what they say publicly, especially given the scandals and controversy in recent years surrounding a number of topics.

But in this case clearly the risks are worth the reward.

And what is the reward?  Simply put, social media is allowing the Church to communicate with its followers all over the world in ways they’ve never done before.  In fact, earlier this year the Church launched its “Catholics Come Home” campaign geared at reaching those who have left the Church and inviting them to come back.  So the reward for the Church is helping Catholics re-enforce their faith by providing information in ways they want to consume them and, I dare say, making it a little more fun to be Catholic.

Is Social media causing the world to “devolve”?

I sat through an interesting presentation this week given by Michael Fredrick of Point 2 Point Central.  Michael is a web developer who has grown up in the online world and has a different perspective on things than those of us who grew up “offline” so to speak.

The presentation was designed to educate business owners about how social media has grown into an 800 pound gorilla; and what they should be tuned in to if they want to keep from falling behind.  He also talked about the evolution of social media and where it’s headed in the coming years.

Some interesting facts from Point2Point about the growing world of social media

• 20% of American’s consume fast food daily and 50% use social networking sites daily
• Wikipedia has more than 14 million articles and 85,000 contributors

Facebook:

• Facebook has more than 500 million active users
• 50% of them are on Facebook every day
• Zynga, the creators of Farmville, is currently worth $5 billion!

Twitter:

• Twitter has more than 100 million users
• Twitter is adding 300k new users per day!
• Twitter gets 180 million unique visitors to the site every day
• Twitter is handling more than 55 million tweets per day

You Tube:

• People are watching 2 billion videos per day
• Every minute, 24 hours of video is being uploaded to You Tube

Word Press

• Over 25 million WordPress publishers
• Over 260 million people visit a WordPress site or blog every month

What does all this mean?

We know from previous studies that the #1 reason people go online is to “pass time.”  But what does the growth of the social websites mean?

For business owners, it means more new things to learn – because they can no longer ignore what’s happening in the online world.

For everyone else, does this mean the world is “devolving”?  Meaning that people are acting less like people and more like machines connecting through the digital world?  Only time will tell!