8. The fifth communications revolution Source: Clay Shirky TED Talk: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history
9. Source: http://about.sensis.com.au/DownloadDocument.ashx?DocumentID=295 Australia’s internet experience
10.
11. Australia’s internet experience Source: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/global/australia-getting-more-social-online-as-facebook-leads-and-twitter-grows/
12. The world according to Facebook Source: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=469716398919
13. People use the internet in different ways Key Creators Generate content Critics Respond to content Collectors Organise and vote on information Joiners Connect in social networks Spectators Read, watch and listen to community-generated content Inactives Neither create nor consume content Source: Forrester Social Technographics - http://forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html
14. We can’t rely on our own websites to reach audiences Government websites (2.26% of all visits by Australians) Source: Hitwise reports – July 2008
24. Where is Gov 2.0 happening? Australia United States United Kingdom China Iran Brazil Kenya New Zealand Brazil Russia Estonia Denmark Uruguay Maldives Canada Mexico Spain Latvia Sweden Nigeria Oman Papua New Guinea Japan South Korea Switzerland Ukraine Mongolia Chile Egypt Bolivia Vietnam Ireland Portugal Finland Poland Turkey Singapore Hong Kong Ecuador Philippines Liechtenstein South Africa Malta Belgium Saudi Arabia Czech Republic Haiti United Arab Emirates Malaysia Norway Israel The Netherlands Saudi Arabia Germany Lithuania Morocco
Clay Shirky, a well known futurist talks about how there have been five great communications revolutions in the last five hundred years. The first was the creation of the printing press, which allowed information to be duplicated and distributed cheaply. It turned Europe upside down. This was followed by the development of conversation mediums – telegraph and telephones. Next was recorded media, photographs, recorded sound and films. Finally there was the harnessing of the electromagnetic spectrum for radio and then television. This was the media landscape for most of the 20 th century, which most of us grew up with and are used to. Interestingly, the media that were good at creating conversations were no good at creating groups, and the media that were good at creating groups were no good at supporting conversations. If you want to have a conversation it’s with one other person, and if you want to address a group you must send the same message to everyone in the group. Now we’ve had a 5 th communications revolution – the internet. The internet supports both one-to-one and one-to-many communications patterns. It also becomes the carrier for all other mediums. This means that every medium takes on the characteristics of the other mediums. Media becomes more than a source of information, it is also a means of co-ordination. And every time a new content consumer joins, a content producer joins as well, as if every time you buy a book they throw in a free printing press.
OK – so looking at how social media is used in Australia. <Run through slide>
But what are Australians doing online? Forrester’s Technographics tool looks at different types of activity, so roughly… <run through slide>
As one example of this, when looking where Australians go online, government is a very, very small channel. In the middle of last year the government represented only 2.26% of online visits by Australians. The amount of traffic to Facebook alone was as great as the traffic to all Australian government websites put together.
So what is social media? I consider social media as any participatory media – channels driven by the participation of communities and where users provide much of the content and commentary on content. There are many tools which can be considered social media - I’ve listed the most well known. Each works in a different manner and has different uses, but they all share the same characteristics of being driven by user-generated content and community participation.