Blog about one of the trends you found most interesting and explain why.
The trend I have found more interesting than others is “Web-based Email Usages Heads South.” I think one of the reasons of its decline is more people are using social media such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate online. As we can see the decline in almost all age groups, less people are using web-based email. And I can see this from my personal experience. As my parents are in my home country and due to time differences, we used to communicate via email. However, as my mother started learning about MSN Messenger and Skype, we just chat over those two media or even leave a message if one of us is not online at the time.
We all know more and more people are using social media and there is a rapid increase in mobile usage for such as watching movies, updating social status wherever we are, taking videos, etc. With this decreasing use in web-based email, I wonder what changes there will be as media in general are changing fast and what will replace web-based email if not used by general public in near future.
Blog about what your learned about "The Tipping Point" factor and how it can apply to social media.
I learned that this book is about change in social epidemics that are happening around us. Gladwell tells us that it is drawn from psychology, sociology, and epidemiology. It is simply about ideas and things that are around us. “Tipping Point” means when a virus reaches critical mass in an epidemic. Hel says “Things can happen all at once, and little changes can make a huge difference” and ideas spread like epidemics.
The Tipping Point can be applied to social media and all other word-of-mouth marketing materials we learn in class in a way that popular social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all started as small changes in how we communicate online. He talks about the following three major concepts:
1. Law of the Few: a few influential people must master the idea before the critical mass can be reached. The influencers include connectors, mavens, and salesmen.
2. Stickiness Factor: there must a quality that makes people pay attention to a particular idea. Social media are very sticky. We are addicted to Facebook, checking tens of times every day!
3. Power of Context: it is whether a particular idea will be a tipping point.
I like how he puts a tipping point as “signals a key moment of crystallization that unifies isolated events into a significant trend.” We all know Facebook was created by a group of college students to connect with friends. I also read an article about the behind story about the beginning of Twitter and the story the company has told us is not what really happened. These events that were not known to everyone in the world have crystallized and utilized millions of people in the planet.
He also talks about STDs were originated by just a few groups of people as “super infectors.” When I was reading this paragraph, I thought about those celebrities who have millions of followers on their Twitter, such as Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama, Britney Spears, and Ashton Kutcher, infecting millions of people. I am sure they all started zero followers in the very beginning. It must have been a small number of people who started following them and many people found the idea of following celebrities sticky, thus it became a tipping point reaching the critical mass.
Regards,
Lee
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