BRUNSWICK SCHOOL
FEBRUARY 2011
MONTHLY MAILING A MESSAGE FROM THE HEADMASTER The World in Which We (and our Children) Live Consider the following statistics drawn directly from http://socialnomics.net: 1. Over 50% of the world’s population is under 30 years old. 2. 96% of them have joined a social network. 3. Facebook tops Google for weekly traffic in the US. 4. Years to reach 50 million users: radio (38 years), television (13 years), Internet (4 years), iPod (3 years). 5. Facebook added over 200 million users in less than a year. 6. iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months. 7. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest ahead of the US and only behind China and India. 8. 80% of companies use social media for recruitment. 9. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year old women. 10. 50% of the mobile Internet traffic in the UK is for Facebook . . . people update anywhere, anytime . . . imagine what that means for bad customer experiences? 11. Generations Y and Z consider email passé – some universities have stopped distributing email accounts . . . instead they are distributing eReaders + iPads + Tablets. 12. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube. 13. Kindle eBooks outsold paper books on Christmas. 14. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation. 15. We no longer search for the news, the news finds us. 16. We will no longer search for products and services. They will find us via social media. Conclusion: Even though social networking will never fully supplant direct human interaction, clearly, the active use of social media isn’t a passing trend. Rather, it is a fundamental change in the manner in which kids expect others (even adults and future employers) to communicate with them. Two suggestions: 1. It is essential that we stress with our children that, as the “socialnomics” site says, “what happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.” In other words, be careful what you post. 2. Social networking might be a “new world” to many of us as parents, but like it or not, it is the world in which an overwhelming number of our children “live.” It might be time…gulp…that we as parents open our own social networking site. After all, living in a different world than our children is never a good idea.