The End of Business as Usual: Reconfiguring the Way You Work to Succeed: A Brief Summary

In The End of Business as Usual, author Brian Sola explains the sea change in business caused by the advent of social media. Alone poses a great challenge for those of us who have not yet joined the revolution of Facebook, Twitter and Linked-in. He caught my attention with the claim that 65% of the Millennial generation born between the mid-70s and late 90s go offline while awake. less than an hour per day! Less than that “creates a disconcerting sense of disconnection.”

Taking Seth Godin’s concept of Permission Marketing even further, Sola says that it’s not about companies connecting with customers, it’s about customers deciding whether they want to connect with the company now and over time. The explosion of the Internet required that successful email marketers gain your reader’s permission through the recipient’s opt-in agreement to receive the ad; A far cry from the intrusive and aggressive Madison Ave-type advertising classically seen on television. Over the past ten years, we’ve learned how to integrate permission marketing into our offerings and our marketing campaigns in general. And we discovered that we were adaptable and willing to change.

Guess what? It is time for more changes if we want to compete in the 21st century. Here’s why.

The Millennial shopper isn’t just interested in giving permission to the companies they want to know about—wait co-worker with them, says Sola, more than just a business relationship, these younger customers expect I like it the company they do business with so they can share and post their shopping experiences with their friends and networks, estimated at an average of 130 per Facebook user. When they have a problem, they are not interested in dealing with their customer service departments, they expect to hear from someone at the top. Ranging in age from 17 to 32 as of 2012, this group comprises 25% of the online shopping population. .

In both 2010 and 2011, Facebook overtook Google as the top search term: People are increasingly interested in other people and relationships. The results?

Americans look to different sources for our information. TV viewers are declining, subscriptions to traditional newspapers fell 9% in 2010, even more in recent years. The combined subscribers of the New York Times, Wall St. Journal and USA Today have less than 5 million subscribers, while Facebook is home to more than 750 million residents and more than 200 million people use Twitter as their primary means of communication. Interestingly, the isolation predicted by the increased use of the Internet during the 1990s does not seem to hold in the 21st century: pollsters find that more than 50 percent of respondents feel more connected now than before the advent of social media. The growing sense of “connectedness” is apparently more than a virtual phenomenon.

In 2008, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced a formula later known as “Zuckerberg’s Law” when he explained that social media is simply about connecting with people we know and predicted that with each passing year, people will share the double information. Think about that for a moment; a doubling of information shared each year. According to Nielson, Americans in 2011 spent a quarter of their waking hours on online networks, and Facebook measures more than 700 billion minutes per month spent on “Facebooking.”

These numbers are staggering and the marketing implications are profound for those whose products are shared, liked and published.