Social Media: A New Information Center of Gravity

Last week, I was fortunate enough to attend the 2011 Social Media Summit (Wednesday, Sept. 14) at Harrisburg University. I accompanied my colleague from the U.S. Army War College, Dennis Murphy, professor of information operations. Professor Murphy, a member of the summit's Social Media and the Military panel, delivered a presentation entitled “Fighting Back: New Media and Military Operations.”

The summit featured a variety of other panels and presentations on social media and education, job searches, organizational policy, legal issues, political change, life sciences, intellectual property, and even disconnecting from social media. Click here for a complete listing and links to videos of the summit’s panels.

The summit provided an excellent opportunity to listen to experts, speak with colleagues, and consider the impacts of social media on our military profession and our personal lives. The day was brief but packed full of information – not unlike a 140-character message on Twitter. After deciphering all of this information, I identified a few themes that emerged during the summit.

• Social media is here to stay. Summit organizers provided a list of amazing facts that indicate social media is not merely part of a passing fad. Social media is, increasingly, fueling business practices. For instance, 80% of companies use social media to recruit and hire new employees; and 95% of those companies use LinkedIn. Even more impressive, in July 2011, 38 million people reported that social media influenced their purchasing decisions, an increase of 14% from only six months earlier.

• Social media is ubiquitous. Social media touches the lives of billions of people daily. Facebook attracted 500,000,000 users in 2011, or one in every 13 peopleon the planet. Also, 46% of the world’s humans access social media platforms – every day; and 57% of these people spend more time talking to each other online than they do offline. For example, in an average 20-minute period in 2010, Facebook recorded 1,587,000 Wall posts; 2,716,000 photo uploads; and 10,208,000 published comments.

• Social media is no longer the domain of youngsters. Adults in the 35- to 54-year-old age group represent the largest group of followers on Facebook. And our mobile society uses a variety of devices to follow each other more and more closely. Twitter members exchanged 50 million tweets daily in 2010, which pales in comparison to the average of 100 million tweets a day that have gone back and forth so far in 2011. And speaking of mobility, Twitter use on mobile devices rose 347% over the last year.

Upon returning from the summit, I published a post on the DIME Blog of the Center for Strategic Leadership, U.S. Army War College. The DIME Blog addresses issues related to the information component (I) of national military power, with the other elements of national power being diplomacy (D), military (M), and economics (E).

In the DIME Blog post, I elaborated on the influence of social media on military strategic communication activities, coining one of Professor's Murphy's descriptions of social media as a "center of gravity" in U.S. military operations. Click here to read and comment on the entire post.

*Follow tweets from the summit on Twitter, hash tag #HUSocialSummit