Down to the Wire 2008: Power to the People

Jade Tang & Eddy Helm from YMedia talk about the role of social media in the business space.

Down to the Wire 2008: Power to the People

In 2008, if you didn’t have plenty of Facebook friends your opinion wasn’t worth listening to. “Just putting that out there…”

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Social Media. Most New Zealanders were engaging with it in 2008, many without knowing it. To most of us, this just meant talking to each other online through sites like Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, blog comments and on forums. Often we weren’t even considering these conversations public – and certainly not influential. Sometimes we ended up wishing they weren’t public – other times we were amazed to recognize our growing power as Kiwi consumers.

2008 was the year that our habit of nattering with other New Zealanders online was given a name. We’d been enjoying the way the Internet eradicates distance and enables us to find like-minds to communicate with since 1998, but until the mid ‘00s no one had bothered to single it out by giving it a name.

By the end of 2008, we’d not only know the term ‘Social Media’, but we’d also have a legion of locals calling themselves ‘Social Media gurus’ or ‘experts’ on social network sites such as Twitter. In mid-2008, the site was the 605th most popular among Kiwis, by early 2009 it was 39th.