Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

It’s now obvious that social networking and social media are becoming an integral part of everyday life of more and more people and that the some basic rules of business are changing, namely how relevance and reputation and won and maintained.

The video above tackles the question whether “social media is a fad?”. It was created by Erik Qualman as a part of the campaign for his Socialnomics book on the business of social media.

I might add one correction to the video though. Facebook must be the 3rd most populated country on planet by now. :-) It had 300 million users 2 days ago and USA is estimated to have 307 million.

[video via Jackson Bond]

This video explains it nicely why you should keep be on the watch out for media hype. It comes from my favorite statistician Hans Rosling who caught my attention with his presentation TED 2007 and TV commentator presentation style. :-)

You’ll never ever miss an argument in a discussion about media hype once you remember the distressing statistic that (at the moment) the news/death ratio for swine flu is 8176 while for tuberculosis it’s just 0.1.

Have in mind that every time you discuss the current disease-popular-in-media, you’re not helping human lives are saved at all (on the contrary) since there are many more affected and taken by other long-standing diseases. That’s worth thinking about… should you ignore the reality and be just another media funnel?