The Real World Awaits
U. S. News & World Report ranked Princeton University Number One in its 2013 edition of Best Colleges. It has 5,249 students and you can bet every one of them is smart. I mean really smart. Representing the Class of 2013 were seniors Aman Sinha (3.98 GPA), valedictorian, and Amelia Bensch-Schaus (3.9+ GPA), salutatorian. Truly the smartest of the smart. And that’s saying something.
Sinha majored in mechanical and aerospace engineering, and Bensch-Schaus was a classics major. She definitely drew the short straw because she had to write and deliver her graduation speech in Latin, bowing to a centuries-old Princeton tradition (presumably when Latin was spoken at home).
But here’s why I bring all this up. Neither Sinha nor Bensch-Schaus are on Facebook or Twitter. According to Bensch-Schaus, “It never seemed like meaningful communication to me.”
Yikes. Two of the smartest people in the universe are turning a blind eye to the world of social media. So how does it make the rest of us look? And will they have a change of heart when they move from personal studies to participating in the real (business) world?
Some “real world” facts to consider:
Facebook** currently has 1.11 billion users with 150 billion friend connections.
665 million users are active on a daily basis.
Every day there are 4.5 billion Facebook likes and 350 million photo uploads.
The average time spent per Facebook visit is 20 minutes.
Sinha was ironically using that 20 minutes (and more) every day to work on his senior thesis focusing on the way large groups reach a consensus.
And how about this...
There are currently 554,750,000 active registered Twitter users.*
Tomorrow there will be 135,000 more…and the day after that…and the day after that.
There are 9,100 tweets every second.
58 million tweets per day.
1 billion tweets every 5 days. (And you thought your email box was full).
Bensch-Schaus named her kitten after the ancient Trojan prince Hector from the Iliad. She neglected to tweet about it and no one was the wiser.
I wonder what they think of blogging?
*Source: Twitter, Huffington Post, eMarketer
**Source: Craig Smith/DMR Digital Marketing Ramblings