The concept of ‘FOREVERISM’

FOREVERISM refers to the ways that consumers and businesses are embracing conversations, relationships, and products like never before. Driving its popularity is technology that allows them to find, follow, interact and collaborate forever with anyone & anything.

Just look at any publication, online or conventional media. Not a day passes without the mention of Twitter, FaceBook, Netlog, LinkedIn or YouTube. Every day countless individuals are building online profiles and relationships that are potentially ‘forever’. Hundreds of millions of personal pages, feeds, status updates, tweets, profiles, blogs are building up to an eternally up-to-date encyclopedia of individuals that defies even the most futuristic predictions back in the early days of the web.

These profiles (and billions of other digital crumbs scattered across cyberspace), will live on forever. Not just because the web is a massive caching machine, but more importantly, because younger generations will never want to dispose of their groomed online presence to begin with.

These relationships are already impacting their interaction with brands in a variety of new ways. Here are some startling figures:

FaceBook reached 200 million active users on 8 April 2009. More than 100 million users log on to FaceBook every day, while more than 20 million users update their status at least once each day.

MySpace now boasts 130 million members, LinkedIn counts over 40 million members, and Twitter over 30 million members (late May 2009).

China’s Twitter, TaoTao, now has nearly 50 million users.

Overall, the share of adult US internet users who have a profile on a social networking site has more than quadrupled in the past four years—from 8% in 2005 to 35% now. For adults aged 18-24, it’s 75%, and for tweens, it’s close to 100%.

It all boils down to future ubiquity for personal online profiles, representing every individual who is online, which in mature consumer societies will mean 99% of the population.

The trend of Corporates jumping on to the social media networks and setting up their brand profiles and followers is here to stay, forever. After all, markets are conversations!

Send your comments to sharad@cyber-gear.com.