Concerning Christianity

Yesterday, I taught another of my recurring classes at the local senior center entitled Facebook for Non-Teenagers. This class is specifically designed to introduce senior citizens to the growing “trend” of social networking that is sweeping across the world right now. For a while, I resisted joining in on what is now a tidal wave. I thought Facebook and Twitter would fall by the wayside just as their predecessors had. In my mind, online media forums were nothing more than an increasingly impersonal way to maintain friendships and aquaintances. Hear ye. Hear ye. I was wrong. Not just a little wrong; dead wrong. After taking a hard look at the “trend” of Facebook, I now realize that it isn’t a “trend” at all. It is a change. Facebook was founded in 2004. By the end of it’s first year, Facebook boasted 1 million active daily users. Not bad. By the end of the second year, active daily users reached 5.5 million. The growth continued to speed up over the next several years. As of the writing of this blog post there are now 750 million daily active Facebook users. The average user has 137 friends and Facebook now appears in 70 different languages. While the numbers are indeed staggering they shouldn’t be at all surprising to anyone who hasn’t been under a rock for the last seven years. Facebook is everywhere.

In his book, The Thank You Economy, Gary Vaynerchuk makes some interesting observations about this brave new world of social media in which we all find ourselves. He points out that while many people make statements like: “Things just aren’t like they used to be” they are, in many ways, exactly like they used to be. In the fondly remembered days of yore, people would go to a grocery store or their local butcher and recount their experience to the three or four friends that were closest to them. This type of exchange made it imperative that merchants took great care of their customers from a service standpoint. Word would spread quickly if they didn’t and they could soon find themselves on the proverbial chopping  block. Vaynerchuk notes that for a while in the 80’s and early 90’s our society strayed from the service oriented mentality. It became less important to deliver great service and an increased focus was placed on delivering goods faster and cheaper than ever before. But human nature eventually resurfaced. People like being taken great care of and people like telling their friends when that happens. So now we find ourselves in what he calls The Thank You Economy. It is more important than ever that you devote laser-like focus to delivering quality service in any business. Because now when your customers tell their friends they are able to do so to an average of 137 people at a time with the simple click of a mouse.