Paul Revere would have been proud on how man is using his awareness of time to win the battle in an age when machines would dominate us.

Not a day goes by these days that we don't get something in our mail box about social media. If it's not another article telling us how to incorporate it into our business strategy, it's another webinar featuring experts in the field. And oh yes, it's the most discussed topic in boardrooms.

Well, here's another one - but this one, transcribed from a 10-minute speech given by Morris Sim (right), CEO of Circos Brand Karma, is worth reflecting on if only for the context it gives as to how big social media has become, and why it's so fundamental to human nature.

First, the Taiwanese-American sets the stage. There's been an explosion in the last 12 months, he says. Citing Alexa statistics, he said, Facebook is the second most popular website today, although he was later challenged by Robbie Hills of GroupM Search who said Comscore statistics had Facebook as ranked number 5. "They are growing for sure though," said Hills.

And growing it is - Sim said Facebook was the number one site in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Bangladesh. And of the top 20 sites ranked in the last 12 months, eight of them are powered by social media, added Sim.

AirAsia has 74,000 fans, JetBlue has 1.3 million followers on Twitter and there are 5,000 photos on Peninsula Hong Kong on Flickr. He's merely using numbers to prove his point that "the amount of content, the number of people talking" is incredible.

Moving on to commerce, he said one out of every 20 users that are going to Singapore Airlines' website, or sites such as Wotif, Asiarooms, Webjet and other OTAs, were at Facebook previously before they went to those sites.

He said a battle had been occurring for a very long time and it has to do with "our fundamental need to access information in an efficient manner".

Traditional media had dominated this access and this had been powered by man until 10-15 years ago when a company called Google kicked the apple cart over. It put together a bunch of machines, scoured the web, compiled the information and asked the user to ask questions to which it responded with a list of answers.

It worked like a research model - "the way academics would look for material", said Sim,

"In that sense, when Google came in, it set up a battle between machine and man (traditional media). The machine won in the viewership perspective and the advertising dollar perspective. That left a vacuum, data was moving to machines and information was moving back."

A counterpoint was needed and a classic battle is now ensuing between man and machine, said Sim. "We as human beings are inherently empathetic - we need to relate to each other and one of the biggest actions we take is to share about what we do and what we are thinking."

Back to numbers - 4 billion photos on Flickr, 100 million videos on YouTube, 269 languages on Wikipedia. Facebook is "all about sharing, sharing, sharing" - 2 billion photos a month, 14 million videos a month, 40 million status ipdates a day, 6 billion minutes spent in viewership - the average - 30 minutes/a day.

"You pick the people you trust and you see only the content you want - the people are the filter for the content. The context is personal to you. You toss out the question and you get the recommendations and referrals."

And - another number - 74% of users trust peer reviews.

So why is man going to win this latest battle? Simshares a story. "On April 18, 1775, a 40-year-old man, Paul Revere, rode from Boston to Lexington to tell everyone that the British were coming. What the ride did was emphasise the importance of the timing of receipt of information - man has a fundamental awareness of timing in a different way to machines."

It is this awareness of time that explains the importance of Twitter, argues Sim. "Twitter is all about relevance, breaking news illustrates this, it explains its meteoric rise - from 1,000 most popular website to 13th in one year and 60% of its users are now from outside the US.

"It's a utility to get relevant information out in a timely manner."

Look at it another way - Twitter allows you to pick who you want your editorial staff to be by following their tweets and unfollowing them as you wish.

JetBlue, with 1.3 million followers on Twitter, uses it as a distribution mechanism to get its rates out. "This is not possible under the search paradigm," said Sim.

Man's deficiency is "we cannot process large amounts of data. Machines are optimized to gather, collect and organise data - that has becomes its weakness in this era of information glut.

"Social media and social networks have made it so much easier to process information and recommendations from friends - 4 answers as opposed to 4 million.

"And if the answers come from those you trust, well, you don't have to do the research work,"

So man or machine? You choose.

Watch Morris Sim at www.vimeo.com/7717547

Yeoh Siew Hoon, one of Asia's most respected travel editors and commentators, writes a regular column on news, trends and issues in the hospitality industry for 4Hoteliers.com.

Siew Hoon, who has covered the tourism industry in Asia/Pacific for the past 20 years, runs SHY Ventures Pte Ltd. Her other writings can be found at www.thetransitcafe.com

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