Groundswell, just in the beginning...

As it said in the book Groundswell, “The groundswell is not a flash in the pan. This is an important, irreversible, completely different way for people to relate to companies and to each other.” Yes, I can feel the trend in recent ten years, and it is just beginning.

I remembered ten years ago blog was very popular in China. No matter who you are, anyone could write something and posted on blog website, and your article could be seen by others, even someone became famous because of good blog articles. Chinese movie star Jinglei Xu became famous because of outstanding blog articles, named the queen of blog, attracting more than one hundred million fans in 620 days.

Five years ago, micro-blog became more popular. We use Twitter or Weibo and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Our posts became shorter. Chinese movie star Chen Yao became the queen of Weibo.

Today we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Instagram, Pinterest.

Information on Internet is so rich that people are easily lost in the ocean of message. So we have little time to read long articles such as the early form of networking-blog. The posts became shorter and shorter and almost disappeared. Picture is a simple and quick way to communication in a few seconds. Five years ago, if marketers were pursuing “content is king”, but now we can say, "a picture really is worth a thousand words." Pinterest captures this trend toward the visual.

Visual communication on social media brings a new business --- inSelly, a marketplace for Instagram. This new business makes online selling and buying easy and simple.

What will happen next? It’s really hard to say. This is a fast-growing phenomenon. Everyone has to learn to accept it, adapt to it, and use it.