Perspectives on Personal Selling and Social Media: Introduction to the Special Issue

When the Stereo MCs released their hit song Connected 20 years ago, one would have been hard-pressed to understand how applicable the lyrics would be in today’s society. However, two short decades later, it would be difficult to find someone who does not understand the importance and see some value in being “connected.” Let’s consider, for example, the rate at which technology has evolved and been adopted over the past century. To reach 50 million users, it took the telephone 38 years, the television 13 years, the Internet 4 years, the iPod 3 years, and Facebook 2 years. Adding to these statistics, the number of Internet devices in 1984 was 1,000; in 1992 there were 1 million, and in 2008 there were 1 billion (Richardson 2010). What is noteworthy is the fact that these adoption rates represent the fastest spread of any “technology” that the world has ever seen, and there are consequences associated with that. One of these consequences is that companies marketing global products and services must address a whole new “sector” of business and do this very quickly because with over 800 million users on applications such as Facebook (Haak 2011), as the Rolling Stones sang, “time waits for no one.”