Just recently I was joined by the iconic Canadian singer song writer, Dave Carroll, creator of the United Breaks Guitars (www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo) social media viral phenomenon, to talk to a North American audience about the rise of social media as a customer service channel.

And if you are in Asia Pacific like me and are wondering why I am talking to North Americans and then pondering the time that I would be talking to them... well yeah you are right.... I hosted a webinar for Canadian telco, Telus, at 3am in the morning. In my pjs.

Much of my work these days is developing social media strategy and risk management strategy for social media channels. I regularly make Dave talk with my audiences as he is the king of viral social media. Brilliant.

So I thought I would share with our APAC audience some stats from the other hemisphere...

We started out talking about the fact that by 2013 over 16 billion mobile devices will be in use globally and that the percentage of people happy to use mobile apps in North America for customer service (n=1000) ...

Gen Y - 57%
Gen X - 47%
Baby Boomers - 31%
Silent Gen - 15%

We then went on to talk about how today 22% of all internet usage, globally, is social media. We also know that 920 million people use social media on a daily basis; that Starbucks has over 15 million fans on facebook and that Dell attributes $6.5 million in sales from Twitter.

We then discussed with the webinar audience the fact that 21% of US consumers and 22% of Canadian consumers are happy to interact with an organisation they are customers of, using social media. Again this varies based on generation (n=1000)...

Gen Y - 38%
Gen X - 27%
Baby Boomers - 18%
Silent Gen - 12%

Our next area of debate and discussion on the webinar was the still fairly average results social media has in being a channel that can achieve high levels of First Contact Resolution – with only about 61% of North American consumers saying they had their query resolved through the social media channel.

Over the next few weeks I am going to blog about best practice social media strategy. So interesting. I am really into it right now and the most entertaining part is teaching people over 40 years of age to respond to social media posts. Funny.

Yeah, ok, fine. I am over 40 so I know how hard it is to untrain yourself so that you can write like an 18 year old...;)