Quentin Hardy's article in the New York Times "McKinsey says social media could add 1.3 trillion to the economy" discusses the results of a study by McKinsey Global Institute. The study suggests that improved communication and collaboration from social media in business sectors could add $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value to the economy.
The value comes from added productivity, improved consumer focus, and better functioning teamwork. Additionally McKinsey states that by 2018 companies will have over 1.5 million jobs available in data analyst. Currently large companies, like Microsoft and Oracle, have been spending huge amounts of money renovating the way they are viewed in virtual communities.
These companies are changing the ways they are viewed online and developing internal communication systems which allow for increased autonomy and communication at the same time. Another author of the report, Michael Chui, said "The industries with the highest percentage of interactions workers have the highest spread of profits per employee." While briefly discussed in class, this study and article correlate the idea of social media and business profits.
I must be in agreement with the thoughts above. Due to two major facts, social media sites can possibly add a huge amount of income to the national economy. Those two facts that I speak of are: social media sites are expanding in number, and these sites are also expanding in advertising. We can clearly see this second fact with Facebook as a prime example. A separate key point to make is that these profits must stay within the US, which means these sites should be American companies.
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