So you’ve just awoken.

As your feet hit the floor, you wonder what the heck has gone on overnight, what’s in the news.

This may mean flicking on the TV for the smiling faces of the morning talk shows. 

You may trot out to pick up the morning newspaper (something I recommend).

If you are like a growing number of people of all ages, you check out the social networking sites.

And that’s where Socialnomics comes in. Socialnomics.net is a blog designed to cover the latest trends in social media. Now how does social media differ from say, the Star Beacon, Newsweek, the New York Times, Rupert Murdock, NBC and more?

Social media has more to do with what is happening in your lives, the lives of your friends and your friends’ friends.

Social media includes Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Socialnomics tells us more than half of the world’s population is under 30 and 96 percent of them have joined a social network. OK, if you are like me you wonder if those in Third World countries who don’t even have safe drinking water or electricity are somehow tweeting (the phrase used by people on Twitter who post messages.) What are they saying? “Dying of cholera today.”

If you aren’t part of a social network, just know it is a place where you “friend” well, your friends, your friends from years ago, in some cases, their friends and people who aren’t friends but you don’t want to make them feel badly so you friend them anyway.

You and they then post messages on what is going on in your lives, as well as favorite links to other sites, to favorite videos. It is a place to post photos, to promote political and social causes, play games with others and a lot more. You can e-mail within say, Facebook, as well. Many businesses have Facebook accounts and instead of becoming a friend, you become a fan.

Socialnomics says social networking has become so popular, some universities don’t even assign e-mail addresses to their students because socializing via Facebook and the like are so rampant. 

Socialnomics has lots of eye-opening statistics. Did you know social media has overtaken porn as the top activity on the Internet or that one of eight couples married in the U.S. last year met on social media?

Facebook added more than 200 million users in less than a year. It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million readers, TV 13 years, the Internet 4 years and the iPod 2 years.

If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest, behind only China, India and the United States.

The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55 to 65-year-old females.

If you read the recent stories about Facebook making participants’ private information more public without informing, them, now you know why it was such a big deal.

The business and professional version of Facebook is LinkedIn, which 80 percent of companies use in recruiting.

Half of mobile Internet traffic in the United Kingdom is on Facebook.

People on social networks trust peer recommendations when shopping 78 percent of the time, compared to 14 percent who trust advertisements while 90 percent of TiVo customers (a digital device to record television) skip over commercials.

In reality, social networking fills a void. It becomes the superfamily newsletter that is updated every few minutes, if not seconds. Yes, media like the Star Beacon may tell you the status of the Conneaut city manager or the shape of Lakeside High School or where Pierpont students will be going to school.

But through social networking tells you what your friends and relatives are doing.

Who knows what a catch-all device like Apple’s iPad will do to the fabric of our social being? In four weeks, a million of the computer-like devices were sold and already new, updated versions are being released.

And for those in the media today, here are some telling words from socialnomics.net:

We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

We will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.

Lebzelter is special sections editor. E-mail him at bobleb@starbeacon.com. Read more of his columns at bobleb.blogspot.com.