Top 30 Erik Qualman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The power of social media is it forces necessary change.”

— Erik Qualman

Featured in: Social Media Quotes

2. “We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media, the question is how well we do it.”

— Erik Qualman

3. “History repeats itself because nobody listens the first time.”

— Erik Qualman

4. “Social Media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.”

— Erik Qualman

5. “The ROI of social media is that your business will still exist in 5 years.”

— Erik Qualman

6. “Fail fast, fail forward, fail better.”

— Erik Qualman

7. “It’s about listening first, then selling.”

— Erik Qualman

8. “Successful companies in social media function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners than as traditional advertisers.”

— Erik Qualman

9. “Privacy is dead. Reputations are dying.”

— Erik Qualman

10. “Consumers are taking ownership of brands, and their referral power is priceless.”

— Erik Qualman

11. “Pushing a company agenda on social media is like throwing water balloons at a porcupine.”

— Erik Qualman

12. “Integrity is what you do behind closed doors or when you think nobody is watching. Integrity is the true essence of who you are, your beliefs and your values. Reputation is the public perception of who you are. It is how others view your integrity or strong moral principles.”

— Erik Qualman

13. “You’re talking about a younger generation, Generation Y, whose interpersonal communication skills are different from Generation X. The younger generation is more comfortable saying something through a digital mechanism than even face to face.”

— Erik Qualman

14. “The beauty of social media is that it will point out your company’s flaws; the key questions is how quickly you address these flaws.”

— Erik Qualman

15. “Complaining is negative energy and the enemy of greatness.”

— Erik Qualman

16. “Social media has made the web all about me, me, me.”

— Erik Qualman

17. “As social media is less about technology and more about relationship building, we are starting to see more women have a heavy influence if not dominant role in the social media space. It’s no wonder that Facebook is being run in part by chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.”

— Erik Qualman

18. “With the growing reliance on social media, we no longer search for news, or the products and services we wish to buy. Instead they are being pushed to us by friends, acquaintances and business colleagues.”

— Erik Qualman

19. “Why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel anyway? Social media touches every facet of business and is more an extension of good business ethics.”

— Erik Qualman

20. “Fail Fast: break items into small chunks which allows for more experimentation, leading to more chances for success Fail Forward: learn from what didn’t work, but continue toward what will work Fail Better: the best way to increase our amount of learning is to increase our amount of failure.”

— Erik Qualman

21. “Increasingly, consumers don’t search for products and services. Rather, services come to their attention via social media.”

— Erik Qualman

22. “Twenty-five percent of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user generated content and thirty-four percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands.”

— Erik Qualman

23. “If pondering whether something is appropriate to post online, ask yourself: Would I tell this to a large group of people in-person? If the answer is “no” or “maybe not,” do not post it.”

— Erik Qualman

24. “It’s important to be socially active, engaged and connected with powerful tools like LinkedIn. These tools can be used in a myriad of ways to benefit you both personally and professionally.”

— Erik Qualman

25. “It had not yet been named Silicon Valley, but you had the defense industry, you had Hewlett-Packard. But you also had the counter-culture, the Bay Area. That entire brew came together in Steve Jobs.”

— Erik Qualman

26. “A British Institute of Psychiatry study revealed that reading digital messages while performing another creative task decreases your IQ in the moment by 10 points. This decrease is the same as not sleeping for 36 hours – more than twice the impact of smoking marijuana.”

— Erik Qualman

27. “The easier things are to buy, the more we consume.”

— Erik Qualman

28. “That’s the power behind a tool like Facebook Connect. It is making a Web without walls. Facebook allows you to go to other sites to comment, rate, etc., without having to set up a new profile for that site.”

— Erik Qualman

29. “Folks want to be listened to, they want to be heard.”

— Erik Qualman

30. “With the advent of radical and accessible technology, each one of us, for the first time in history, is creating an influential mark forever – we are all mini-digital celebrities and heroes to someone.”

— Erik Qualman

31. “To effectively leverage the social graph, every company needs to understand that they need to make their information easily transferable.”

— Erik Qualman

32. “At a minimum the majority of search dollars will flow to a social media model because people care most about what their peers think and the technology is there for that information to be quickly shared on products and services.”

— Erik Qualman

33. “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20 percent of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9 percent than those who don’t,” according to Dr. Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing at the University of Melbourne, Australia.”

— Erik Qualman