My digital awe has enabled sharing more of my life with family and friends, as well as, becoming empowered to be in the moment with information whether it is a live streaming San Francisco Giants game, a list of what friends are nearby in town or immediate recommendations for places to eat from people you trust. Here are ten things to watch for in 2010.
1. 1. Musical Org Chairs - Companies will staff their organization around the power of social media. Rather than hire someone in marketing that is the cross-functional “social media guy/girl” they will share the responsibility across multiple functions including marketing, pr, customer service, product development and research. New functions will spring up focusing on social relationship management, real-time response and an internal b-role team, that will share interesting on-goings within the four walls of the company to the outside world. Additionally, the majority of companies will create “social media guidelines.” (Best Buy had a great document for their Twelpforce campaign and Intel’s is a great example. )
2. 2. Publish Already! - Marketers will stop talking about “thinking like publishers” and will take action. Rather than continue to rent out space across the web, smart marketers will start changing their online strategy by creating powerful social hubs that become instrumental in both integrating their activities across the social web as well as giving their most valuable customers a voice. What started with a set of message boards tucked away into the corner of your corporate website has evolved to a robust real-time discussion that brands will not only start embracing, but they will start inspiring, participating as well as following.
3. 3.Good Is The New Bad – there will be a much stronger corporate focus on aligning their marketing efforts with socially responsible initiatives and things that build trust with consumers.
4. 4. Content Is Still King – companies will reexamine how they produce and distribute their content, keeping in mind Twitter, social networks, blogs, mobile and the power of search. Hand in hand with search, quality content that people can find, enjoy and find utility will be the most powerful customer acquisition tool for brands.
5. 5. Active Listening – Active listening will help drive authenticity, responsiveness, direct marketing and a slew of functions needed for successful companies. Companies like Scout Labs or Radian 6 that create social media monitoring tools will allow companies to listen to what is being said across the world. The best listeners will align the proper resources to spend the time understanding the data and drive insight right back into the organization to improve their marketing, their products, and their publishing approach.
6. 6. Location, location, location – Being the Foursquare Mayor of several places throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Las Vegas, the power of location-based applications, geotagging and geotargeting is just screatching the surface. Look for a healthy battle between the nimble startups like Foursquare and the incumbent social networking leaders like Twitter and Facebook, who are already starting to tap into applying location into their roadmap.
7. 7.Search will change – as Microsoft continues to invest in eroding Google’s (and Yahoo!’s) market share, Rupert moves ahead pulling content from Google’s search index and the sea of social search content becomes integrated into basic search results - all of the rules surrounding basic search, SEM, SEO and publishing will change. Can Facebook join the party and benefit from their recent privacy settings, by persuading their users to open up their data? No doubt they will change their defaults!
8. 8. Loving Your Passionistas– call them brand advocates, hand-raisers, VIP’s, the “hard core,” or your most valuable customers, but this loyal group of passionistas that obsess about your product or services will become a bigger focus of your marketing campaign. Brands will arm this high yielding segment with content, cool experiences, offers and lots of love so they can feed this increasingly powerful expression engine.
9. 9. Influence Is In – with the millions of conversations going on, SOMEBODY, needs to create a deeper understanding of who to listen and who not to listen to. With all the fans, followers, friends, lists, shares, search rankings, page rankings, page views, unique visitors, referrals and social graph data, the data is there. If you didn’t see Shiv Singh’s report titled Influence, it is a must read http://fluent.razorfish.com/publication/?m=6540&l=1
10. 10. Get Your Social Game On! – as social gaming continues to obtrusively invade your action stream the games will start dramatically improving in their game mechanics due to all the videogame industry vets migrating from EA, Activision or Sony and heading over to companies like Zynga, Playdom and the others that have helped define this space. Look for more consolidation in this area, as traditional game publishers will have a hard time adopting internal social media DNA.
Comments