August 2010
Social media is dead
Yippee! We knew Twitter was a fad and Facebook a farce! Not so fast. It's not the idea and practice of social media that is (nearly) dead. It's just the term "social media." That's because it's becoming so ingrained and cross-pollinated that it will no longer be distinguished from general digital content.
First big piece of evidence: Facebook's Open Graph API, the official term for the technology that now allows every website to integrate seamlessly with Facebook and all its users across all platforms. ("Liked" anything lately?) So for the engaged, things just keep getting more interesting. For the non-engaged, well, it just gets more confusing. What's on the horizon?
Trends in social media
1. The usage of real-time info.
Already, Twitter feeds, blog content and other social sources are being incorporated into search results. According to SapientNitro, social media now influences 50% of search results. In a take on The Wisdom of Crowds, this use of current, socially mined info creates a so-called collective intelligence or global social brain. This will soon have implications for SEO—if you're not part of the discussion, your search relevance may wane. Another twist (which Google has in beta right now) will allow users to search topics with the results biased toward what their own social networks are saying, making searches more personal and hyper-relevant. (Let's hope your online reviews are positive.)
2. Distributed content.
There will be more aggregating of social networks and their content. Organizing and filtering content could be growth opportunities for brands that can help users curate and simplify ever-growing amounts of information. And more automation of social agents could radically change the way one-on-one customer service is delivered. Language recognition technology will improve so that complaints via social media posts can be recognized, categorized and responded to proactively and accurately. Who knows or cares if a human or a machine sent that tweet, as long as my problem is solved? And doesn't it beat "press * for previous menu" or even "we will respond to your email within 24 hours?" Automation may also make such things affordable for smaller companies, too.
Other ways social content may be distributed into existing channels include socially enabled digital outdoor boards that incorporate live feeds (think real-time reviews on that 3-D digital outdoor for "Avatar 2"), adding social tools to CRM tools (e.g., Facebook or LinkedIn within Salesforce), or even entirely new approaches to brand websites that operate more like micro virtual worlds defined by the presence and activity of the audience as much as the content (what Second Life never was).
3. "Beyond nowness."
A little more difficult to understand (and with greater technical hurdles in front of it), the concept of "beyond nowness" emanates from the possibilities of the Semantic Web, the coming evolution of the web in which advances in programming allow machines to more fully understand not just raw data but also the meanings and relationships of information. This will allow even more relevant experiences online as machines don't just respond but predict. For instance, Google might anticipate your search behavior based on everything it knows about you through your behavior and social networks.
Some think that by introducing its Open Graph API, Facebook is setting itself up as a leader of the Semantic Web, which would make it incredibly powerful in terms of personal information, ad serving and marketing control. They'll be able to link users' private, personal information to their public "liking" content and mix it up with the same stuff from all their friends, amassing unheard-of levels of individual behavioral data. And you thought Google was Big Brother. But it will also help marketers deliver more individually customized experiences across the web, if done right. These possibilities are why the discussion over privacy is so heated right now, although notions of privacy among the youngest generations are already shifting fundamentally from what we consider normal or acceptable.
Whew! And these are just some of the predictions. The implications are staggering as the pace of innovation intensifies, compounded by the fact that more innovation is expected to start coming from outside the United States. At this rate of change, it's conceivable—maybe inevitable—that Twitter and even Facebook could fade or modify (see MySpace), only to be replaced by the next social, and marketing, imperative.
