“It’s just called “The Bible” now – we dropped the word “Holy” to give it a more mass-market appeal” Hodder & Stoughton, Publisher
Social media and social networking change so quickly and so often that I was worried about writing this post, fearing that by the time you read it, everything I say in it will already be obsolete.
Twitter has only been around since 2006, Facebook only a bit before that. Google has become one of the largest and most important online tools but only as far back as 1995, founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hadn’t even met yet.
Blogs and futurists’ websites are full of “the next big thing” but even a lot of them didn’t even see a success story like Twitter coming.
David Silver, a venture capitalist and author of 30 books on entrepreneurship and finance, in his book “Smart Start-Ups” write, “I’m not at all optimistic about the staying power of MySpace and Facebook.”
He goes on to say, “Other than providing a playground for young people to meet and communicate, I question the economic durability of MySpace and Facebook, which need to segue to a mobile phone-based model pretty soon, before a newcomer captures that highly lucrative market from them.”
That was published in 2007.
Silver had it half-right. The social networking sites DID need to morph into a mobile-ready platform which they have done, but I think few would doubt the economic viability of an entity like Facebook today.
Not only that, but social networking has now become so much more than a ‘playground for young people’ with people aged from 50-65 being one of the fastest growing demographics for Facebook.
My point is that David Silver is not a mug. He is an astutely clever man who is a world-renowned expert in futurism and know what is going to work.
But just a few years ago in 2007, not even he could have seen the growth in relevance of social media.
So, if you are part of the online marketing community, what will be the trends you will need to know about in 2010?
Mobile Marketing
Whether it means including a plug-in for your website that makes it more visible and more usable on a mobile device, or changing the functionality of your site altogether to include features that can only be accessed using a mobile device, you are going to need to embrace mobile marketing if you are to compete.
In an era where more than 60% of businesses are banning social networking applications in their offices and on their computing hardware AND when every other person seems to have a smartphone or other web-ready portable device, mobile marketing is now more important than ever before.
Competitions and marketing devices aimed solely at users of mobile devices are becoming more widespread and this could be a great way to capture that mobile market in 2010.
Localised Applications
The natural flow-on from this kind of accessibility is more localised applications and local adaptations of currently available platforms.
For instance, Twitter, which has 80% of its usage happening on mobile devices, has recently introduced regional trending as opposed to a blanket world-wide trending feature on its platform.
This basically means that as well as knowing what people are talking about on Twitter world-wide, you can also now see what people based in your own country – or even in your own city – are talking about.
A great new example of a local application is foursquare and it is rapidly gaining popularity.
foursquare works by adding an application to your smartphone (or you can use the web-based version if you don’t have a smartphone) and then letting users ‘check in’ or in other words, telling the application exactly where you are at that moment.
Users can then recommend a local cafe, restaurant or business where they currently are, which in turn allows your friends who are also using the application to learn more about the places you visit.
foursquare’s plan is to build a database of knowledge on local areas so that when you follow someone’s recommendation and go and visit that place as well, there are already a list of other things to do: parks to check out, cafes to eat at and so on.
The application also rewards its frequent users with a series of badges and points that they accrue the more often they visit certain places in certain towns.
You can even become the virtual ‘mayor’ of a certain town, precinct or business. This basically means that you have checked-in at that place more than anyone else and you can retain the title until someone else visits more than you.
In their own words: “It may sound a little silly until you see the list of places that are offering freebies to our mayors – free coffees, free ice-cream, free hotel stays – it pays to be a foursquare loyalist and check-in whenever you go!”
Portable Identification
With people signing up to more and more different social networking and online applications, it can get pretty difficult to remember your username and password for each one. Particularly when one app will let you use all letters for your password and others require you to use letters and numbers and so on.
Thankfully, there are a few different applications now that let you sign in to them using your log in ID for another application. The two most famous of these up to now have been OpenID and Google (the fact that Google seems to own everything these days helps that a lot also).
With an OpenID you can log in to thousands of different websites without the hassle of having to remember multiple usernames and passwords, instead signing in using the same information.
Another big mover in this space in 2010 will be Facebook Connect, the application within Facebook that lets developers access Facebook users’ identity, social graph and activity stream. Facebook boasts that when website owners integrate Facebook Connect into their own website the results are pretty impressive. They claim websites can get 15-20% more comments, 15-20% more registered users, up to 15% more traffic and up to 20% more time spent on their site. Facebook Connect is also free.
* In a recent address, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberh announced there would be some changes coming to Facebook Connect this year but at this stage it is still functioning as it always has been.
When you combine that information with a service like Gravatar, you can also control how the world sees you, literally, when commenting on blog sites and so on.
You upload a picture of yourself and then when you make a comment on a blog or other interactive site using the same log in details, that picture automatically becomes your avatar on that particular site.
All the tweets, posts and updates in one place
One of the annoying things about social networking, and in particular participating as a member in multiple social networking platforms, is the magnitude of the information that each platform processes – let alone trying to read it all.
In 2010, the emphasis will be more on combining all of your news feeds into one place, similar to how I use FriendFeed.
With the FriendFeed site, you are able to make user lists and discussions, but without restricting it to just one platform.
On my FriendFeed page, I see people’s updates from Twitter, Facebook, Ping.fm and more. It can be very useful once you have a lot of friends and followers on other sites and want to keep track of a more intimate number of them in one place.
I think in the future, there will start to be more aggregating devices like this as well as alliances between some of the bigger social networking sites to make better and even more targeted ways to keep track of your followers.
If you would like to see how I can help your business’ social engagement strategy through any of these means, call me TODAY on 02 4324 2594.
This article appears in full in my book, The Business of Being David – How to use social media to make your small business big. To read the sample chapters and to purchase your own copy, click here.
Do you use Facebook Connect, Gravatar or foursquare? Or do you have any other opinions on what will be the big changers and important platforms to stay up with this year? Let us know in the comments below.
