How do you think social media will change in the future? What other trends would you add to the mix? Are they any specific technologies that you think will gain popularity or emerge?
I think we are going to be in for huge change in the future when it comes to social media. Social media is starting to become a way of life for most people, and I think eventually it will be a way of life for all of us. This is because it’s easy; there is nothing to using social media. In the near future social media will be done all hands free, most likely all by voice command. Look at us today, we can take pictures from our Smartphone’s and post them straight on Face book, or write on our blogs from our phone. We have now become so lazy that we can’t wait to get to a computer; we use our portable devices to do everything. I think eventually we are not even going to have to think for ourselves, our devices will do it for us. From the convenience that social media is giving us today I think it will create a lazy society. Personally I think that because so many people are using social media now, everyone else will soon join the mix and our society will run through social media. Sure it gives us better social skills behind a screen, but is the convenience worth destroying our personal social skills with real people? Do we really want to spend our lives behind a computer screen not truly knowing who we are communicating with, or actually meeting people, because this is what society will become if social media truly has a future?
Here are the top 11 predictions for what social media will look like in 2012. Some of these items exist today in their early stages, but this list is about what I believe will become the norm in 2012. Ultimately, share of voice, point of view and community influence will be more important than brand ownership — and marketers will need to get over it if they want to stay relevant in 2012.
1. Privacy expectations will change
There will be a cultural shift, whereby people will begin to find it increasingly more acceptable to expose more and more of their personal details on different forms of social media. Sharing your likes, dislikes, opinions, photos, videos and other forms of personal information will be the norm and people will become more accepting of personalized experiences, both corporate and personal, that are reacting to this dearth of personal information.
2. Complete decentralization of social networks
The concept of a friend network will be a portable experience. You’ll find most digital experiences will be able to leverage the power of your social networks in a way that leverages your readily available personal information and the relationships you’ve established. We’re already seeing the beginnings of this with Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect.
3. Our interaction with search engines will be different
Real-time information in Google search, e.g. from Twitter, blog results and user reviews, will be more prominent. Google’s Social Search will change the way we interact with search engines by pushing relevant content from our personal networks to the front of search results, making them more personalized. The importance of digital-influencer marketing will increase significantly.
4. Rise of the content aggregators
The amount of content online is growing at an exponential rate, and most online users have at least three online profiles from social networks to micro-blogging to social news sites.
5. Social media augmented reality
Openly accessible information from the social-media space will be used to enhance everyday experiences. For example: the contacts book in your phone links to Facebook and Twitter to show real-time updates on what the contact is doing before you put in the call, real-time reviews from friends.
6. Influencer marketing will be redefined
As social media continues to permeate more and more aspects of not only the way we interact with digital media but also other channels such as digital outdoor, commerce or online TV, we will see the significance of influencer marketing grow dramatically.
7. Ratings everywhere
In today’s world, having a commerce site that doesn’t have user ratings could actually prove to be a detriment to sales. In the near future, brands and businesses will more frequently place user ratings and accept open feedback on their actual websites. User ratings will become so common that marketers should expect to find them woven into most digital experiences.
8. Social media agents
Managing the customer experience offline and online is already a key concern for marketers and customer-experience advocates.
9. Riding the (Google) wave
Wave offers marketers a unique way, at minimal cost, to allow consumers to engage with each other in way that are miles beyond anything we is currently using. Savvy marketers will develop extensions for Wave that evolves its unique communication toolset into a rich brand experience that is immersive but allows for new levels of interaction from crowd sourced storytelling to crowd sourced product design.
10. Thinking beyond “newness”
In 2009 we became very focused on the real-time nature of social media. The implications behind consumer feedback and interaction around brands using tools like Twitter or Facebook’s news stream caused marketers to re-evaluate the power of social media tools in parallel to “traditional” digital-media channels such as search.
11. Social media everything and the return of digital media
Social functions will become so commonplace in digital experiences that the thought of not having socially-enhanced experiences will seem illogical. Digital media by its very nature is inherently social. I hope we’re not talking about social media in 2012, and we just refer to everything as digital media again.
