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Social Media: The Future

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By Colin Gilchrist, Digital Strategy Planner

November 7, 2009 | 5 min read

It’s a question I’m being asked more and more – what is next for social media? Quite frankly I don’t have a crystal ball and in my opinion businesses are struggling to understand the current trends, never mind my predictions for the future. Loving a challenge however, and in a snap shot, I would say the following:

Businesses employ corporate guidelines for use

Large corporations with thousands of staff would struggle to manage internal use of online social and will continue to block access – because lets face it there are too many staff and they won’t / can’t trust them all. With restrictions in place – staff will continue to browse their friends’ activity using their mobile phones… SME’s move more quickly, they will largely open up their networks to social activity, particularly for their business development and marketing teams. (It has been suggested to me that the cigarette break will increase in popularity – not by smokers but by staff using their phones out of eye-shot to access social sites).

Advertising budgets

Companies will soon realise that their advertising and marketing spend should be diverted to more online resource. They will catch on that employing either contract bloggers, expanding existing roles or increasing retained agreements with online marketers that real business benefit from a brand protection point of view and sales leads will be better facilitated through constant online activity in a social environment.

Closed down

It may seem that a lot of areas within social media will be getting smaller rather than even bigger, or closed to general access as the trend to build lists and the installation of filters that stops users getting bombarded with junk irrespective of whether they are your friends or not. Closed networks will gather pace for particular market sectors (e.g. professional practices) i.e. by invitation only – Doctors, Solicitors, Accountants… Online social formats to ask open questions of their profession better facilitating current trends in their practice.

Ambassadors and Agents

The business model of BZZ Agent (or versions of it) will be turned into a marketing phenomena. The budgets in advertising will be spent on providing free or discounted product to employed ambassadors to write about and networks of Agents will spring up with expertise in particular market sectors. From a B2B point of view the same will happen.

Evolution

I am fairly convinced that the current formats of existing tools including the likes of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn will either disappear or evolve into more user friendly formats that better suit our nature – our inherent understanding of weak ties will come to the fore. I’m not being very eloquent here but if you understand the primal forces that drive social networks it will become clear (thank you Greg Satell).

The Wave

Some of you may be familiar with Google Wave; I’ve been playing with a copy of it and for the future of business communications it will become a very useful tool. For those of you not familiar, it is a social email. The flexibility it affords to add elements to an evolving discussion is excellent at promoting better and clearer communication – those elements can be any number of file extensions. You can learn more here (the first 10 or 15 minutes should be enough).

The Blog

Blogs really started to gather momentum in 2001, here we are 8 years later and their worth is being realised by corporate business from an SEO point of view. The future of it is the value to the individual (as it always has been only more so now). I was told of a case in the US where a lawyer was poached by a rival firm not for his clients, but for his blog profile and quantity of followers!

Measurement

Key to the R.O.I. is measurement – those tools available now will be more common place and better understood for the man on the street. For example, bolt-on applications that monitor and track a specific set of instructions which then produces charts and graphs for non web adoptees to add to websites and fan pages.

CRM

For a company to succeed in such an open market place, it has to better manage its customers and make damn sure that if they talk about the products or services it’s in a glowing light. One existing integrated CRM system is the Salesforce tool that integrates with Facebook – or as Clara Shih called it Faceforce! Microsoft has an amazing CRM system but you currently have to rely on a clever software developer (i.e. some one like Company Net) to integrate it to better manage social activities. A change and upgrade to this is inevitable.

I will stop here – the online social market place is undoubtedly a revolution in communication whose surface is just being scratched at the moment, particularly mobile use. The tips, tricks and tools are still in their infancy and whether you are an early adopter or will take a more cautious view, it is an area to monitor.

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