Blog Archives
2011 Social Media Trends Roundup
Hopefully your inbox isn’t quite filled to the brim upon your return from the holidays. Any second now, your boss will bolt in asking you to brief your company on how the digital world is panning out for the year ahead. At a loss at where to start? No worries, we’ve got you covered.
In the spirit of fulfilling a growing social media trend around “content curation,” I’ve compiled what I believe to be the best batch of “2011 social media trend” posts that have surfaced. Take some time, soak it in, digest and feel free to share your additional links and thoughts below.
Cheers to a digitally savvy and successful 2011!
Mashable – 4 Social Media Trends for 2011
“E-mail addresses are a safer long-term investment than social media features. Think about all the money companies spent advertising their MySpace pages in 2007. Even on Facebook, your direct messages to fans are relegated to a second tier inbox no one reads. This is something you don’t have to worry about happening in e-mail marketing.“
ReadWriteWeb – 10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2011
“Every company should think of itself as a media company.”
Social Media Today – How Much Will You Spend on Social Media Marketing Next Year?
“Even if companies find it impossible to set a specific budget for social media, they can still take a holistic approach, incorporating it into their marketing planning from the start.”
Social Media Today – Seven Digital Media Trends of 2011
“Media Executives: Forget everything you think you know about where your talent pool is forming. It’s not growing in smaller markets, and with a few exceptions, it’s not coming from your programming or sales internship programs. The real talent—the ones you really want—are entrepreneurial and creative, and they’re not waiting around in your lobby to get a job. They’re trying it on their own.”
SmartBlog on Social Media – Why 2011 Will be the Year of Social Media Convergence
“2011 will be the year of convergence and integration. Fueled partially by consolidation, mergers and acquisitions, and partially by API mashups, we’ll see huge progress in unifying social communication.”
The Next Web – Seven Important Social Media Trends for the Next Year
“There is no doubt that services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook places will continue to grow and be adopted by a larger audience but I don’t even think the most exciting technologies have even been invented in this space yet. The best is yet to come.”
Social Media Explorer – 5 Social Media Trends for 2011
On “consumer content curation” – For brands, this means it’s not going to be enough to create content – you have to create content that gets curated into people’s streams.
Future Lab- Six Social Media Trends for 2011
“While social media schizophrenia (the overload of multiple social profiles) is nothing new to tech mavens, it will become something that more and more “average” users experience as they tweet, Facebook, G-mail, chat, Skype, BBM, SMS, and Tumble their way across the social web.”
Trends 2011 – 10 Digital Trends
“Another way digital is making headway is through disruptive engagement. Digital displays are amusingly catching audiences off guard through unexpected placement and the ability for consumer interaction.”
Entrepreneur – 10 Social Media Trends for 2011
“A Tweet-a-thon is a fundraising campaign on Twitter for which users encourage their followers to tweet about and donate to a particular charitable cause over a specific period of time. These initiatives will gain in popularity as savvy entrepreneurs capitalize on the relationship-building advantages of social media and the good publicity that comes with giving back.”
Social Media Explorer – 30 Social Media Predictions from 30 Social Media Pros
“Social Media will become Conversational Marketing and its practitioners will shift their focus more to ideas and technologies that can create or stimulate conversation versus simply focusing on the engagement in conversation.”
Mashable – 4 Predictions for the Future of Politics and Social Media
“Like the television boom of the 1960s, we are standing on the precipice of a big shift in how public figures are perceived and how campaigns are conducted. Our frontier is social media, and its impact on mainstream political culture is coming on fast.”
Mashable – The Most Popular Slideshare Presentations of 2010
Image courtesy of RoseFireRising.
NOTE: This post also appears on the Weber Shandwick Seattle blog.
Keeping Tweeters on Twitter
By: Anne Helmond
Current trends show that there are now over 19 million users on Twitter, up from 3.4 million last October.
Twitter has gained incredible momentum as a key social media platform to say the least. The big question is whether new users are sticking around and using the site or visiting once and not returning after drawing blanks on how to churn up a 140 character update.
Last month, Nielson posted their research showing that Twitter currently only retains 40% of its users (Andy Beal addresses a plausible reason why this may be inaccurate). In the past I’ve posted about why Twitter can seem intimidating which still rings true for a lot of new users trying to understand the purpose and potential of the site (Facebook seems to be facing a similar ordeal with 55+ users).
Looking back, one item I would add to that post is the overwhelming number of Twitter applications that can be used to help with a range of services from tweeting to monitoring and trend analysis. There’s a lot out there and getting a grasp on overall tool utility can be a detriment to someone who wants to fully understand the platform right away.
The guessing game continues with Twitter’s next big move, but I do love the recent step they’ve taken in internalizing Twitter search on twitter.com. They do limit you to only 10 saved searches, but that’s usually plenty for personal use or for setting clients up with solid daily snapshot monitoring.
It does seem that Twitter would take as many steps as possible to keep traffic on twitter.com for accurate data capture and user trend analysis…not to mention creating appeal for potential advertisers. As Steve Rubel notes, Twitter search is booming and social search is here to stay as a major player. How Twitter capitalizes on the growing traffic has yet to be determined but adding more internal features on the site and providing a basic user/best practices guide to keep new users coming back could help their efforts.
Personally, I would prefer using twitter.com over my current use of Twhirl if Twitter moves on incorporating the following essential items:
- A shorten/trackable URL tool such as budurl.
- Notifications for replies and direct messages
- Addition of a simple RT button
- Follower grouping and ability to privatize a tweet to a particular group (sounds like this is a possible consideration)
- Basic stats analysis and tracking
What other functionality would keep you on twitter.com or what do you think will motivate more people to remain engaged on Twitter in general?
-Scott
People You Should Know – Jeff Woelker
I read and read and read blogs. I comment, tweet and ultimately connect with a variety of incredibly talented, insightful PR/Marketing/Digital professionals. Today, I’m starting a hopefully regular feature post called People You Should Know. The intent of these posts will be to introduce or connect readers with someone that is contributing great content and helping us all blaze a path in the digital space.
I only recently connected with Jeff Woelker, a Senior Digital Strategist at Slack Barshinger – a B2B marketing agency in Chicago. Jeff was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to provide some insight on his background and social media at large.
Be sure to hop over to www.jeffwoelker.com to read more and follow him on Twitter.
-Scott
Jeff Woelker
How long have you had your feet wet in social media?
JW: Well, I’ve been blogging regularly for two years now. The reason I started blogging was because I would regularly send around 5-10 emails per day of “Hey – check this link out” or “How do you think we could use this website”? That got old pretty fast for many of my friends and colleagues, so I decided to put all that knowledge I found each day into one place, namely my blog. Over time, it transformed from my interests, to business uses and finally to future uses or tools I’d like to see in the future. As for regularly engaging in social media, I was on Friendster when it first came out, then I moved to Facebook and now I can’t even keep track of all the websites I’ve signed up for. You can see a few of them here: http://www.jeffwoelker.com/about/.
What do you like best about helping clients understand the digital space?
JW: It’s really helping them make sense of the insanity which can be the digital landscape. When a client can come to me and say “we have this problem” and I can throw out three or four tactics without even blinking that can solve their problem, that’s when I know I’m really on top of my job. That’s not to say that I never have a problem that I don’t have an answer to, but in those cases, I usually know the right people to ask or the right places to look for a solution as well.
What’s the biggest social media trend you’re seeing?
JW: Information openness and sharing. I’m looking forward to the day when I can share my contacts and information across platforms without the need for constant data duplication. More and more social networks are incorporating OpenID and allowing for more and information to escape their “walled gardens,” but we’re not there yet.
What’s your recommendation for social media newbies?
JW: I’d suggest taking a look at the applications that Friendfeed ties into. Friendfeed is a social media aggregator that pulls information from many other applications into one “lifestream” so that you can monitor yours and other of your friends and colleagues information in one place. The guys working on it seem to be pretty on top of things, so if a new application or website takes shape, they usually incorporate it pretty quickly. This should give you a good idea of where to start.
Once you’ve decided which websites to check out, set up an account and see who’s there. If you find that your friends or customers aren’t already there, check other networks to see if they are there. If you have the influence, try and push them all to one or the other, so it’s easier to manage. If not, you’ll just have to keep track of a few different communities at once to ensure you don’t miss anything, but there are a growing number of tools to do that as well.
