These slides were presented during session of India Youth Forum at the digital media round table. In this slideshow I identify key digital trends and how brands, organization and people need to plan communication accordingly for them. I believe these trends are not future gazing but still we must challenge and adapt to change, adopt new practices and innovations. 29 March - 1 April 2012, New Delhi, India
It's that time of the year again when we will get out our crystal ball and look into the future. The ball gave us 21 social media trends you should watch out for in 2012.\n
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Media will fragment even more and smaller communities can be hyper-targeted.Well, here I was a bit off. It seems that people will come to large social networks and not to smaller sites. They may occasionally visit small sites but most of the activities take place in their semi-closed social graphs within larger networks.\n
The fact that audience has the control starts to sink in.More and more brands are getting on social media. Pepsi pulled Super Bowl ads in favor of social media. This trend will continue, brands will get more social and broadcast media will get more personal.\n
Social media marketing disappears\nSocial media is going to be integral part of everything we do when promoting our business. This will make social media an integral part of marketing and it will not be a separate activity. Much like SEO or email marketing, social media will be just one tool in the box.\n
Social media advertising will grow\nSocial media channels are looking to turn a profit so they are looking for ways to get at your advertising budget. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others are looking into way to display more marketing messages to their users. This will increase budgets dedicated to social media advertising.\nSocial media advertising will grow to $5 Billion in 2012, 25% of that vill be locally targeted social advertising. \n
Most companies will increase their social media budgets. This includes in-house spending on and outsourced services. Part of the investments go to boost their own social presence through blogs and product reviews. Rest goes to external sites like Facebook. \nSocial media will get real budgets.Social media ad spending rose 20% this year and is set to grow even more in 2011. But this is just ads. Companies that use social media tools went from 58% in 2009 to 73% this year and will continue to 88% in 2012.\n
 Ads will be more interactive and connected to social networks.This has not yet come to pass in any large scale. To get personalized interactivity into ads needs a massive infrastructure and it’s not there yet. But it will.\n
Brands start to use listening platforms to monitor the conversations.62% of large US companies have voice of customer program in place.\n
Measuring online activities and their effect on offline sales will become increasingly important.This ties nicly back to measuring ROI of your online activities. Groupon is one way to do that. Multichannel integration where people get incentives online to act offline will get increasingly important.\n
People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. First window to the net\nSpot on. Email will decline and social networks will take its place in person to person communications. In business email will remain dominant for some time but there will probably be some kind of hybrid solution in a few years.\n
Integrating social media to corporate websites\nBrands start large scale integration of social media content into their digital properties. Big brands will use social media connect and user generated content to get closer to customers. This will help them get most out of true fans and brand advocates by linking their web properties to conversations.\nSocial media will be integrated to overall marketing activities.This year has gone by in the search of ROI. There are efforts to tie social media into marketing mix but in most companies the social media effort is still somewhat separate from other marketing efforts.\n
Social media will influence more sales\nSocial media integration will allow customers to get real user opinions before making purchase decisions. Social commerce is not web shop on Facebook. It’s a digital property where people can make their decision based on marketing materials from the brand and augmented with feedback from existing customers in a form of ratings, reviews and comments.\nMore sales will originate from social media contacts (B2B and B2C).With the growth of social media the sales from that channel go up. There are good examples like Dell on Twitter. As people get more accustomed to social channels and the tools get more sophisticated the sales from social media will soar.\n
Social commerce on mobile devices\nWe will lead into a new era in eCommerce where you can directly purchase from your Facebook account. With proliferation of mobile platforms social commerce will become popular on mobile devices. Facebook’s Open Graph will also let you directly purchase with Facebook credits based on recommendations by your friends.\nMarketing will hit mobiles big time.This is probably the most important trend for years to come. People are being liberated from behind the desks and the social networks will be in their pocket.\n
Rise of the branded content\nNext to advertising there will be a push be in the user’s stream. This means brands need to create content that is good enough to be curated and shared. Content has longer shelf life, can be reused in different channels, has higher perceived value for customers. This means that content creation budgets may in many cases exceed the social advertising budgets. It wouldn’t be surprising if some brands will kill advertising in favor of content creation.\n
Content Curation and Discovery\nContent Curation is the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that surrounds specific subject matter. Information explosion has created an attention deficit and people want to have a quick overview of what's important and easily find what they need. Aggregation and content curation are going to be very important and brands start filtering information to give value to their customers.Brands will integrate curation into their IT or use third party services. News aggregation apps like Flipboard and magazine apps will find a market in corporate circles.\n1. The Expert Approach: Curators\n2. The Crowd Approach: Popularity\n3. The User Behavior Approach: Personalization\n4. The Relationships Approach: Social Graph\n
Tabletizing and mobilizing websites\nNot exactly a social media thing but businesses start to make their sites mobile. Like 10 years ago companies made websites because everybody else did, now they will make their sites mobile because everybody else does. People will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. \n
Location! Location! Location!\nLocation based services will be everywhere. Local information, reviews, coupons, loyalty programs and more. All tied in with your social graph. We are moving towards an era of real-time need for information. More and more people will be checking for recommendations about nearby restaurants, bars, hotels, etc. Location based services will be part of many marketing campaigns. Near-field communication chips in mobile devices get more common and will pave the way to the new era of “tap & pay” commerce. Loyalty programs will start moving towards NFC and location based solutions. NFC will be a convenient way for you to connect, share and react.\n
Most social media usage will be on mobile devices\nSocial media is happening in real time and people share content when it’s happening! As smartphone penetrations reaches majority and tablets become increasingly popular, sharing content will move towards mobile devices. Smartphones gives us extra depth into personalization – we can share what we want, when we want. The limits are fading! You will always be connected with social media, no matter where you are!\n
Your social media footprint will grow\nFrictionless sharing capabilities and social gestures will make our lives increasingly visible on social networking sites. Music, TV shows, check-ins, purchases and more will be automatically posted to social media sites. Always connected, always sharing! If you don't share, your friends will. Some may rise privacy concerns but most people will ignore the implications and their lives are going to be more open than ever before.\n
Facebook will break the 1 Billion people mark now 833,982,760\nUsing a process of linear regression on the data from the end of 2008 onwards we expect Facebook to hit a billion active users around August 2012.\nFacebook’s growth has slowed or stopped in many of its early adopting countries such as the US and the UK. However, developing countries such as India and Brazil have shown strong growth with India growing from 22 million users to 36 million and Brazil going from 13 million to 30 million in the last 9 months. Both are large countries with millions of potential users who have yet to sign up to Facebook, with only 3% of India’s population on Facebook and 16% of Brazil’s (compared to 49% of America’s population or 47% of the UK’s population) countries such as these will clearly contribute heavily to Facebook’s continued growth.\n