Looking ahead on the year to come, I thought I’d take a look at one of the most dynamic areas in marketing – social media – and try and project out what might happen over the coming year. Here are four thoughts I have – two things that are cool, two things that are maybe a little overhyped. What do you think? Let us know in comments.
Backlash. Clay Shirky once said, of newspapers: “No medium can survive the indifference of 25-year-olds.” I’d qualify it a little further – no medium can survive the indifference of lead user 25-year-olds. And yet, from my admittedly unscientific look at my circle of friends as well as the influential folks whose blogs and Twitter feeds I read, it looks as though several social platforms – including Facebook – might be headed that way.
Why? I think the introduction of Timeline had a lot to do with it. There’s something unidentifiably creepy about that particular new feature; yes, it gives past versions of oneself almost equal weight to the present version, and a perfect embodiment of Zuckerberg’s commitment to radical transparency (a phrase which business-ese has made an unabashed positive, but which I use neutrally; there are lots of areas of our lives that we shouldn’t want to be transparent). I personally don’t like the fact that it reframes my life in Facebook visual metaphors; my life story is mine, not something to be rendered in schema, with an algorithm.
The growing numbers of, well, not-cool people on Facebook don’t help either. All-caps political rants from grandparents, sappy chain mail-like status updates (“post this as your status OR ELSE”), and the endless updates from people who’ve fallen out of our lives – and who we also have stopped really caring about – have driven some folks to burnout on the platform, and it’s a trend I’d watch out for in the coming year. Social platforms fail quickly.
Playing games. This could have been written last year, and probably was; but watch for game-like environments to continue to proliferate in the marketing and tech worlds this year. It seems clear that “games” – simplified models of real life, where a participant’s action prompts almost-instant gratification from the model – tap into some fundamental lizard brain property of humans; even those of us who understand the idea of gamification are somehow compelled to play.
As with all things, marketers can use this for good or for evil. Good uses are ones that improve the consumer’s life in some way; my favorite new gamified platform, for instance, is Fitocracy, a site that doles out points for exercising. This entirely meaningless world has spurred me to exercise with a devotion I’ve never really had before. But if marketers take this kind of attention and devotion and just use it to park messages in front of eyeballs, that’s not so good.
Embracing the small. This prediction is sort of out of left field, so forgive me if, in a year’s time, it doesn’t pan out. But one of the biggest reasons I’ve noticed (anecdotally, of course) for Facebook burnout is the accumulated detritus of year after year of friend-adding. The result is status update after picture after event invitation from people you don’t really know anymore (or, worse, never knew at all).
I want to keep in touch with people I care about, but this unintended side-effect of years of Facebook usage makes that a lot more difficult. I think there’s a huge opportunity for smaller-scale social networks to fill the void. Google Plus’s “circles” feature does this well; presumably Facebook could do something similar (but it would decrease the value of the average user).
Resisting the urge to check-in. It’s almost 2012, and if you aren’t already, it’s time to start being skeptical about check-in services – geography-based and otherwise. Foursquare, by far the most popular of these, has been around for three years; similar services have been around longer. Its Alexa rank is flattening. It claims 15 million users, but a recent Forrester analysis found that only 4% of online adults used the service once a month or more. Not exactly explosive growth.
But what these numbers hide is that, in order for Foursquare to deliver lasting value to marketers, folks have to be checking in a lot more than once a month. Occasional check-ins are okay for one-off messaging or discounting opportunities, but a more holistic view of the customer requires a better picture of the other places they visit, and you won’t get that with anything but the most heavy Foursquare users.
What do you see happening this year in social media? Let us know in the comments.
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