Social Media and Marketing: Digital Trends for 2012 - A synopsis of a recent seminar
Posted 11 February 2012 | 
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A couple of weeks ago I spent a very informative morning at a breakfast seminar run by Hotwire (@hotwirepr), 33-Digital (@33Digital) and Skywrite (@skywrite), held in the screening room of the Soho Hotel. It was a presentation of a white paper entitled "Ten Driving Forces in Digital Marketing - A Digital Trends Paper 2012". The auditorium was packed to the gunnels - standing room only, apart from the single empty front row seat that I nabbed, right in the "audience humiliation zone" much-loved by standup comedians. Luckily this wasn't "An Audience With...", "Live at the Apollo" or "Dave's One Night Stand".
I was interested to see which, if any, of the observations or predictions would have any relevance to, or impact on me, either professionally or in my personal life. As a relatively small IT and Networking company, IP Performance are engaging with digital marketing and social media integration, but only in as far as it benefits our communication outreach into our (quite distinct and well-defined) customer and prospect base. Personally, I use social media, but find it hard to manage engagement with anything more than the holy triumvirate of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter (with occasional forays into Google+, Foursquare, Ecademy and Naymz). So here's a potted report of what I picked up, with factoid snippets and opinion/comment here and there:
Digital Trend #1: The Interest Graph - an introductory piece by Peter Sigrist (@psigrist), Director at 33-Digital, on this representation of what drives individuals in the web community. This took off in the final quarter of 2011, and looks set dominate the social media marketing landscape in the coming year. It's all about tailoring information and creating filter bubbles. Essentially, where the Social (or Business) Networking Graph concentrated on plotting your connections, the Interest Graph maps your interests - it represents a shift from "who you know" (LinkedIn, Facebook), to "what you - or they - like". Examples of such "Interest Network" platforms are CircleMe and Pinterest, both identified as worth checking out by Peter. Looking at these sites and their leveraging of feeds from existing platforms, exploitation of location-based services etc, I can see where anyone seeking brand establishment and brand awareness would benefit. Not so much me though, either in my professional or personal capacities. As commented later in the presentations, Google+ and Foursquare are predominantly male enclaves (not sure why), while Pinterest, as a virtual pinboard of likes, hobbies and interests, redresses the gender balance somewhat.
Digital Trend #2: Putting Your Business on the Map - it's been said before, it was said last year, and it's being said again - this time by Peter Sigrist: "location-based services will be key to driving business to you in 2012". If 2010 was experimentation, 2011 discovery and adoption, then 2012 will be exploitation and delivery. Personally, I'm ambivalent, having watched the business model issues unravel with Groupon, suffered service problems and irritations with Foursquare, and gnawing security doubts with Facebook Places. Foursquare Radar looks like a good innovation, but not much use if the servers are oversubscribed or the service constantly mislocates you...
Digital Trend #3: How Tablets are Changing Communication - Peter continued his presentations with his take on the adoption of tablet technology - which I really can't argue with. Tablet use has changed, and is continuing to redefine, the ways brands and companies publish information, leveraging interactive audiovisual as well as traditional textual methods of information delivery. A show of hands showed that only three in the audience had not used iPads or other tablet devices to get such information - perhaps, like me, they didn't want to be called on the matter. I operate two touchscreen devices - an iPhone 4 and a Samsung Galaxy S Android phone, and find that the combination allows me to tweet, email, surf and photograph effectively in all business and social engagements without too much switching between screens and devices. So I don't really need to, but I probably would get a tablet, if I wasn't so tight...
Digital Trend #4: Who are the New Social Media Celebrities? Oh, come on, who cares? Following Lady Gaga, Stephen Fry or Ricky Gervais on your personal Twitter feed may be fun (or not), but it's hardly appropriate for business... or is it? It depends on who you class as the Social Media Celebrities. Much boils down to the clash between brands and individuals, around reputations - witness the recent withdrawal from Twitter by Anton Kutcher, and his 'mea culpa' announcements, as well as more recent incidents with farther-reaching legal consequences. Specific expertise, contextual influence and impressive communication skills will mark out the NSMCs, whatever their personal areas of expertise or celebrity.
Digital Trend #5: Social Media and Internal Communications - for this, the reins were handed over to Tom Glover (@Gloverboy), Head of Digital Communications and PR/Social Media guru for the Financial Times. For me this was the first really interesting trend covered, outlining a third social media paradigm: Internal Social Media. The concept is nothing new - with internal bulletin and message boards, corporate intranets and then internal blogs, staff communications have been understood and catered for, almost as long as the Internet has existed as an inter-business communications tool. What has changed is the look and feel, and terms of engagement - internal comms have lagged behind in embracing social media disciplines (or, you could say, lack thereof). That has been changing, and will continue to deo so throughout 2012 with the growth and increasing traction of systems such as Ning, Posterous and National Field.
Factoid #1: 20% of large corporates now implement some form of Enterprise Social Network in addition to, or instead of intranets.. Tom went on to describe how Pearson, the FT's parent company, built their "Neo" Enterprise Social Network on Jive's Social Business Software platform. The trial has been transformational for Pearson and its subsidiaries, with 80% of staff now using the internal SM platforms.
At IP Performance we are not large enough to implement a bespoke ESN, but we already use company Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and are looking at private LinkedIn Groups and closed Twitter feeds, and how to integrate this usage with our internal IM systems, blog, website and wiki pages.
Digital Trend #6: Forums - Next up was Claire Moore-Bridger (@clarehinkley), Head of Corporate Communications at eBay UK. It turned out that Claire was sitting next to me, and that I'd caused her to move all her paraphenalia and presentation materials from my seat when I arrived, fashionably late. Claire spoke about the old-school, old-fashioned Internet forum, still going strong after all these years. I well remember spending most of my time on various USENET Newsgroups in the mid- to late-nineties, while my wife embraced Compuserve bulletin boards. It turns out that forums are still a more trusted resource than social media, delivering a dimension of special or specific interest group support and credibility lacking elsewhere. As a corollary, these forums can provide a powerful means of building a reputation, establishing expert status, and driving traffic to your website (although to my mind, the same could be said for special interest social media platforms like LinkedIn Groups and LinkedIn Answers). It is pointed out in the report that the self-service quality of the Internet forum, while similar to many social media platforms, adds a filtering benefit to the customer as they combat information overload and spamming. Claire's presentation showcased eBay's use of the Internet forum to establish a community following of loyal and highly engaged individuals, and cited the fact that 95% of questions asked on eBay forums are answered by members, highlighting the value of forums to eBay's user community. See Econsultancy's piece on Claire's presentation here.
Factoid #2: 23 seconds is the optimal time to place a winning bid on an eBay auction. Nice to know, but I tend to use a sniping engine like AuctionStealer UK, but can corroborate the rough timing, as the free version will place that snipe at around the 20 second mark, and is successful more often than not!
Digital Trend #7: The Socialising of TV and Music - Drew Benvie (@drewb), Group UK managing director at Hotwire, took us into the home straight with the last four topical trending technologies, starting with the merging of viewing patterns and habits with social media. A few years ago we started seeing email addresses and web link URLs scrolling under our screens, in the last year or so it's been hashtags - soon, we are told, it will be live twitter feeds tickertaping across the bottom of our screens. Whether you call it 3 screening, transmedia, crossmedia or multi-modality, getting our media feeds from simultaneous multiple sources - TV, smartphone, tablet - is already with us. The next generation of TVs will be Internet-enabled and have social media embedded, but for now live twitter streaming on TV is available through third party set-top box add-ons.
Factoid #3: 70% of toptrending topics on Twitter are based on TV content. The fact that third parties are building set-top boxes to provide this content in advance of the broadcasters and TV manaufacturers building it into the core service proposition shows me that the demand is there and that it will drive the process, but I can't help but remember that Fox tried this back in 2009 and it was an abject failure. Ahead of its time perhaps, but the clunky graphics and heavy textual overlay all but obliterated the onscreen action, to viewers' fury. Maybe if they keep the scrolling tickertape small and out of the main field of vision it could work this time...
Digital Trend #8: How Cashless Payments Could Unlock a Wave of Innovation - Yes, it's the old smartcard argument again, only this time we're wrapping it up in buzzwords like Social Wallets and Near Field Communication (NFC) chips which will be embedded in your credit/debit or dedicated transaction (e.g. Oyster) cards, and also into personal mobile devices like smart phones. It's nothing new, and has taken a seemingly innordinate amount of time to be adopted, but linking it all up and "joining the dots" is crucial to the monetisation (ugh!) of digital social media, and of the greatest interest to the social media and marketing industry. An example given of cashless payments in action was Square, founded by Twitter's Jack Dorsey, which in the United States processes 100 billion payments through 800,000 merchants - over mobile phones. Further, Cashless payments integrated with social media will allow retailers to reward consumers with cash for engaging/engagements and loyalty, and tie-ins with location-based services like Foursquare will provide validation and mapping of geolocation.
Digital Trend #9: Gamification - No, no, no. That is not a word, Drew, no matter which way you spin it. Even if it was, it wouldn't mean what you're trying to make it mean. It would describe the process involved in getting a haunch of meat or a carcass to that state of mild putrefaction so beloved by the upper classes and evidenced by an oily sweaty sheen and a funky odour, whilst hanging on a hook in a butcher's outhouse or a farmhouse kitchen pantry. So anyway, this was all about how game theory and game design are now increasingly built in to the apps and services we use every day in social media and communications devices. Think of Foursquare's encouragement to poach Mayorships from other users, or the unlocking of badges. Think of Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook, or even the popularity of Angry Birds on iPhone and Android smartphones, and later the tablet variants, and how it helped cement their success. Drew draws our attention to some other examples of online community gaming that are used to channel human inventiveness, competitiveness to innovate important medical research, including Foldit and Phylo. In another example, the US military has been recruiting candidates through America's Army - a video-game recruitment tool whereby gamers are ranked among friends and can earn distinguished status, badges, medals and ribbons. And presumably, fast-track promotion. It all sounds a bit like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game to me. At the end of it all, whilst pertinent and accurate, we already know all this. Less "wow!" epiphany, more "meh..." cognisance. Next!
Digital Trend #10: The Driving Force in Mobile Devices - It may seem odd, given that we look to our mobile devices to be increasingly smaller, that the original personal mobile device is the automobile - according to this white paper, and to Drew's presentation spot here. I would however postulate that it might be the humble bicycle, which predates the automobile by 70 years; or even that enduring testament to human/equine symbiosis, horse riding, a further predating by tens of thousands of years, which kick-started our reliance on access to (or transfer of) information on the move. But no matter, I'm quibbling. Whilst I was underwhelmed by the previous digital tech trend, I was somewhat terrified by this one, when presented by the opening slide (pictured), showing as it does a Tweet symbol and a "like" button on a car's dashboard. OK, it's a mock-up, a joke, an amusing lead in. But still, I shudder. The fact remains that the automobile is the highest-specified, most expensive technological gadget that any of us own. With built-in engine management system computers, SatNavs, in some cases TVs and DVD/BluRay systems, it's hardly surprising that automotive manufacturers are looking to integration with social media platforms. Mercedes and Ford have announced app stores for their brands, with third-party providers like TomTom following suit shortly; social media platforms and geolocation-based services can but follow shortly.
And so ends the list of top trends for 2012. All interesting, some more relevant to me and my business-related drivers than others.
After twenty minutes or so of socialising and business networking, I left the Soho Hotel, and within twenty minutes found myself, elsewhere in Soho, accosted by a young photographer, wanting to snap me using my iPhone.
"How do you know I've got an iPhone?", I asked. "Everyone's got an iPhone" he replied. "And anyway, in case you haven't, I've got a couple in my bag for any such emergencies". Smart ass. I quickly pointed out that I did in fact have my own iPhone, and indeed a Samsung Galaxy S for good measure.
It turns out he was photographing various studies for a Guardian advertising piece on Digital and Social Media trends for 2012. Small world. I aquiesced to his entreaties and even signed away my rights for £0, as I'm always up for encouraging fellow freelance photographers (even though he didn't want to talk about his Canon 5D). I've no idea what form the advertising piece will take, nor what the photographs taken will be used for - paper print run, online, billboard, bus stops - but mine, taken in a drizzle of sleet, with me wrapped up in scarf, flat cloth cap and voluminous coat, are more likely to look like a jumble sale collection facility than most.
We're coming up to Social Media Week London (#smwldn) this week, but this clashes with Broadcast Video Expo (#BVE2012) - our first attendance as exhibitors, and therefore a Big Thing for us - so I may only get to bracket around these events. No doubt I shall find some news- and report-worthy subjects!
by Pierre | 11 February 2012
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