katy lindemann // seemingly unconnected

The lovely folks at Mashup* asked if I would do a brief intro to social, to set up the afternoon of case studies and presentations at Social Media 09. The deck is on slideshare and the full presentation is here, if you’d like to see how to raise a gasp from a room of ‘social media specialists‘.

There were some cracking presentations – I heartily recommend checking out Chris Thorpe’s ‘On the horizon of a real-time networked society ‘ for some fantastic insight, and also Jonathan Akwe’s ‘Social Media in Government‘ for a brief overview of how the social web can be used for genuine citizen engagement.

As part of the day, we were also asked to suggest 4.5 trends for 2010 – 4 things we thought would go up, and one which would go down. Nothing radically new here, but here’s my two-penneth:

Going up

• Social will expand beyond the remit of the marketing department – as it already has within the most successful social brands. Whilst brands will still continue to work with their agencies for social communication within a marketing context, businesses will increase their investment of human capital to deliver social throughout their organisation – with social playing a greater role in customer service, product & service development, research & insight and beyond.

 

• We’ll see a greater focus on return on engagement rather than direct return on investment when measuring the value of social communication – moving away from the fruitless struggle to apply the traditional metrics for paid-for marketing, we’ll see greater attention paid to trying to measure how greater engagement and deeper relationships deliver brand and business value (rather than trying to attribute a direct link between social relationships and immediate payback).

 

• Adoption of mobile geolocation services will tip into the mainstream, and more traditional brands will begin to dip their toe into the development of services and applications utilising geolocation technology to interact with people on a much more personal level.

 

• As the thingfrastructure (Matt Jones’ brilliant description for the internet of things) develops we’ll see more physical objects becoming social – as more and more physical objects become internet enabled and technology such as RFID become more ubiquitous, we’ll see social communication moving away from the screen and into the physical world around us.

Going down

• As greater integration between different social platforms increases, enabling you to automate the sharing your lifestream across multiple platforms, I predict we’ll feel increasingly overwhelmed by the deluge of updates across an ever-increasing number of platforms – and instead of trying to maintain a presence everywhere, we’ll focus our attention into a smaller number of platforms and communities, become both more discreet and discrete regarding how, what and where we share.