EDI TIMES

2) Advertising avalanche
while we argue and am disappointed about all the advertising that gradually moves into the social web, we will experience an avalanche that may almost break the social web. With a soon aggregate number of a Billion users, it will be the most sought after place to advertise for the almost 1 Trillion $ advertising industry. Google will make substantial changes to their advertising model to not only participate but lead the intrusion of the space. Advertising will get more and more subtle – not the primitive sponsored links saying «buy my stuff» but highly sophisticated «targeting» based on an omnipresence social graph of close to 1 Billion individuals. Automated yet individual adds based on our own profiles, friends…. Anecdote: On facebook my wife was introduced to me as a hot chick in my neighborhood.

3) LinkedIn’s break through
LinkedIn was always not very social. Managed with an iron fist in regards to: what user can and cannot do, how you get to other people’s data and more. But exactly that behavior will pay off as users compare the platforms they want to deal with. Already LinkedIn gains 10 times as many new users then the European Xing – in part because Xing became a social version of Craig’s List without the business benefits. It will be up to the group managers who manage the professional discussion groups, whether or not the qualities of the posts keep up with the expectation but there are already good indicators that many will. And as businesses finally find their ways and strategies into the social web, LinkedIn will grow more than average. That may lead to the actual break through – unless they come up with yet another management change.
4) The Social Business
Businesses will enter the social web – but this time not with «social media marketing» but with a rather cohesive customer experience strategy where social media is only an underpinning for the strategy. What many people won’t believe, companies will change their culture – simply because they have to. «Who says elephants can’t dance» may come to mind. Of course this will not be true for the majority of companies, not in 2010 – but the leaders will surprise with models that will please a large portion of their customers. The more social business will span across the companies departments including service, product management, sales, HR, procurement & logistics and marketing. The «let go» strategy as indicated by Cisco’s John Chamber in an interview with Washington Post will be turned into reality. Primary benefits for the consumer will be better access to services and knowledge, a saying in the product development and product road maps, faster access to other customers to share and accelerate learning and similar benefits. Advocacy for a brand and its team will be the biggest return on investment – which actually will demonstrate measurable decrease in sales and marketing cost.
5) IT Department conquer the Social Web
Finally IT Departments will be confronted with the social web. Vendor driven initiatives to invest in Social CRM may overshadow the good intent to make a company more social and instead make it more complicated. Heated and controversial discussions around sCRM will help IT managers defend their security concepts, data integrity and data privacy models and more reasons not to connect with the outside world more than necessary (from an IT point of view). Department managers in sales, marketing, service… will again need to fight and circumnavigate IT like they did in the 90’s when Internet came into businesses or in the 80’s when Personal Computers dared to push mainframes and minis aside. With an all new culture and new processes required by the market, new systems will enter the corporations. This time open systems, directly connected to and with the market and democratization of information will consequently end up in democratization of data. Again this will not be true for the majority of companies as most wait and see what the leaders do and then just follow but this IT shift will be very notable in 2010.

6) The end of Social Media Marketing
After hundreds and thousands of “Social Media Marketing” attempts to push the message in this new “channel”, businesses will realize that this is not very successful and not resonating with the target group that is supposed t be “attracted: not “annoyed”. Unfortunately even so many did it right it will be overshadowed by the failures. Social Marketing instead will have a fine but notable difference: “Media” is out of the equation. What maybe semantics for some may be an important difference for others. Social marketing will change the way social media is used in marketing. The focus on social will bring sales and marketing closer than ever (OK it is an old dream and may never happen) but at least the social interaction model with the market only can work if the marketing part and the executing sales part is in synch. The biggest change will be noted by companies refraining to overly advertise their wares – knowing that a customer satisfaction can never be reached by not keeping the promises.

7) Social Mobility Evolution
In 2010 mobile devise page views will be similar or even higher than computer based page views. The only issue: they are not measured – just estimated. But this will come as a wakeup call to many product and content provider to adjust their strategies. Social mobility will more than ever demonstrate that the lines of corporate strongholds (offices) will more and more vanish away. I think it will be interesting to watch that it will not be “the final break through for the home office” but unleash a whole new concept of the distributed enterprise. A new version of outsourcing will make way to a collaborative engagement with the hundreds of thousands of experts in all kinds of industry field who just don’t want to be hired as an employee any longer but work as an individual contractor. The missing link, the social bond, will further shortened with social media.
8) Social media denial
The dark side of the social media evolution may lead to denial in a larger order. I expect Google engaging in a rather substantial opening of social graph information in a similar way as it made books publically available opening up very controversial copyright discussions. Social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn for that matter who subscribe to the OpenSocial concept will pay some price for that by losing users. However the critical users will be outnumbered by a flood of those followers who finally enter the social web simply because everybody else does without digging deep into the consequences of privacy concerns – or the lack thereof. Primarily the very early adopters of social media who claim for them they made it all happen will be massively frustrated in 2010.
9) Listening 2.0 & Monitoring
Listening, in particular listening to customers will have a new dimension in 2010. What started in 2008 with interesting monitoring systems will come to a boom in 2010. Mass-Listening to better understand what customers saying, what the sentiment of the discussion is and what companies need to learn from that information will contribute to the entrance of businesses in the social web. Finally there are measurable results, that lead to actionable items. Listening will also no longer be the old way of listening to a person in a conversation but listening the relevant people in an ongoing manner – using monitoring software that works 24x7x365. It will surface what is really on their customers’ mind and will answer questions no survey can answer – all in real time. Also in 2010 it will again bring up the question of “too much transparency”. It will suggest don’t say anything anymore because not only it could be found – now it is actively watched for. See social media denial.
10) Social convergence
One of the biggest, most promising and most stupid trends of 2010 is the convergence of social with everything else. Starting with stupid, I’m sure we will see more and more things social. It started with Social CRM, we may see Social ERP, maybe social office and even things like a social washing machine – it talks to you and tells you who else in your neighborhood is washing jeans right now. But social media will more and more converge with other social activities like co-participating in online events where an online participant can share their emotions with the physically present participant, we see this already today happening. We will see a lot of announcements of social convergence like FINALLY integrating the user voice into the TV channels or further more integration into mobile devices where I can see if any of my contacts is in my vicinity.

(my social map)