2010 Predictions: Will social media reach ubiquity?

Paula Drum, Gettington.com - @pauladrum

The good news is that consumers will continue to wield their power and word-of-mouth worthy brands will benefit exponentially. Social media has created a world of word-of-mouth on steroids. Companies like Dell and Ford have really turned themselves around by using social media to add personality to their brands. The bad news is that as the space becomes cluttered with traditional marketing messages, consumers will begin to tune out these social platforms. To avoid this, companies new to social media need to steer clear of the following:

• Think of social media as a relationship, not a marketing campaign
• Avoid relying on gimmicks to ride the social media wave- like using irrelevant trending topics such as #iranelection to spew promotional messages
• Don’t hide paid relationships or your identity– for example paying for positive reviews or blogging about your company or service under a false name. What makes social media successful is authenticity.

Bert DuMars, Newell Rubbermaid - @bwdumars

With so much information and communication unencumbered by time, geography or borders, how we filter and organize the massive amounts of content and social interactions will be key to improving the social web ecosystem and making it more usable and useful in 2010. Whichever company(s), community(s) or person(s) who crack this puzzle will be the big winners in the next generation of the social web ecosystem.

The new, empowered customer requires that businesses be much more adaptive to their needs, wants and desires. The role of marketing is going to have to change from the current management mentality to an advocate or business ownership model that is more agile and responsive to the social web ecosystem. Social network or social media marketing can no longer be an experiment or silo in the marketing organization. Social web marketing must be fully integrated into the strategies and tactics of a variety of organizations within the business from marketing to customer contact to information technology for it to be truly successful.

Tom Eston, SocialMediaSecurity.com - @agent0×0, @socialmediasec

1. Personal information you share on social networks will be easier to find while privacy settings and privacy policies will grow more complex. One example is that Facebook will probably open up status updates to be searchable outside of Facebook to compete with Twitter. We have already seen Bing and Google ink deals with Twitter and search. This trend will continue with other popular social networks. While social networks like Facebook are making changes to application and privacy settings (Canadian Privacy ruling earlier this year), the settings presented to users will become more complex and make privacy policies more confusing to the average social network user.

2. Attacks using third-party applications will increase and become more sophisticated. For example, attackers will be focused more on exploiting popular Facebook games and applications because they are not coded by Facebook and Facebook does not do proper validation of the code. Many of these attacks will leverage trust relationships between friends and the applications they have installed.

3. Major increase in infrastructure attacks against social networks or the users of social networks. For example, we will see more attacks like the incident of Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal being DDoS’ed earlier this year. Social networks will also see an increase in attacks against the administrators and owners of these sites. Weak passwords, use of publicly available information (even posted on their own social network), and social engineering will all be used in these attacks.

Susan Etlinger, Horn Group - @setlinger

In 2010, businesses will face two huge challenges: 1) how to make customer engagement scale; and 2) how to integrate social media effectively into transactional systems and processes. We’ll also see a greater emphasis on the organizational impact. And one day, not too long from now, the term “social media” will sound completely archaic — a remnant of a time before all media was social.

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