So here is one more thought about the new year. Undoubtedly we’ll see even more Social Media activity in the new year. Especially in Germany, where I am located, there is a lot of activity to be expected, since we’re always playing catch up to what is happening in the US.
deft lab offers a list of Social Media Predictions for 2008, looking at the various big players that are out there, grouped by networks, technologies and blogs / microblogs.
Interesting. There is a post at the „social media today“ blog that states that conversational marketing will outpace traditional marketing by the year 2012. The main obstacles at the moment seem to be:
“Manpower restraints†– 51.1%
“Fear of loss of control†– 46.9%
“Inadequate metrics†– 45.4%
“Culture of their organizations†– 43.5%
“Difficulty with internal sell-through†– 35.8%
The second point should be easier to manage, once the first point has been solved. But that needs success on point 5, which depends on point 3, because point 4 necessitates success on point 3. Confusing? Yes. But doable. And very necessary.
Clever, very clever indeed. Google announces the Open Hand Set Alliance and liberates the 33 participating mobile phone operators from the claws of proprietary systems. From the Google Blog:
Android is the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices. It includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation. We have developed Android in cooperation with the Open Handset Alliance, which consists of more than 30 technology and mobile leaders including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC and T-Mobile.
It appears to carry very similar objectives as OpenSocial which was announced only last week. Google seems to favour open standards, so that the web as a plattform and mobile phones as the future personal device for everything will stay open and free. This should enable innovation to the benefit of the user, no doubt about that! But it might also serve Google quite well.
Why? I can only guess: Googles revenue models are still mostly built on advertising. So Google needs scalability in customer reach, which they can only keep increasing with ready access to information and users. As social networks are obviously becoming the dominating platforms for users to interact with, and mobile devices probably being the first choice for going „online“, then Google needs to be able to freely play on these grounds.
In the future, I think the key to revenue will most likely not reside in just delivering content, i.e. producing or transporting it, since there will be soooo much of it. And it is very labour intensive to produce it. Instead, it is much more efficient to
Regarding the second point, I think it is fairly obvious that Google should be way ahead of the competition in gathering the necessary user data. Think about Google Toolbar, Google Analytics and Google AdSense, nevermind the main site, the search engine itself. They should have better tracking data than anybody else, which they can put to work for solving the second point above.
One thing that can stop the (nearly) endless scaling of Google’s model into the long tail of every single social media profile and mobile device is „artificial“ restrictions such as walled gardens and operating systems. So: very clever to launch initiatives to at least partially open up social networks and mobile phone operating systems.
Joe Jaffe, who just released his new book „join the conversation“ (and very successfully bumrushed the charts on amazon) also conducted a study (together with the Society for New Communications Research and TWI Surveys) on how marketers might shift their budgets to conversational findings.
Here is an excerpt from his blog (the whole study is here):
The rest you can find in his new book. I should get mine soon, amazon already notified me, that it shipped yesterday. (I helped Joe bumrush the charts on Sunday … )
Wo ich sonst so bin...