Social media trends 2010

You know it’s getting closer to a years end, when people start forecasting trends for the following year. This time it’s really early. It’s only the beginning of November and the first selection of six trends is already online.

David Armano writes about these 6 trends:

  1. Social Media begins to look less social: as more people contribute ever more content on social networks, updates-fatigue sets in and people filter out other users for reduction of clutter. I agree, and I would like to add: social media will have less farmville and mafia wars…
  2. Corporations look to scale: companies leveraging social technology to better serve customers, e.g. Best Buys Twelpforce
  3. Social Business becomes social play: playful social (mobile) applications with a competitive component for users are used for (local) marketing.
  4. Your company will have a social media policy (and it might actually be enforced): the title says it all.
  5. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline: Due to the IT departments locking down  social sites, people will increasingly turn to their smartphones during (or instead of) coffee breaks.
  6. Sharing no longer means e-mail: Well, that is kind of obvious in times of facebook and twitter…

Social Media Counter showing the growing Social Web

A guy named gary has produced a widget which demonstrates in „real time“ the explosion of the social web. As you can see below, the rate of new content and interaction on the various social sites and applications is enormous! He writes about it:

I quickly built and coded the app based on data culled from a range of social media sources & sites at the end of Sept 2009.

On his site you can see more about his data sources, and you can also grab the source code for the widget.


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Some results from the Fiesta Movement activity

I already blogged about the Fiesta Movement social media activity. Now there are some results, published at adrants:

The program — which included a test-drive program — has elicited the interest of about 50,000 potential buyers, 97% of which don’t drive a Ford at present.

In toto, official Fiesta Movement content has drawn 4.3 million YouTube views, 540,000 flickr views and 3 million Twitter impressions.

These are quite remarkable results, indeed!

And all this is achieved with „$0 ad spent and a fraction of marketing costs“. I assume it really does compare well to traditional advertising efforts.

Yet communicating a figure of $0 seems to send out the wrong signal. The total costs (for 100 cars, the website, the staff at Ford, etc.) might be „a fraction“ of what is usually spend, but somehow I can’t imagine this whole campaing having been „cheap“.