The Cheap Revolution

Look to the future - 2010 Social Media and Internet Marketing trends

Many of us are happy to have 2009 behind us! I've enjoyed looking over the predictions and forecasts for
  2010.  I thought it might be helpful to provide a roundup of some of my favorites - and add my reflections to kick off the conversation. 

What are your favorite Internet Marketing and Social Media trends for the upcoming year?  2010 breakthroughs may present themselves as shiny, new technologies... but the biggest surprises might come from mainstream business use of stuff thats been around for some time. 

Here are some of my favorite predictions for 2010.

 1) Harvard Business Review takes an industry level peek into how we organize our social media, business scaling, gaming, mobile and more.

2) Dan Zarella, A Social Media and Viral Marketing Scientist who also works at Hubspot, talks about Social Media trends toward more IRL (In Real Life) translation, micro-segmenting, small business Social Media Marketing and the Real time Web.

3) StartupNation has a terrific set of Top 10 Internet Marketing Predictions for 2010 from Tom Now covering everything from the explosion of the US Hispanic Market online through the rise of video blogs, Digital Portfolios and your digital footprint, Location-based Marketing and Integrated Marketing.  

4) Trendwatching wins my creative insight award though... by taking a wide angle lens on all of society and culture they forearm us with predictions of embedded generosity, intention-based online profiles and Tracking & Alerting to manage our INFOLUST.   They wrap with some reflection on the opinionated, risque, outspoken - and (might I add) rude - brand speak of 2010 that emanates from the mouthpiece of the online world.  Hmm... sounds like a teenager to me. 

My Takeaways and Favorites... 

Favorite #1 - INFOLUST and too much noise.  While I haven't heard the term before, it seems to me an accurate perspective on many of our online pursuits.  This necessitates the need for Attention Filters like alerts, automated search tools, RSS feeds and aggregation tools.  Twitter Lists, Google Sidewiki and other ways for the collective to annotate our ramblings reminds me of how folksonomies are being taken to the entire Web. 

Favorite #2 - Craving of life to meet life.  IRL (In Real Life).  As a  Meetup organizer, I appreciate the value of online meetups.  Meetup passed the 50 Million RSVP mark this year, with 5 Million Meetup groups per Scott Heiferman in this YouTube video on Meetup in 2009. 

Favorite #3 - Portfolio thinking - Digital portfolio/digital footprints.  For the past year, I've been realizing and advocating that we are all going to have start thinking in terms of portfolios. In the highly fragmented world we call 2010, it is more and more likely that our money, time and attention will be coming from/directed to a wide range of sources.  How many income sources do you have?  (I can count six and growing).  How many social (online and offline) outlets do you have (I'm well over a dozen). Have you Googled yourself lately to see your Digital Footprint? 

Favorite #4 - Embedded Generosity.  The idea of seeing tighter, micro-embedding of cause-based efforts is one of the more positive trends that helps tighten the weave of our global blanket. 

What are your takeaways or favorites? What would you add? 

BTW - I know I'm missing some great trends and predictions.  If you have one, please add it to the comments below.  

Thanks - and here is wishing you a life-inspiring 2010!

-Skip

Photo credit: www.brainygamer.com

Probing my Social Network - what came back?

What  is your topmost reason for using Social Media? 

Search? 

Sales? 

Relationship? 

Build credentials? 

Recruiting? 

POV? 

Helping? 

Other? 

Two weeks ago, I posed these questions across my Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and LinkedIn.  I wanted to see what my network and reach was like for a random question.  The rest of this post illustrates some of the dialogue that arose in each of the channels.  

From FaceBook: 

Hey again everyone. Thanks again for participating. To answer Kevin's question... What is My Topmost Reason for using SM? 

To embrace my humanity more fully.

From LinkedIn:

Thanks to all of you for your responses. I have responded to most of you directly, although I didn't get a chance to respond to Steven T. Smith yet... which I'll include here. Steven called me out on this - and I agree that the question was deliberately vague. By leaving it vague, I was hoping to get a bit of an "ink-blot interpretation" response to the question... and each person had a unique take on the question. 

I also ran the exact same question across Yammer, Twitter, my blog, Facebook and here on LInkedIn. It was meant as a quick experiment to help me flesh out some some frameworks I'm putting together about human communication. (I think my friend Rick might have been running a similar experiment concurrently and hope to hear his findings!) Thank you for your insights and participation.

The early results are shared below. However, the responses not only helped to identify the wide range of potential uses of Social Media, but highlighted the different nature of some of the channels. For example, I received 3 Twitter responses in less than 30 minutes and then nothing. LinkedIn and Facebook responses continue to roll in after 24 hours. The LinkedIn responses were the most detailed and nuanced. I didn't receive any responses on my blog :-/. The size of my personal reach is different across each of these mediums - as is the strength of my relationships. While I personally know all 14 respondents in Facebook, I only personally know 1 of the LinkedIn respondents. 

Where am I going with all of this? I'm pursuing the perspective that "Social Media", Social Networking, Professional Networking, etc. all fall under the umbrella of Human Communication. The Social Media umbrella is just a set of "conversation extenders". If we start to look at them from this perspective, we can map out how the different media relate to each other, serve different purposes for different audiences - so that we can each create maps tailored to the demands of our most important conversations. 

So... here are the initial results of my little experiment. 

Twitter - 3 responses (all within 30 minutes) - relationship (stay in touch), listening, learning, sharing loves/gripes, sharing ideas, building company brand (FB, Twitter, Blog)

Yammer - 1 response (relationships, POV, credentials, search, drive sales, branding, thought leadership, listen to clients)

LinkedIn - 5 responses (recruiting, sales, promoting awareness, event notification, sharing resources, tracking business network, (email, YahooGroups), job leads, connecting with partners, market testing, feedback, recruiting, credential building, search)

Facebook - 14 responses (relationship, cheese, gossip, dating, reconnecting (FB), follow influencers, broadening relationship, family relationship/updates, deepening business relationships)

Blog - 0 responses

With gratitude to those who already participated!

How about you?  What would you add to this list? 

TribeCon kicks off conversation about Community

This week in New Orleans kicks off an important conversation about Tribe Building.  TribeCon will be held October 29-30 in New Orleans, Louisiana in partnership with the Voodoo Experience. The conference will feature inspiring and educational presentations by world-renown panelists. All panels will focus around building community online and offline, and leveraging communities to accomplish amazing things.

The lineup includes conversations about failure and community, microcontent communities, how to Rawk a new community,  community across contexts (both online and offline themes) and many others.   Sounds like a lot of fascinating topics.   As an added benefit, the conference is co-located with the Voodoo Experience - a New Orleans Music Fest featuring top tier talent. 

I'll be watching @TribeCon on Twitter, but I've been able to watch Chris Schultz and TIffany Starnes, co-founders of TribeCon create a community to help them build this conversation.  They've done a remarkable job.  

I'll also be using this as a kickoff to my series on conversations about community building.  I've asked some of the best community builders to answer five questions about community building.   As a guy who keeps trying to get the community building formula right, these are some of the insights I'm hoping Tribecon will help answer this week! 

1) How would you characterize successful communities you've helped to build?

2) what are hallmarks of building a "strong community"?

3) what are some of your community building best practices?

4) what roles need to be filled early during a communities growth?

5) what helps sustain a community over time?

Before I start blogging the community builder responses I received,  I'd love to hear your thoughts on community building.  Do you have answers to any of these questions?   What other questions would you ask community builders? 

An Integral Philly look at the Internet

One of the organizations that I'm active in is called Integral Philly.  Part of our mission at Integral Philly is to explore complex and dynamic topics using the Integral Theory lens called AQAL.   At our last meeting, we decided to apply the AQAL Lens to the rapidly changing Internet.   (Ken Wilber is the originator of the AQAL model.)

The conversation quickly jumped into a discussion of Network Theory and Six Degrees of Separation.  It seems that this idea is particularly important in the social networks we are creating and propagating across the Web.  

However, the conversation quickly ran through a gamut of topics which I captured in the Quadrant breakdown shown below.  For those of you not familiar with AQAL, the quadrants are:

- upper left.  the interior of the person.  Think of our consciousness.

- upper right.  the exterior/measureable elements of the person.  Skills, demographics, behaviors

- lower left.  the interior of the group.  This represents our culture.

- lower right. the exterior of the group.  The formal organizations we use.

In the diagram below, the four quadrants capture single phrases around a wide range of topics.  However, some of the key takeaways and discussions were captured as links between quadrants.   A brief recap includes:

1) Remember that Technology runs ahead of Morality (Blue Line).  One of the saddest moments of my career as a technologist came when I realized how a cool technology like a video camera built into a cell phone could be turned into a cyber-bulllying tool.  Imagine a boy or girl being humiliated on a playground by one or more bullies.  A 12 year old girl, thinking its funny, whips out her phone and records the whole scene on video.  The bullying video is posted to YouTube.  The next day, the bullied child with low self-esteem, now the laughing stock of the entire school, does the unthinkable.   

We are blessed daily with new technologies.  But those of us who use them, or who put new technologies in the hands of children, are obligated to recognize that morals and ethics for these devices often have not been established by our culture.  We have the responsibility of using vigilance in personally monitoring ourselves and others for moral and ethical violations that emerge from using these technologies.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. - Martin Luther King Jr.

2) Different Internet Communication Channels provide different levels of Context.  An interesting discussion started with a conversation about email and how so much can be taken out of context.  Indeed, it seems that proper etiquette in email should be required education in our classrooms today.  That said, what is the difference between the context provided by Twitter - at 140 characters of text - and live online video?  Quite a bit, I'd say.  But its interesting to think about the differences of context provided by the various Internet channels.  Live networking or "Pressing the flesh" may always be the most intimate way to interact with someone.  This item opened up an entire range of new topics for me related to mapping Internet Marketing Channels.  More on that in an upcoming blog post.

3) Working at Home has a crucial side-effect of more isolation.  Okay. I admit it.  I often communicate with my wife by email... even when she is 20 feet away from me.  I instant message co-workers who are in the same room.  How pathetic is that? 

We are becoming increasingly isolated even as we become more connected.  

4) Disembodied Surfing needs to be more present.  Have you ever zoned out while surfing the Web?  I have... plenty.  A random meditation bell software program that rings periodically, without warning, helps to bring me back to reality.  I can take a deep breath... appreciate my surroundings and begin surfing again with more presence. 

Some of the topics discussed during our Integral Philly Meetup are shown below. 

I hope you get the idea that, during the talk, we covered a wide range of topics.  One of the final areas of discussion before we ran out of time was the role that generation is playing in how people interact with the Web.   One hot topic was how Millenials relate differently to the world in particular.  Millenials are the first full-fledged Internet generation from just-about cradle and on.   

Apparently, this hasn't gone un-noticed by a number of authors.  Some books mentioned during the conversation included:

Fourth Turning by William Strauss

Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation by Neil Howe, William Strauss and R.J. Matson

and 

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

How do you relate to the conclusions our group reached?   What questions do they raise for you?

Are there other cross-quadrant topics that you'd like to explore?

By: Skip Shuda