4.5 Trends for Social Media in 2010 – Katy Lindemann
Going up
- Social will expand beyond the remit of the marketing department – as it already has within the most successful social brands. Whilst brands will still continue to work with their agencies for social communication within a marketing context, businesses will increase their investment of human capital to deliver social throughout their organisation – with social playing a greater role in customer service, product & service development, research & insight and beyond.
- We’ll see a greater focus on return on engagement rather than direct return on investment when measuring the value of social communication – moving away from the fruitless struggle to apply the traditional metrics for paid-for marketing, we’ll see greater attention paid to trying to measure how greater engagement and deeper relationships deliver brand and business value.
- Adoption of mobile geolocation services will tip into the mainstream, and more traditional brands will begin to dip their toe into the development of services and applications utilising geolocation technology to interact with people on a much more personal level.
- As the thingfrastructure (Matt Jones’ brilliant description for the internet of things) develops we’ll see more physical objects becoming social – as more and more physical objects become internet enabled and technology such as RFID become more ubiquitous, we’ll see social communication moving away from the screen and into the physical world around us.
Going down
- As greater integration between different social platforms increases enabling you to automate the sharing your lifestream across multiple platforms, I predict we’ll become increasingly feeling overwhelmed by the deluge of updates across an ever-increasing number of platforms, and instead of trying to maintain a presence everywhere, we’ll focus our attention into a smaller number of platforms and communities, become both more discreet and discrete regarding how, what and where we share.
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return on engagement – yes I see that and think its a good measure.
but we will still have to find other ways of measuring costs (investment) vs what the engagement can do. I mean, there has gotta be a way to show how ROE translates into a better customer journey or a better translation of awareness down the line to purchase decision. So not using traditional paid-for ad models as you say (since they simply dont work), but finding true correlation that leads to either stronger brand preference (which should be logical to prove) if not purchase preference.
roli
Relevant and mercifully succint post – nice one!
Social media will expand beyond the marketing department: we’ve been preaching this one for years now and I only hope you’re right in that organisations will wake up to this fact. It makes getting in buy-in from all the departments tricky at times but in the long run it demonstrates to the client the need to think socially across the board and makes for a longer lasting relationship.
Return on engagement as opposed to return on investment. Absolutely and there are lots of metrics to choose from to best suit your approach (see http://econsultancy.com/blog/4887-35-social-media-kpis-to-help-measure-engagement for a selection of these). However, I’d question that social media channels are not “paid for” marketing. Social media efforts in all areas are certainly not free, requring time and resources to do properly – be they internally or externally sourced. At this stage, I think the big picture on ROE/ROI is the best approach but that’s not to say that a more direct linkage between actions and results (in $$) should not be sought. @brandbuilder is developing some interesting work in this area.
Jon Moody – @jonnybgood68
@Matthew and @JonathanMoody – yep totally agree that it’s about understanding the value of investment – social isn’t free, far from it – it takes time and money to do it right. But the current model for evaluating ROI is to clumsily applied using metrics from ‘old’ media that just don’t apply – I think it’s probably more about indirect ROI – understanding how to measure engagement, and then understanding how this engagement pays back (rather than assuming there is a direct link between social relationships and payback). So I think I’ve probably phrased it quite clumsily – it’s not that we don’t need ROI, it’s just that the current model for ROI of directly attributing payback isn’t right, and I think understanding the relationship between investment, engagement and payback is probably where we need to be…..