The future of social media marketing is in digital storytelling; the ability to humanize a brand in ways with which people identify and are closely engaged, thus feeling invested in its future. The brand becomes an extension of the fan and they are its most compelling ambassador. Social media is more than water cooler chat and exceeds the benefits of traditional word of mouth marketing. While it provides immensely useful data about our habits in real-time, the new frontier of social media is chronicling lifestyle. When viewed not at the scale of minute by minute updates, social media provides a holistic picture of who we are and how we live. It begins to speak to customers as whole people.
The Facebook Tab’s Time is Up
With the imminent death of tabs on all Facebook brand pages, expect more options for in-newsfeed commerce and app engagement, and greater emphasis to be placed on leveraging Facebook data to build more compelling and personalized microsite campaigns.
Whereas Facebook was once the primordial soup kitchen from whence social marketers fed, the ecosystem that supported every app imaginable will soon be scaled back, in part due to Facebook’s own frustration with Like-gated marketing and a shifting desire to pump all content through the newsfeed. To be certain, Facebook knows brands will be forced to invest heavily in promoted stories in hopes of boosting brand chatter among friends and cutting through real-time clutter. Without app activity metrics, brands will redirect their quest to crack the code of social ROI, as insight metrics like “people talking about” become the new norm for engagement comparison.
Timelines will launch for brands (and for those users who didn’t hack-adopt them following the F8 Developer’s Conference). Brands with rich histories will begin to populate and leverage their own retrospectives, as well as the tales of how fans have grown with them over time. Still, despite Facebook’s efforts to unearth more personal content with timelines, users will continue to be pounded by a wealth of third party content serving up stories on what their friends are reading, watching and listening to, and the frequency of Facebook visits and content consumption patterns will begin to resemble a certain social network that limits content to 140 characters (for easily digestible reasons).
In all the marketing upheaval, expect Google+ to seize the moment to differentiate itself, and conversely, keep an eye on whether Facebook works to manipulate its ownership of the social graph to take stronger footing in the battle over search.
Geosocial Content Begins to Tell Its Own Story
While the features briefly known as Facebook Places may be gone, Facebook has recalculated its approach to social geography, integrating the players who do it right (most notably Foursquare), and using geotagging to overlay location onto any major life event, photo album, check-in or status update.
The result is an impressive map aggregating all of these moments from every place you have shared content, creating a chronological trip of your time in that area, be it the restaurants you visited or the photos you took. Recognizing that social content is increasingly mobile, most of this visualization happens seamlessly without added effort from the user. However, early adopters of Facebook Timeline have already noticed prompts with suggested geotags for life milestones (major moves, changes in career, births, etc) and any of their photo albums that are not yet location aware.
Within a few years, we’ll begin to have a socially curated history of what has happened everywhere Facebook has been adopted, allowing us to sort timelines not only by people and brands, but also places. Other platforms like Intersect have already proven this can be done with intriguing results – showing our shared experiences at specific places and times. Facebook’s user base has the power to create a mobile Wikipedia of any event moving forward, including tagging who may have been there and their unique vantage points.
Twitter Makes a Financial Play
Even though it clocks in 250 million tweets per day, Twitter has been slow to find a viable advertising model which monetizes user behavior on its network. Thus far, current ad services include promoted trends, promoted tweets and promoted accounts. Leadership at Twitter has stressed that they hope to create ads that are personally useful and reflect the content users share on their platform – and that they are in no rush (or need) to make money.
But there are high expectations to meet. According to eMarketer, Twitter’s ad revenue will grow to $400 million annually by 2013. SharesPost estimates Twitter will pull in $1 billion by 2016. But with 200 million current users (100 million of which Twitter classifies as active), the platform is still falling short, bringing in $150 million, or $0.75 per account. Comparatively, Facebook is making $3 per user with a base of 750 million fans.
What will force Twitter’s hand in 2012? Political advertising. The demand of national and local candidates hoping to reach a social savvy electorate may be the final kick in the pants pushing Twitter beyond its character-limited offerings and helping to prove the long term health of its business.
Social Data Mining Lands Center Stage in the Election Cycle
On a Digital Capital Week panel, New Media Strategies used a proprietary product called BuzzMark to highlight the accuracy of social media in predicting campaign results and polling data. Originally developed for clients in the entertainment industry, we tested it on campaigns during the 2010 elections, and it worked. In the current republican presidential primary, there is even more evidence that social media is a leading indicator for poll data when using a hybrid formula accounting for both volume and sentiment.
Social media has the potential to be much more impactful than polling. Not just because of the amount of information you have about the electorate, but also how that information is more dynamic, with people voluntarily sharing billions of pieces of personal information. The data mined from Twitter or Facebook is unprompted, from ongoing, naturally occurring conversations. Listening and measuring what is being said is an entirely new, but accurate approach, much different than focus group or traditional call centers. The real race is to master identity; companies are looking to match current databases such as direct mail and voter registration to social data.
Apple No Longer Owns the App
Though sometimes perceived as a completed house that may never be touched again, the app may be taking on new life outside of your favorite app store. Take, for example, the Financial Times mobile app (surf to app.ft.com on your mobile device), an HTML5 powered mobile app that is self-updating with no need to purchase or authenticate a download in order to utilize its full capabilities. The touch screen experience allows you to quickly flip through sections of the publication with constantly refreshed content, in-app subscription offers, search, and options to auto-download articles – all without the hassle of customizing and refreshing the app for Apple, Android, and Blackberry operating systems. This bypasses the tax on subscription services many developers face when selling through a store, and avoids the need to update versions with every rollout of new features.
Breaking Down Video Barriers
Science fiction has long prepared us for video conferencing, whether it was communicating from the bridge on Star Trek or calling home to the wife and kids on the Jetsons. So why has there been a hesitation to adopt video chatting by the mass market? Some may blame it on poor privacy settings or stranger danger on sites like Chat Roulette, but even Facebook’s recent Skype integration went off without much use or fanfare, despite limitless value for video chat in both business and education.
The tide is changing, however, as viewers are tuning in and turning cameras on to interact in town hall meetings and celebrity chats on Yowie and Google Hangouts with the Muppets. Whether you actually video chat with friends and family in 2012 is a different matter, but expect brands to bring you closer to their executives, developers and spokespeople, and perhaps engage in creative crowdsourcing opportunities throughout the next year.
LivingSocial Makes a Sprint to Surpass Groupon
While Groupon has found itself floundering after IPO and Super Bowl blunders, LivingSocial continues to show skill and growth entering the holiday season, offering up Black Friday deals to those of us who’d rather shop at home than risk being pepper sprayed.
The two competitors have been at each other’s throats for most of 2011, with LivingSocial boldly declaring in March that it planned to overtake Groupon by January 2012. While that goal is still quite ambitious given Groupon’s market share, Groupon has left itself vulnerable, suffering from diminishing website traffic, a flailing reputation among consumers (read: a lot of bad press), and most recently, stock falling below its IPO price – which was only half of the $25 billion valuation for which the company had aimed. 
As the daily deals market has benefitted heavily from instant deals and mobile extensions in 2011, and with Facebook retiring from the space altogether, expect LivingSocial to seize the moment and do everything possible to lockdown better vendors, mass market appeal and more innovative partnerships to edge their way to the front in the new year.
Brands Start to Care What Siri Says
Siri, the iPhone 4 personal assistant, has been the most lauded and joked about feature of Apple’s latest release, as users marvel at her ability to respond to voice activated requests with accuracy and wit. Siri leverages databases like Yelp and Wolfram Alpha to aid users in identifying planes overhead or finding the closest Italian restaurant, among other needs. From a brand perspective, having Siri recognize your product or retail location can be key to discovery and future business. Keeping accurate records in all of the databases Siri pulls from will help brands be recognized as they bypass their own internet searches and let Siri do the work for them.