The NMS team has been on tour the past several weeks, visiting clients to brief them on spanking new social media developments – from the smallest emerging platforms to the elephants throwing their weight around. And while everyone is curious about what’s up with Google+, a multitude of movers and shakers warrant an update to our social media watch list.
Here’s our latest take on social trends:
This Isn’t Twitter’s Last Peep
While doomsayers predict there’s only room for two social sheriffs in town, the rise of Google+ won’t mean the end of Facebook or Twitter.
Twitter has quietly marked more than a few major milestones in 2011, from Apple knighting the platform as the official social authenticator of iOS5 to the purchase of traffic-chomping third-party platforms like Tweetdeck. In a huge boost, Pew Research reports that 13% of online Americans now use Twitter, with adoption higher among key minorities. A full 25% of online African Americans and 19% of online Hispanics use Twitter, compared to 9% of whites.
We’re looking forward to in-feed photo and video sharing, and curious as to what Twitter’s upcoming suite of in-stream ad products will offer brands.
The Photofest Continues
Blame it on short attention spans or a need for visual stimuli. Whether it’s for fashion, design or lack of a darkroom, photo communities are developing huge followings on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.
At only 8 months old, Instagram had surpassed 5 million users and logged 1 million photo posts per day, putting a nail in the coffin of the casual digital camera.
Meanwhile, branded content runs rampant on Pinterest, a space aching for tastemakers. Wild west marketers will easily build opportunities for product placement and serialized content, much in the way they currently utilize photo-forward Tumblr (which impressively surpassed Wordpress as the key online zip code for blogs).
Our dark horse candidate is new player Intersect, which capitalizes on the wealth of geotagged content and documents how friends’ stories – you guessed it – intersect across both space and time. Brands can adopt posts to aid in their own digital storytelling, from showing off photos of fans’ first cars to following a political campaign trail.
If It’s Not in the Newsfeed,
It’s Not Going Anywhere
2011 marked the end of Facebook tabs as we knew them, making a brand’s newsfeed content strategy even more critical. While popular brands lure fans to their pages through contests and sweepstakes, keeping those users engaged and seeing regular messages has proven to be an art form.
Ninety-five out of every 100 comments and likes stem directly from a user’s home news feed, with fans rarely visiting a brand page again. Staying in their feed is a high-wire act of content creation, balancing eye-popping status updates, crowd-sourcing ideas, posing poll questions and creating commerce options in the feed as we’ve seen for everything from Transformers movie tickets to Lands’ End’s swimsuit line.
If a fan ignores 3-6 of a brand’s status updates in a row, future updates are unlikely to make it back into their feed. Facebook’s solution to getting back on track? A serious investment in advertising to pull back attention during critical campaigns.
We’ve Burst Our Geo-Social Shopping Bag
How many yoga sessions can one buy in a week? As blogs continue to punch holes in the business model pioneered by Groupon and its ilk, it seems the most viable deals are limited to those of arbitrary value (like fitness classes) or supported by bigger brands willing to take a financial hit in exchange for ad exposure. When it boils down to it, many mom and pop shops can’t pony up a deal on which they’ll only earn 25 percent of market value.
Given the supersaturation of social shopping communities (Groupon, LivingSocial, Scoutmob, Rue La La, Gilt, et al ad nauseam); their brand extensions like “jetsetter” and “family” editions; and the current collision with geosocial networks like Foursquare and Facebook Places (not to mention financial partners a la American Express), it’s no wonder consumers are feeling inundated by shopping sites that seem to have sapped the market of great deals.
How can shops break from the pack? Providing true exclusives to members and rewarding deal sharing will remain key. Moreover, networks that can best integrate mobile communications, giving merchants the ability to issue time-sensitive deals to potential customers in the area, can revolutionize the way we browse, do lunch, and discover our cities.
Watch for more check-ins to provide ‘analogue’ rewards – like this clever dog food ad – and for vendors to create on-the-go storefronts as Tesco did in South Korea.
Are Consumers Cracking the QR Code?
More than 3 billion Microsoft Tags were printed in the past 6 months. And yet, despite the proliferation and advantages of QR codes when it comes to mobile activations, the market may be leaping past them and moving directly to RFID.
The problem lies in the pay-off. Too often consumers have to haggle with a number of QR readers, fidgeting to find the perfect angle to scan a code which links them to something disappointing, like the homepage of a website. This spoils the wow factor for marketers – those of us who want to do it right, providing custom content tied to the discovery. Check out this censored Calvin Klein ad to see what we mean.
RFID, which will soon be widely available in mobile devices, can tie interactions directly to a user’s social profiles, tagging a Facebook photo, issuing a like, or checking them in to a location with a simple swipe. Customers are tiring of multi-step promotions, and RFID will provide the simplicity that so many apps fumble over.
Let Us Entertain You
For those of us more likely to couch surf than shred real waves, entertainment check-ins allow us to share what we’re watching, eating and listening to on platforms like Get Glue, which boasts more than a million users and 12 million check-ins per month. Marketers have been quick to one-up one another, providing real life and digital incentives to keep users clocking in. If Facebook rolls into the space as part of its entertainment content strategy, the playing field could quickly be razed. Group messaging also seemed like a playground to co-watch shows like Bad Girls Club, but limited reach (groups cannot exceed 25 users) poses challenges for achieving ROI.
Incentives for Influence
When it comes to identifying influencers, everyone compares against Klout. Navel gazing social media “gurus” monitor their scores daily (today I’m at 60), calculated from a myriad of metrics imported from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Klout’s ability to nail down conversation leaders by topic still needs refinement, and identifying top tastemakers can be a costly process. That being said, the value of pushing customized web experiences to varying tiers of enthusiasts (see experiments by companies like Involver) could be huge for spreading brand messages through loyalists. But don’t be quick to count out other contenders -- tools like Tweet Level and BlogLevel are keeping Klout in check by focusing on trust and topicality, so it’s still anyone’s game.