3 Helpful Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2010

I read a lot of 2010 predictions to end up with 3 that I felt were truly helpful to a seasoned marketer from a major business. There are a lot of common clams out there from "this is the year of mobile marketing" to the many ways people guess that location-based marketing will take off (this ranges form the 'augmented reality' fans to the predictions that Four Square is a harbinger of major innovation).

Presuming you already have loads of social media marketing expertise and that your primary purpose is to work with major brands in B2C and even B2B, here are three predictions for social media marketing in 2010 that are worth taking action around:

Brands and Marketers will invest in Data Analysts to Inform Their Social Media Marketing Efforts

As I have said so often this past year, many of our larger brand clients have been focused on measurment and adding scale to their social media efforts. There is a rich set of measurement options now available. Just look at WOMMA's recent Metrics Guidebook which compiled some of the leaders. "Scale" is still not well understood. We have our own models for adding scale. Both areas remain new and non-standard. Brands will stop waiting for Godot and they will realize that their currently-staffed internal marketing measurement teams can't provide the real answers they need about how well their social media investements are paying out. 

Marshall Sponder put it pretty succintly in his prediction post; "...in 2010,  data analysts will become hot property for marketing departments..."

He goes on to claim that clients will demand PR firms (he works in PR) to have these capabilities. I would go further and say that brands, themselves, will invest in new positions as they tire of trying to make partner-measurement models work for their unique situations.As their investment in social media programs rises, they will see the wisdom in investing in internal data analystics that will be dedicated to establishing trustworthy models for performance and business value metrics that can be shared across the organization.

Social Media Staffing Models Established Within Enterprise
We do a lot of organizational planning for clients - mapping workflow, identifying staff and repsonsibilities in marcom and customer service. Most brands are learning from doing and by making incremental hiring decisions (everyone seems to go through the "hire-one-expert" phase and then evolve into building a team and infrastructure to accomplish social business goals). Innovators like Intel, American Express, Best Buy and more have created teams internally to address their needs in social media. One common model is the "center of social media excellence" which forms a federation of members from all disciplines who are executing social programs. they come together to share best practices, establish policy and build an integrated capacity.

As brands invest more deeply in social and reap benefits across marcom and customer service, they are defining their dedicated staff needs in new job descriptions from content strategists to social customer care to community managers. Who manages the brands Facebook presence now distributed across a collection of pages and fueled by a CMS sustem like Vitrue or BuddyMedia? The whole purpose of that particular strategy is to cultivate "everyday engagement" and it reqiuires commitment and human-hours to execute.  That's just one example of a labor-intensive (yet efficiient) new requirement.

Jay Baer from Convince and Convert put it this way in a post featured on his site and in a compilation of predictions from Conversation Agent which has some good ideas.

"In 2010 we’ll see the emergence of best practices around real-time Web staffing. What types of employees are needed? Do you need round-the-clock monitoring? What’s the role of the agency, in comparison to the brand? All of these questions are being answered by brands via trial and error today."

Look for more mature staffing models. But don't look for them to be shared as openly as social media guidelines have been. Business will want to protect the investment in trial and error that led them to a staffing model that works. They will see that as a competitive advantage.  Brands will need to participate in more exclusive 'clubs' like WOMMA's Brands Council or the Social Media Business Council to get access to this depth of sharing. 

Blogs Will Resurface As The Popular Hub for Brand's Social Media Effort

Taly Weiss tweets on page 37 of her Trendspotting Predictions in 140 Characters presentation, "Blogs will continue to flourish as people realize that micro-blogging needs a "home base"."

This year blogs will redefine themselves for brands. They will be the fast-publishing and 'voice of the brand' option for many brands who now have experience in social media via Twitter and Facebook and have a new confidence in expressing themselves socially. It is likely that many brand web sites will merge with their blog. Rather than the awkward examples of this to date where the blog no longer looks or behaves like a blog (more like just another page within the Web 1.0 Web site), we will see Web sites that bear many of the attributes of blogs and Web 2.0 (spontaneous, shareable, subscribable, etc...).

Blogs are not passe. Quite the opposite. They will become a valuable "get more" destination that corporate Twitter handles and Facebook "walls" can point people to.

  

also:

Heather Rast at Insights and Ingenuity put together a helpful index of many marketing-related predictions form across the Web. You can access it here.
http://insightsandingenuity.com/2010/01/01/reflections-predictions-and-trends-2010s-new-day/

also, Taly Weiss at Trendspotting has a clever deck on Slideshare that compiles the "tweet-predictions" of many of the usual subjects - 37 slides worth!

Comments

[Dr. Taly Weiss]

Thanks John for the follow-up.
Taly, TrendsSpotting

[Adam Gray]

Thanks for a fantastic article.

I think that not only will blogs redefine themselves for brands, I think that we will see many blogs redefine themselves AS brands as they decide to try and monetize their efforts.

An interesting year ahead as things begin to resolve themselves.