Social Media Trends 2011

Social media changes from month to month. Trends come and go quicker than the seasons change. Having said that there are some trends that I think will continue over the coming year and with that in mind I wanted to share them here. All in all it should be an exiting year in social media with these expected trends escalating and expanding in 2011.

1. Social Commerce: 

Group buying + Facebook Commerce + Mobile Commerce

It’s all the same thing: new ways to leverage your social circle to help you shop or share your haul. Social commerce with the end goal of increasing conversions, leads, and sales started to gain attention years ago with consumer reviews and began to escalate in different methods. The connection of social media to sales, sales indicators, promotions, and other measurable or valued marketing and sales conversions, including couponing, is fueling the investment in social media as companies begin to prove the capability to drive commerce.

• Group buying: You should have heard of sites, such as Groupon, that sell for discounts if you get your friends to “group” together to buy a product or service? Like all kick ass ideas this one is incredibly simple and instantly understandable and there is something in it for everybody. Groupon and like-minded sites are expected to continue to grow, offering a new way to reach different audiences.
• Facebook commerce: 
Facebook has joined the social shopping market by launching its functionality called Facebook Connect. In short, you can now sell on Facebook by letting your customers buy, but also letting them tell their friends. And letting their friends tell their friends. Even if you don’t offer ecommerce on your website, it’s now possible to provide that service through the social network. And it’s overly simple to set up. YouTube has been recently extracted this concept with what was described as the first "YouTique" launched last September, by French Connection.
• Mobile Commerce: Mobile payments enable eCommerce merchants to expand their offerings and create new experiences on the phone, a trend we expect to see continue as mobile blurs the line between offline and online. Shopping will become even more social. Your mobile phone will soon become your identity.

2. Content Curation: Branded Content

Brands are starting to realize that one of the main ways of engaging their customers and offering value is to create content that enriches the user’s social media experience rather than just blasting messages out at them. All companies should become media companies, in that the content they provide is valuable, consistent, and non-salesy. With users starting to get more and more aware of ads and adding their own filters the smart brands will create bespoke content that engages users in a meaningful way and offers value. Building that content in to Facebook and other social sites while all hooking back to their own website will be crucial with video playing a more and more important role in the branded content play.

3. Crowdsourced Innovation

Crowdsourcing as a term and idea is nothing new, but 2011 will likely be the year where it becomes a core part of many organization’s social and customer engagement strategies. Additionally, there is an increased understanding from customers about the concept of Croudsourcing, which means it will no longer just a way of engaing the social media savvy, but rather a much broader audience who will share their ideas and thoughts with brand simply for the reward of recognition and being heard by the brands they purchase form everyday.

4. Niche Location / Location Casting

The ability to drive commerce and hence expand the potential advertising and marketing opportunities is fueling the growth of location-based social networking. Location is a key factor in the future of search, social, commerce, and media, among a lot of other things. It is the most important signal to emerge in the database of intentions since the link. If 2010 belonged to Foursquare and its playful, competitive and sometimes addicting ecosystem of badges, mayorships and specials, it's likely that Facebook will rain on Foursquare's parade in 2011 with its completed Facebook Place.

5. Social Gaming

New media models are being built based on virtual goods and currency, currently connected directly to the increasingly popularity of social games. As a category, social gaming has grown incredibly quickly, becoming one of the dominant drivers of usage on Facebook. The current leader moving this trend is Zynga, which is building a new media model from micro-transactions. From this trend, viable marketing opportunities are emerging, so-called "engagement ads." These are basically an exchange between a player and an advertiser, where players earn points or currency to raise or extend their game play in exchange for some brand-related activity like taking a quiz or sharing an ad on Facebook. The power of gaming to drive revenue and marketing benefit for advertisers, as well as its increasing capacity to catch mass engagement, is driving not only new offerings but also new partnerships, startups, and other innovations.

Continue Reading...

Vietnam's Social Media Landscape

“A lot of brands jumped in and said, ‘I need a Facebook, I need a MySpace, I need to do SEO, I need to share all of my content everywhere.” But often it’s lacked of a brand tone of voice. And it’s just created some form of presence that’s not based on strategy at all”, said Daniel King, director of digital, JWT Melbourne. In the emerging markets, which are quite young in onine marketing, the moves might be even slower and lots more problems exist. Vietnam is one of thess cases.

Vietnam has a large population (13th in the world) and half of the country is under 30. The young active Vietnamese are all over the Internet. They’re watching videos, listening to music and reading random news. They’re spending and they’re talking. But there’s little connection that companies here want to cement between those two actions. You could say Vietnamese Internet usage is almost caught up with the world. If the US and Europe are in 2011, then they are in 2008 or 2009. Yet Vietnamese online advertising is still 2002. 

1. Deny acknowledging the trend and taking the lead.

The biggest problem in Vietnam is not that brands or companies are incapable of understanding the fact of the increasing online media power. It’s just that they don’t need to. Understanding online and social media is acknowledging that online could propel an existing brand to greater heights, or it could take a nothing product to become the new star. And though there’s incredible opportunity online because no one is really strong here, no one really wants to consider what that means. 

2. Lack of knowledge 

The second problem is the proper understanding of online media landscape with its current trends and insights in order to furnish the brand strategy and motivate the business to find a real effective communication channel with the target audience with less competition and more cost-effectiveness. Many businesses in Vietnam do not fully understand how social media works and how they could use these channels effectively to benefit their brands and companies. Many marketers or managers in Vietnam may ask you what Twitter is.

3. Lack of attention to detail

Another problem is the lack of attention to detail indicate attitude of most of Vietnamese businesses when go online, especially in customer service. If social media is anything, its core is at customer service. If customer service is not important, then social media cannot be important either.

4. Lack of strategy

Although the rising power of social media, SEM and mobile services, is obvious in all over the world and rising strongly in Vietnam, most of Vietnamese businesses still got very simple reactions when going online, just like the age before social media:

“Let’s put up banners and count the impressions”

“Let’s make a microsite, spend a ton of money to fuel registrations and gather personal data, and then what we’ll do is never use that data and never follow-up. And we can do this all over again next year too.”

Traditional media channels, such as TV, print, radio, outdoor, have been here for ages and intensively competed. But online is completely open, waiting for someone to think and innovate. If you can dominate in this, you could just completely take over – no one else is here or cares. Or they just not care enough to take the lead.

Continue Reading...