Back to the Future

The year 2010 will be about social media coming of age,
albeit in select ways. Some relevant trends:

Social Media For the Enterprise: 2010 will be the year
where the enterprise look towards social media for providing internal solutions
for interaction, learning, fun! By 2010 end, internal emails should be pass
with people/organizations sharing news, information, and updates through their
internal social networks.

Search Will Open Up: If Facebook opens itself to search,
that in itself would be the single most revolutionary development in the social
media environment for the year 2010. Google may also bring its social search out
of the labs as a service, which again would shift the paradigm back in favor of
Google as the enduring, preferred search mechanism. Real-time search will gain
ground.

Greater Focus On Tracking and Monitoring: Rigorous social
media monitoring will emerge as one of the key focus areas for brands and
organizations, in addition to their outreach and engagement initiatives over the
social web, a symptom of maturing digital campaigns. While social media
monitoring has relevance for several other sectorsgovernance, e-journalism,
etc, it will be interesting to see if its potential gets tapped in 2010.

The Year of the Mobile, Finally: While for the last two
consecutive years, weve been beckoning the arrival of the mobile as the next
big thing, 2010 looks like the year that mobile will finally get third-time
lucky. While it is already the ubiquitous device, the mobile itself is
increasingly becoming the first tool for social media consumption, making it
seamless and instantaneous. People would publish, consume, and share on the go!

Collaboration Among Social Media Stakeholders: One of the
crucial trends that 2010 will see materialize is the coming together of the
various stakeholders within the social media landscape for sharing, learning,
collaboration as well as fun. 2010 will see this coming of age of the Indian
social media scene through such collaborative initiatives.

Convergence Across Media: Increasingly, all media are
coming togethertextual, audio, visual. Google Wave is one such examplea cross
between chat, wiki, and email. Convergence would gain credence and adoption
across platforms, and even in social advertising!

Augmented Reality: The much touted phenomenon of
augmented reality, only witnessed in science fiction, may not entirely
materialize, but will surely develop further. While we already rely on LinkedIn
and Facebook to profile/ sample people before we meet them, or meet over Twitter
before a real-life face-off, extensive social profiling is something to look
forward to. For instance, foursquare is a well known location-based network.
This is also convergence in the sense that offline and online identities
eventually come together, where the hitherto separate persona and the person
come together as one.

Social Gaming: Farmville and Mafia Wars have only shown
the tip of the iceberg in 2009, and this potential of purely fun-based
engagement on the social web will be tapped further this year.

Interest Based Tribes Mature: Just like anything that
comes of age, social media would also become boring in general. However, theres
respite in the fact that specific interest groups, as they mature, could become
even more intensely active. However, these enhanced tastes imply that while 2009
was the year of unfriending, well gradually move to the year where people
will un-join communities and un-fan pages that lie dormant on their social
circuit. Brands will have to provide value to be on peoples social radars.

Revenue For Twitter: Twitterthe shiny object having lost
its sheen by now, would be relevant for its use-value, and not just its glamor
quotient. This in turn also means that 2010 is the one for Twitters growth as a
business offering, it having fared well at the numbers growth in 2009.

Manpreet Kaur

The author is knowledge manager, Blogworks, a strategic social media
solutions firm

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in