Six social media predictions for 2111

Yes, that's right: 2111. It's not a typo.

It's that time of year again when everyone likes to make predictions and outline what is going to happen next year in a certain field. Personally I'd like some of these predictions to be a little more sports orientated and a little more score specific but in lieu of that I can make do with a prediction of what social media is going to offer 100 years from now*:

1. Facebook will improve safety standards in its moon mines
They have been promising that less children will be killed down the Facebook mines of Crisium, but this year CEO Lord Mark Zuckerberg IV has promised that the mega-corp will start to require more stringent safety checks, better breathing equipment and at least two meals a day for under-fives.

2. Apple will upgrade its BrainBook
We spent most of 2110 complaining about the BrainBook that many of us have had implanted directly into our brains, but Apple chairman Mike The Situation XI recently unveiled the new, slimmed down BrainBook that he says will not crash when people walk through metal detectors and says Apple have found the bug that led to the 4,657 head explosions last year.

3. Twitter will reduce tweets to just 45 characters
Twenty-second Century teens are going to get their way and the current outmoded tweets will be reduced so as to reduce the laborious time it takes to send and receive messages of 46 characters.

4. More stores will adopt the MindMeld app
It's controversial, but it's working. The MindMeld app, which allows stores to directly interface with the brains of consumers will be THE hit of 2111. Expect to return home with goodies you didn't even know you needed. Really, you'll leave the house for bread and milk and return with a drill and foot powder.

5. The first pre-natal Facebook page will be opened
Facebook says it's coming and it probably will be 2111 when it allows the under-zeros to get online and create a profile without parental intervention. Wombbook(TM) will link directly to neo-natal clinics, allowing instant upload of scans onto profile pics and fetuses will be able to tweet directly to their mother, demanding more or less ice cream covered curly fries.

6. We'll finally receive the blog posts from those astronauts on their way to Alpha Centauri
Nasa says they are coming all the way from 2087! Did they make it? Did Astronaut Denise hook up with Cosmonaut Sergei? Who grew the best facial hair?


*This of course ignores any possible nuclear wars, zombie diseases or worse, Sarah Palin becoming President.

Demographics to die for

I stumbled upon these great infographs by @TweetSmarter that show exactly how all-encompassing Facebook and Twitter is today. But the thing that stands out the most is how great the social media demographics are.

We all know young people use Facebook and Twitter but as these graphs show, the majority of users are young, upwardly mobile, have cash to burn, educated, travelled and revisit the sites everyday. That's a brand manager's wet dream, so why aren't companies taking the social media experience by the horns?

Of course some are, but as this recent study indicates the biggest brands in the world are pretty much ignoring Facebook. Most don't communicate with their followers, most do not allow followers to comment and most do nothing more than paste a few offers and logos onto their page.

The problem is this demographic is to die for, but it's also the demographic marketeers are most scared of. The report indicates that less than a quarter of measured consumer communications through social media with big brands are positive. Many are questions, many are complaints and many are just not information the brand is interested in.

Seems to me brands need to man up. This isn't the world of smug Don Drapers anymore, the consumer can and will answer back. They are smart, they are savvy and they are taking control. Brands have two options - keep doing what they are doing and wait for this pesky social media trend to finish (tip: it isn't going to, sorry) or they can wake up to a new world where you communicate with the little people or suffer.

JC Penney doesn't get it

Facebook usage took a strange turn today with JC Penney opening an online store on its Facebook page. Exactly the same as the online store at jcpenney.com.

The department store now allows followers to buy 250,000 items through its fan page. It says it will allow the store to reach more customers and will be able to help them see who is buying what, information all retailers love.

I don't get it. Online stores offer the same as real stores but allow you to buy from the comfort of your own home or on your smart phone. I get that. But a Facebook store will allow you to buy from one website that is very similar, maybe even inferior (the store will be restrained within the coding of Facebook) to that at jcpenney.com, which is just a click away.

Why would you bother buying from a Facebook page when you can already buy from a website? People like convenience but surely no one is too lazy to type 12 characters in an address bar or even click one link? One thing Facebook hasn't really overcome is people's hesitation to transact real money through the site - the marketplace, Facebook credits, it's all in its infancy.

This, for me, is another example of firms not getting what Social Media can do. Yes, it can channel more custom, but smart SM would have allowed JC Penney to get more users onto their online store. If you 'Like' JC Penney it is very likely you have already visited jcpenney.com and even if they hadn't, a link would have been on the Facebook page.

They could have used the Facebook page to offer exclusive coupons, codes and offers. They could have asked users what they want from the online store, what they want from the real life store....they could have spent more time and money ENGAGING with people instead of wasting time and money on something they already have.

Financials are missing the golden ticket

Unsurprisingly, a new report suggests that financial firms are not on the top of people's friend lists when it comes to social media - friends that financial firms need to desperately make.

The study by Fiserv found that 53% of Americans have no interest in connecting with a financial firm on a social level. Why should they? We are all living through tough economic times thanks to financial firms. They are faceless, unapologetic and frankly about as popular as a fart in a spacesuit.

But it is not the job of people to connect with the financial firms - right now it should be the financial firms who are trying to connect with people. They should be getting online and talking to their clients, helping them out and giving them advice FOR FREE.

But that's not the general tact of financial firms. Having worked as a financial journalist for the last few years I know for first hand experience how user unfriendly banks, wealth managers, pension providers and insurers are. There is very much a one-way street of communication with them and for the media and the population that is massively frustrating. They don't care about what people think of them because their business isn't reliant on being liked.

But social media should be being embraced by the financial firms. They should be getting out there, saying sorry and explaining how they can help people going forward. It means local stores, advisers, brokers, salesmen and PR people talking to their community, giving back. It's not difficult and people would be open to a financial firm being honest and forthright. It would help their industry win politically and would help their businesses become a social good rather than a social ill.

Also, any financial professional will tell you that the number one problem in engaging clients and successfully selling product is consumer education - if you could engage consumer you can teach them why they need certain financial products.

Financial firms need to change their attitude towards their customers. The world is changing and their omnipotent power is being questioned. They should be getting down off their pedestals now before it's too late.

Twenty minutes too late

According to some new research from some blog scientists I should have posted this blog about 20 minutes ago so as to get maximum effect. Damn.

Also, it seems, I should be mainly tweeting on Thursdays between 10:30 and 11am, retweeting on Fridays around 2pm and sharing on Facebook on Saturdays before noon. Better get this programmed into my planner...

This isn't a new idea, working on publications you have to be very aware of when people are reading your articles or clicking on links. We used to create our own charts and found that most stuff was read before 8:30am. Unfortunately this led to a war of attrition between us and a rival publication as to who could get emails out fastest. We began shooting them off at 7:30, so they hired a guy in Mumbai to do it at 2am. His name was Anash, he was a pretty lousy journalist but he was prompt.

So were they better off hiring a dud to get stuff out first? Would I be better off getting up an hour earlier to do this blog? Probably not - we didn't lose numbers after our rival hired the 2am Indian, but we did get a few comments from readers about the falling quality of our rival's articles.

No matter how fast the Internet gets, quality has to come first. You can be the first out with a pile of manure or you can spend a little more time and a little more love on something that ticks all the other boxes except for breakneck speed.

Twits start the Tweet Race

All brands want to utilize social media and are now either riding on the SM wave or running to keep up. But you get the impression many of them still just don't get it.

Audi and Mercedes are aiming to compete via social media this Super Bowl with Tweet races; as USAToday reports, both car firms will "offer hefty prizes to consumers who best use unconventional social-media tactics to tweet and digitally tout the foreign brands before the Super Bowl".

So instead of spending time engaging with people the super brands are just going to throw a few cars at people who are willing to do all they can to Tweet, Facebook, Blog and generally whore their communication outlets and digital networks out for a prize.

Urgh.

This is a cheap trick and I hope it is a 2010 fad. Mercedes and Audi aren't interested in harnessing social media, they want to jump on it and use it as a way to avoid having to buy a Super Bowl ad. They don't want to engage with their audience, they do not want to listen to what their fans want, they just want their brands yelled out louder than those on display at half time.

MySpace stopped being a social media outlet because it let brands hijack it and they used it to shout rather than communicate. I only hope other brands realize this isn't what social media is about.

You can’t force cool

This morning I was sent a link to participate in a new hip, cool Facebook game called the Number Game. I didn’t bother getting to the end of the game’s rules but needless to say it was complicated and irritating. Something about codes in status updates that tell your friends what you really think…..urgh.

The thing that did catch my eye was the picture alongside the game page, which said “let’s go viral” as if to plead with users to help it become an Internet smash hit, like that sneezing panda or all those porn sites.

It reminded me of when I was 17 and some equally geeky friends and I randomly decided to ditch class for the day some time near the end of the year. We had a crappy car, somehow we got hold of a crate of beers and we went to a park far enough away from teachers. It was a glorious hot day, we had fun and we even met some real life girls. It was just one of those perfect days where everything went right. The next day one of our friends, who’d been too chicken to ditch, was green with envy. We regaled him with the random brilliant day and he decided to try and plan another ‘random’ day so as to not miss out on more fun. He even set a date when he knew he could get out of class safely. He just didn’t get it.

It’s the same with social media fads – you can’t force it. Attempting to make stuff ‘go viral’ is like our friend trying to recreate that perfect day we had. There are innumerable ‘viral marketing’ guides out there showing you how to "make it viral", probably made by that friend of mine and others like him who are desperate to recreate something.

Viral happens because it’s well placed, because it hits the spot, because it’s funny, because it’s shocking, because it's original or simply because it’s cool. You can get the word out as much as you want but unless it’s an original and intelligent PR stunt then no one is going to click on it, no matter how well you plan or plead.

Lighten up LinkedIn

I’ve just joined LinkedIn and it was great to find loads of my former contacts and colleagues on there but of all the social media outlets I have begun to explore, LinkedIn is the most tedious.

Like a bad business meeting, LinkedIn is full of boring people with little to say. There are a lot of people trying to be overtly ‘professional’, something that turns me off right away. It has the feel of a conference where no one really knows each other and not many people really want to be there. It’s dull, basically. This is why I have come up with a few ways that LinkedIn could spice itself up:

1. Create Facebook style games

Yes, you may have been down in your half-year results compared to your business rival but you kicked her ass on LinkedIn Farmville. So what if you lost that big contract to the other supplier? He sucks at LinkedIn Angry Birds!

2. Add an anonymous gossip wall

Imagine the fun you could have posting all those little peccadilloes online to share with your network? Yes, it could destroy people’s lives and yes, it could lead to lawsuits galore but it would be fun, wouldn’t it?

3. Be more truthful with how you really know contacts

At the moment you have to have been a ‘friend’ or a ‘colleague’ or have ‘done business together’ – come on, let’s tell the truth: I want to be contacts with x because ‘I want to ask him out’ or ‘she annoys me sooooo much but I love seeing the stupid stuff she posts online’ or I want to be contacts with x because ‘once me and him got super wasted and went to this strip bar and oh my God, it was off the hook!’.

4. Rate contacts

How cool would it be to give that dirtball you had to deal with last month one star? Oh, or that bitchy secretary that never passes on your messages? Also, LinkedIn rewards could also be given in lieu of real bonuses, a great tool for those stingy bosses during the holiday season: “I know you expected a bonus this year but look I gave you two extra stars! Merry Christmas!”

You may argue that all these suggestions would lead to animosity, fights, time-wasting and relationship break-ups - but surely that's what office life is all about?

Facebook, as cunning as a fox

Facebook, it seems, is as cunning as it is popular. It’s new profile changes have been welcomed by its global users but there might be more to it than a simple gift from Mr Zuckerberg.

As soon as the new profile settings were launched yesterday my wall was inundated with updates from friends who’d updated their personal information so as to fill the new profile bar.

On the surface it looks like a simple design change so as to offer up even more information and make Facebook even more accessible. Facebook says Facebook will now have “more ways to show and tell your story”. Thank you Facebook, we’re not worthy. 

But I think I am going to agree with @daveknox who has taken the cynical view to the changes. For him, the new profile switch-a-roo is a clever way of getting us to stuff our pages with sweet, sweet information ripe for the plucking.

The profile information is now top and centre and it will encourage people to keep updating. Mmmmm sweet information – music tastes, career paths, home towns, favourite TV shows, political leanings – great stuff Facebook can sell and take one more step towards taking over the world becoming even more awesomely awesome.

So is this all bad? One hand this info is out there, people have filled in their profiles, but now they’ll be inclined to do it more often. Also, our information – from who we vote for to what we bought last week – is recorded and sold one hundred times over so this isn’t new. But on the other hand this is Facebook becoming less cool and more, well evil. Facebook used to be an exclusive club but now it’s a bit like a corporate market research exercise and that’s a little bit sad.

Right, better update my profile….

Good tweeting is good dental care with rappers

After my first foray into Twitter, I have reasoned that most people are not yet sure what Twitter is for. I’m certainly not sure what Twitter’s for, but I know who and what I want to listen to, and right now it’s dental advice from GhostFace Killah.

Is Twitter a megaphone? Is it a handy alternative to group emails? Is a cheaper and equally personal version of a text message? It seems like it is a bit of all three from what I have been seeing – people giving each other online high fives, some people sharing an opinion, lots of shared links and ideas and some inane, boring chatter. It’s all a bit loud right now, it takes a lot to get through some of the noise and see the real interesting tit bits.

All I know is, right now I want to hear more dental advice from GhostFace Killah. Mr. GhostFace was one of the main members of the Wu-Tang Clan and it seems a vociferous advocate of good oral hygiene, well if some of his recent tweets are anything to go by:

and these:

and this:

And it went on, and on and on. Follow him @GhostfaceKillah and see for yourself, it's brilliant.

For me, Ghostface’s tweets ticked most of the buttons on ‘what to follow’: He was telling us something we all should know (he is right, we all should brush our tongues more), he was passionate (he obviously believes in brushing at least twice a day) and whether he was intentional or not, he was hilarious and entertaining. And do you know what? I will be brushing dat f*****’ s*** tonight to get rid of dat f*****' corroded bacteria.

Tweeters need to engage their followers and they need to tell them something or share something, otherwise it seems as though it’s just an alternative to texting, which is kind of boring and isn’t going to get the message out there. Ghostface Killah is obviously crazy and I’m pretty sure from listening to Enter The Wu-Tang he hasn’t got much in the way of dentistry qualifications but he did engage me and he has got my tick. I look forward to more of his tweets in the future.

TMI (Too Much Information)

Looking at social media, it is easy to see that there is Too Much Information out there and that could easily fall into the wrong hands.

Some PR professionals back in London introduced me to the benefits of social media in journalism and PR. One of the first things they advised me to do was to privitize my Facebook account. This came as a shock to me initially as I didn’t think anyone was interested in stuff like this but they informed me that the first thing they did as a firm was to peruse Facebook to see what sort of person they would be hiring.

So lesson No.1 when it comes to social media – never click this:

But it seems that many of us have a lot more information out there than we think that can’t be hidden with a click. According to Mischa Tuffield’s blog, my very own National Health Service, the British Government-sponsored healthcare scheme, has attached Facebook social features that allow your searches on the NHS website to be tracked and shared with a third party or even a fourth party.

I am used to living in a country where you are monitored quite closely but this is definitely TMI for the Internet. I can live with a few drunken shots of me trying to make out with a houseplant but to share my most private medical information is unnecessary at best and at worst a worrying move towards some kind of online Totalitarianism.

And why do they even need information this private, this specific? I can understand if Target or Walmart want to know what I am shopping for and to be honest that's information they can have (if I'm lucky my peanut M&Ms obsession will get them refilling those aisles a little quicker) but surely my medical searches help no one?

I worry about a future where, instead of being offered winter jackets when I check my email I am offered laxatives or pregnancy test kits. Where once I was put on mailing lists for new DVD releases now I am on lists for creams for rashes that I'd prefer to remain between me, my doctor and the inner lining of my jockey shorts.

I may be able to walk into the doctor's office and they'll already know what's wrong with me but then I might be able to walk into a bar and the bartender will also know what's up with me after a quick look on Facebook.

Unfortunately it seems that there are no handy privacy settings on the Internet at large, I can hide those pictures of me with my pants down but I can’t hide my most personal medical ailments. I am learning that while I want to share information using social media there is plenty of information I do not want to share. The best thing we can do is be careful what we say to who and when we say it. Much like real life, I guess…

Bad bloggin'

I recently found a statistic that says 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blogs. Straight off the bat I immediately wanted to know how much of that brand chat is positive or negative – it might be a glass half empty kind of view but I’m guessing a lot of that isn’t great advertising.

Looking for an apartment in Minneapolis recently, myself and my wife checked each rental firm’s customer reviews and searched them on Google to find any hate blogs that detail exactly how many mice they had in their kitchen or told us about the time the landlord kicked their puppy down the stairs. There were a few for each firm, people ranting about how they got stiffed for $200 or how the hall smelled of cheese, all the time. This didn’t enamor us to the properties but we went anyway and we met some firm’s reps and they were mostly quite lovely and their properties quite lovely also.

So were these bloggers lying? Probably not entirely. If you are pissed, you want to shout and the Internet is a great way of getting your voice heard but because there is no one to shout otherwise you can elaborate – the mice were massive, the cheese smell overpowering, the evil landlord was definitely a child catcher (just look at his moustache, dude).

Also, some of these apartments had maybe 100 renters, of which maybe five blogged. Simply, getting people to blog about how great a brand is or how wonderful a service is isn’t easy. Not one of the apartment blogs waxed lyrical about the quality of the AC or detailed how attractive the friendly janitor is, especially when he takes his shirt off to fix the young ladies’ extractor fans. You expect good service and hot janitors, you don’t feel compelled to write about it.

BUT this might not be all bad. A recent NYT article found that a particularly vile person was using complaints and hate blogs to up his Google ratings and get more custom. In the article, Google wouldn’t confirm whether it based its analytics on sentiment. It obviously doesn’t if Mr ‘I know where you live’ got into the top three searches.

So if Google doesn’t care if it’s bad news or good news, is bad blogging a good way of getting a message out there?

Maybe not forever. Threatening people down the phone can only bump you up Google for so long before the Feds come-a-knockin’ and there are enough people out there who can, you know, read and will notice a health food brand has made its way up to the front page because hundreds of cute kittens have been murdered by the firm, not because it makes a delicious cat-flavored health shake.

The key is to reply and get engaged. One of the landlords I asked admitted his firm would look better if it actively replied to bad blogs, maybe citing little things like 'the truth' and denied the scurrilous rumors about his facial hair. The lady in the NYT article would not have dreamed of buying from the evil online vendor if she had read any of the hate blogs posted and I doubt I'd be sipping on a health shake I'd found online if I'd taken the time to read about the kitty genocide.

A lot of goings on, it seems.

One of my main gripes against social media is that it isn’t very social. I mean it is social; it’s just that not many people I know socially use it. I asked, like all my friends and none of them Twitter and one of them thought LinkedIn was a website to buy sausages.

The problem is I have been asking the wrong people.

According to Jake Hird at eConsultancy 175m people log onto Facebook every day. That’s more than the population of Pakistan, and there are loads of people in Pakistan.

Thanks to @nickburcher, I found that there are 106m Twitter accounts, of which 15m are active. That’s a lot of text speech, in fact there are 640 tweets every second, and bearing in mind a M134 minigun only shoots about 50 bullets a second, there’s a lot of twittering going on as well as facebookin'.*

As for blogging, 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours a week doing what they love, which according to a scary coach is around the amount of time one would have to be working to be able to handle a triathlon (ironically more blogging means less chance of being able to handle even a junior triathlon but still, I digress).

Interestingly, 7 out of 10 bloggers mention brands without being pushed. Of course many mention the brand with the prefix ‘here’s why I hate…’ but still, all news is good news.

With all this twittering, facebooking and blogging it’s a miracle anything is done in the English-speaking world. But then maybe all the social networking is getting stuff done?

*That said, the top Twitterer on Earth is Ashton Kutcher, so there’s room for all those involved to clean up the network.

The experiment

I woke up yesterday and I realised I still lived in the first decade of the 21st century. I thought I was with it, I thought I knew what was what online. I use Facebook, I get all my recipes off of Google and tell people I invented them myself and I now even argue with my parents via Skype.

But I am not of this new decade. I still think Twitter is for Aston Kutcher to tell us what he had for breakfast. I mainly use Facebook to share my views on the weather and post drunken photos that would have been better off hidden before social media was invented. To me, LinkedIn is full of out of work weirdoes and blogging is the domain of the failed writer.

I still live in the world where social media is a bit of a laugh where blogging is the domain of the disturbed, the drunk and the angry. To us in the noughties, Blogs, Tweets, Links and Posts are primarily for people to share YouTube clips of children being hit by stuff.

So I need to speed up and realize that this isn't the case. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging - they are all tools to get the word out, to get the word around and to find out what the word even is. But it isn't as simple as logging onto my Twitter feed a bit more often and to tell people what I had for breakfast, it's about linking up with people, trading ideas and yes, laughing together at terrified fat kids.

So this is my social media experiment. Step one: find out what all the fuss is about.