Social Media & Digital Marketing in Singapore

Social Media Trends and Predictions for 2010

Mark started the ball rolling with his 2010 predictions for social media, and now it’s my turn to weigh in on what I think are trends going forward and what that means, particularly for businesses engaged in (or thinking of engaging in) social media.

In no particular order, here we go:

1) Simultaneous fragmentation and consolidation
From blogging platforms (Typepad, Wordpress, Blogger, Livejournal and now Posterous) to analytics platforms (Omniture, Web Trends, Google Analytics) to listening tools (Radian 6, TNS Cymfony, Techrigy, Brandtology) to social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, QQ) to search platforms (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Naver, Baidu), the choices that arise just to decide where to ‘play’ can be overwhelming.

Part of the social media sphere is that it’s inherently easy to set up these platforms at low costs and immediately compete with the big boys. As a business, have you done your due diligence to know where your target audience is and which platform works for you? Or are you really going to assume that Facebook solves all problems and use it to reach China (where Facebook is blocked)?

At the same time this fragmentation isn’t going to go on forever. We’ve seen Adobe acquiring Omniture and Facebook acquiring FriendFeed this year. The danger of investing in a platform that may have a very real chance of disappearing or swallowed up by another company in the next 12-24 months is real, so choices have to be thought through more carefully than ever.

2) Social media is becoming more exclusive
Private Facebook profiles, walled gardens like Google Wave and Twitter lists all make it even more challenging to reach the ever-elusive ‘influencer’. If someone has 2,000 friends on Facebook but his profile is private, you’ve lost a way to reach 2,000 people. Twitter lists are naturally exclusive but penetrating the right one could really help you. In-groups are forming and the later a company gets with the programme, the higher the barrier to entry. How high a barrier do you want to deal with?

3) Social media policies will be set in stone.
From the NFL to Honda to Dominos, companies are feeling the heat of not putting down hard guidelines to encourage employees to participate in social media, but to participate responsibly. Nothing is secret anymore and if businesses let employees run unchecked, it could spell big problem for the company.

4) Sentiment analysis will become increasingly important
More emphasis will be placed on sentiment analysis. Perhaps not necessarily the accuracy of it, but what can actually be done with the data. A free Google Alert can tell me everything I need to know about my brand, but can the sentiment analysis tools put data together in a way that makes cohesive sense? Can they understand native language nuances? Can they segment by country? Will the phrase “a terrific example of bad customer service” be recognised as positive or negative sentiment? As advancements in the language recognition software gets more advanced, these questions will have to be answered and listening will be more crucial than ever.

5) Mobile access points
To me, netbooks can fall in the category of ‘mobile’ these days, not just handphones. As access on the go becomes even more ubiquitous (at least in developed countries) are you ready for a proportion of your customers to be accessing your site or service online? Or are they going to be even more frustrated at the lack of usability (I’m looking at you, local cinemas)? Are you enhancing your services with the idea of mobility and flexibility, or are you still operating with the mindset that customers only think about your products and services when sitting at home, thus losing the opportunity to snag them when they may be walking right by your physical store?

6) Transparency and disclosure
Beaten over the head to death. Companies and agencies who don’t understand the idea of transparency and disclosure aren’t going to last very long. On a personal note, I think bloggers who get into pay-per-post kind of schemes are doing themselves a disservice and there needs to be a better way for bloggers and companies to work together.

Bonus: Singapore special – Blogger outreach has to change.
Speaking purely as a blogger, I’m really frustrated, no I’m more than frustrated, I’m sick and tired of agencies reaching out to me for events, products and services which are so far from something that I might be interesting that it really grinds my gears. Agencies need to learn this is as cardinal a sin as pitching the technology editor a piece of fashion news (and I don’t mean tech-news with a bit of fashion in it).

The way of doing outreach aside, the events themselves have to change. This one off ‘come to my event and touch my product and read my press release’ has to change. And bloggers need to make it known that they’re tired of it by not going, rather then going for the sake of being invited to the next one.

So there you go. Agree? Disagree? Let me know in the comments.

[this was originally a post on Digiramblings, a shared blog by four Gen Y agency folk in Singapore trying to make sense of digital and social media

Tags: 2010, asia, predictions, Singapore, social media, trends