Social Machinery

2009 was the year when social media became a mainstream media creating a paradigm shift on digital marketing opportunities, strategies and budget.

 We can expect that 2010 will deepen this media shift as the hype dissipates from Social media marketing efforts like Facebook fan pages, Twitter campaigns and other superficial attempts for bringing a more honest community factor to brands and organizations.

 This are my 5 likely truths for 2010 when it comes to social networking

1. Social networking sites will replace personal email

is quite interesting to notice that our networked address book is shifting from our email contact list to social networking sites like Facebook. The virtual friendship process starts when someone adds you as part of their community (e.g. Linkedin, Facebook) or they sent you a direct message through them. After this moment the relationship is usually manage via your social network site, making Gmail, Hotmail or any other email just a repository or message back up system. Emails are becoming redundant. Besides, emails are just one part of the communication process. In the other hand, social networks address a wider context of that process.

 2. Crowdsourcing replaces outsourcing

Social networking will start affecting all our life aspects in a crucial way. One area that is still immature, but with a great potential is social networks and labour market. Our way of working will be affected by social networks. Across many organizations, crowdsourcing will become a growing tool as part of outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize passionate communities or freelancers to lead and take part in activities on their behalf.

Prodsumers will be incorporated into the organization value chain. If outsourcing can reduce production costs by giving away organization’s tasks to outsiders, crowdsourcing brings consumers and communities into the production line. A good example is how companies like Unilever are launching open contest to the community for creating their new advertising campaigns for some of their product lines.

3. The “Cloud” dominates new service launch

With high speed broadband available everywhere, Cloud computing services will become mainstream next year. Cloud Music, Cloud Videos, Cloud Applications, Cloud storage among others will be a mass-market for 2010. A good example is how players like Apple are starting to position themselves in this arena. Apple just bought LaLa, a “music in the cloud” provider, for integrating it with their Itunes store.  Cloud computing facilitates the implementation of low cost infrastructure that can take advantage of processing power and storage capacity of internet in order to improve user’s application performance. It also leverage on the power of communities for improving services trough networked knowledge and experience sharing.

A good example is Panda antivirus, which centralizes all the information about malware, system behavior collected from their community in order to improve their application.

 4. Who will help us to manage our Digital life?

As life becomes mainly in a digital format, managing our information, social graph, transactions, social networking sites, networked address book, logins, etc. Still web 2.0 is a collection of fragmented data spread all over. Until now, nobody has been able to aggregate our digital life in a way where we can get full control of it. Just think about login details. In my case, I manage more than 50 sites where my password and username is required. Also think about managing your virtual friends, comments about you, etc. Facebook connect and OpenID have tried to address some of this complexity at least in the social networking space, but I believe that several solutions for managing our digital life will appear during 2010.

 5. The power of collectiveness

Much has been said about the power and potential of collective intelligence. From solving complex problems through crowd sourcing, to reconfiguring industries to be leaner and more innovative by harnessing the expertise of a network of independent freelancers, many of the breakthrough solutions of tomorrow will come from pooling resources and intelligence from different people or communities around the Globe. Mastering this skill will be the key for companies in the future.