Why Social Media is Poised to Explode

Clement James at ITNews wrote an interesting piece recently where he outlined reasons why in 2008 social media will come into its own as a necessary online strategy for businesses.

The article referenced Will Beresford, a strategy director at Beyond Analysis who gave several predictions on where the social media is going in 2008. While I don’t necessary agree with all of Mr. Beresford’s predictions I do think that they are good discussion topics.

The predictions were:

Traditional search engines will become increasingly less relevant to the consumer and that businesses will need to rethink their online strategies.

As a result, search engine providers will look to tiered services providing more accurate results to those willing to pay.

While this will begin with services to business, Beresford expects to see tiered search services bundled into ISP packages as value differentiators.

The big three search engines disagree with this one. Search engines, especially Google, are top of mind of any marketing officer in the country. Everyone I talk to, wants to either be on Google or get more traffic from Google. The search engines are not going away in 2008. If anything I think they will increase their strength due to the increased use of search on mobile devices.

Net neutrality is a big issue, but I don’t expect to see tiered search services bundled into ISP packages as value differentiators in 2008 or the foreseeable future.

Traditional models for businesses to research their consumers are also expected to change. Customer information will be enriched by data found on the social web to supersede traditional research tools such as questionnaires and focus groups.

Feedback and influence from social networks will ultimately become more significant factors in the purchasing decision cycle.

Smaller, lesser known brands will begin to pick up loyal networks of customers who have come directly as a result of influence from within their network.

Yes I believe that social networks can provide tremendous market research and feedback to companies. Can this data be as good as what is collected offline? Absolutely.

I do agree that small companies will continue to use social networks to gain a competitive advantage over large brands. We heard about this last year from Roots.com.
The issue that has not been dealt with however is user privacy. We have seen both search engines (Google) and social networks (Facebook) get a lot of bad press in 2007 over customer privacy.

Americans feel that when they surf they are anonymous and they are very reluctant to give us that invisibility cloak. This is an issue that will be at the forefront of a lot of social media discussions in 2008.

Meanwhile, as social networking sites become ever more cluttered with advertising and branded applications, their popularity will decline.

I agree completely and have written several posts this week that niche markets will be the big growth area for social networks in 2008.

What do you think will be the big social media story in 2008?