A place for my stuff | by Ian Ketcheson
{ Monthly Archives }
I guess these would be my prognostications for the evolution of “social media” in 2007, written from a Canadian perspective.
First, I believe that 2007 will be the year that real money starts moves into the social media space, with corporations, governments, and organizations of all stripes finding ways to embed social media in their monitoring, outreach, and other PR functions.
The roll-out of “real” initiatives that embed social media will result in a degree of cynicism from purists and a feeling of hangover from those who were drunk on the promise of “pure” social media in 2006. Mesh 2007 will include way too much navel gazing and concern that the principles of authenticity, transparency, etc. have somehow been compromised by the desire of large organizations to use these new tools to engage in conversations with their stakeholders.
From where I sit, this is a natural movement that we have been through countless times before in the arrival of the introduction of new social software, whether it was the first spam sent over ARPANET; changes in multiplayer gaming that led from MUDs/MOOs to commercial spaces like Ultimate Online; or even the obsession with online retail in the dot com boom of the 1990s, which represented the first wave of commercialization on the Web.
Face it, when Internet tools hit a certain level of acceptance and legitimacy within organization, money starts to move in, real initiatives start rolling out, and the medium changes. For good or otherwise, this is what will happen. It’s happened before and it’ll happen again.
While I’m not too troubled by the changes that will accompany greater corporate and institutional involvement, it is important to emphasize that the underlying values and ethics (articulated to a certain degree in the WOMMA ethics code will remain. Organizations will still need to recognize that deceptive practices are dumb, and will (1) be found out, (2) be sharply criticized, and (3) and will do more brand damage than you suspect.
Even though social media will look much different a year from now, flogs, astrotufing and other deceptive practices will still be inexcusable.
I do think, however, that a bigger concern in 2007 be the sharp spike in social media spam (note to self: we need a new term for this). Organizations, legit and otherwise, will realize that the attention shift brought on by social media represents an opportunity to make some serious cash through deceptive practices. This will dramatically reduce the effectiveness of aggregated content, and will start to drive us all crazy.
What will this look like?
We will also see a social media backlash. MSM journalists who were annoyed with the rapid rise of social media and the endless questioning over their own value in the face of the growing influence of bloggers, will revel in these articles and will report excessively on all of this negativity in excruciating detail.
At the same time, social media will start to look a lot like other media and there will be a lot of head-scratching and existential discussion over what really is different. This has already started among thought leaders in this space. A recent post by John Battelle on related issues is required reading. I subscribe to his perspectives around the move from “packaged goods” media to “conversational media”.
I predict there will be growing demand for enterprise-level social media tools (blogging platforms, enterprise wikis, etc.), as organizations realize that they are paying gazillions of dollars for IT tools that are proprietary, expensive to implement, and actually not that good. I’ve felt this for awhile, and The Economist has given this feeling some strong validation.
I also predict that somewhere in Canada, a Cabinet Minister will start blogging. No inside information there, just a gut feeling.
And, somewhere in Canada, a blogstorm will lead to the resignation of a Cabinet Minister. Again, just intuition.
RSS will continue its steady, but persistent spread. The breakthroughs on consumer side will be modest, with the inclusion of RSS in IE7 doing little to drive adoption (sorry, Joe). The big breakthroughs will be in number of organizations that start publishing in RSS and improvements in web-based services that are driven by RSS but which don’t require users to actually know what it is. What will that look like? Pre-rolled Netvibes tabs, sites like Wikio, and enterprise-level blog monitoring and analysis tools.
That’s it. Those are my thoughts for the next twelve months in the world of social media. Should be an interesting ride!
That’s most likely it for me for 2006. Have a great holiday, everyone.
Thanks to Bob for tagging me on this meme, which is spreading around the ’sphere like a bad cough.
What has made this “five things meme” spread so fast? It feeds on the number one reason people write blogs…so they can talk about themselves. Part of my fascination with blogs is how such a self-serving, narcissitic, and gossipy medium has exploded and gained such credibility over the last 2 years.
I guess those traits are the key to any good medium, and probably aren’t that different from the origin of newspapers. What’s one of the golden rules of journalism? Make sure you spell the names correctly.
This meme is also fascinating because it draws on our own internal narrative and tells a lot about how we wish to project our view of self onto the rest of the world.
This is complicated by the fact that we all know that whatever tidbits of personal information we float onto the Net will slosh around forever and could splash back on us at any time. So we are circumpsect, while trying to be interesting.
Or, maybe I’m just overanalyzing and it is just a silly chain letter.
Oh well. I’m game.
Here’s my response to the “five things you don’t know” meme
1) My wife and I once hitchhiked from Harare to Johannesburg in a day and a half.
2) I have learned (and since forgotten) a lot of the Thai language.
3) I grew up on a dairy farm with 55 milking cows. I ran the farm for 6 months before I started political science at U of Ottawa.
4) I once created a PR campaign for a Canadian NGO selling fantasy coffins from Ghana. My favourite was the chili pepper.
5) I worked as a softball umpire for several years. Interesting people, those umps.
I’m late to the party, with most everyone I know already tagged. If you are reading this and haven’t been tagged, then “you’re it.”
