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 | Written by Neil Durrant | Like a racehorse galloping to the front of the pack, new media trends are developing faster now than any time in history. And like a old nag well past its sell by date, traditional media is becoming a back marker just as quickly. The reason is social networking. Not only are we in touch with everyone who knows us 24 hours a day, we are also in touch with millions who don`t, but nevertheless desperately want to communicate with us. And that is a very powerful tool indeed. We recommend films, music, fashion and new products and we tell each other about news events before they even get to the media.
This massive growth in social media is not the product of some marketing gimmick, but good old fashioned hard facts. Twitter grew by an astonishing 1,382% in 2009 and is well on the way to having over 100 million registered users. Facebook has doubled its user base to 200 million in only 8 months - bigger than the population of Brazil! and YouTube exceeded 100 million monthly viewers and carried over 6.3 billion videos. We`re all blogging, tweeting and emailing our hearts out. Let`s also not forget that what was once the domain of teenagers and twenty somethings, will quickly be overtaken by the over 40`s, once they get on the bandwagon, opening up many more millions of users with potentially much greater spending power.
We cannot get enough of talking and communicating with each other and now with the advent of smart phone technology, including the still rising IPhone and Google`s long awaited Nexus One, 2010 will be the year when social networking really comes of age to dominate the marketing landscape. It will be the first thing to address in any marketing strategy and like it or not, we`ll have to put up with a sustained commercial attack on what has been up until now a relatively social environment.
The two most important words in 2010 are mobile and integration. There will be mobile apps for everything, but at the centre of it all will be social media. Already we are seeing the green shoots of this with one stop mobile access points like Ping.fm, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite and the one with the easiest, most intuitive interface will have the greatest take up and dominate the social marketplace, becoming a household word.
We`ll be using our smartphones to buy tickets, clothes and goods and even suggest restaurants, The phone will be our pocket rocket for everything we do and we can only wonder just how much potential there is to make serious money through commercial revenues or from home such as earn money. Just watch this space. |
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