Social media was big in 2009. Twitter grew (and then flat lined), Facebook attracted a flock of 35-55 year olds and news was broken before Joe Journalist could say ‘rosebud’.

But what of 2010? What can we expect? Will it actually be, as it’s been predicted every year for the past 10, the year of the mobile? Will Twitter actually make any money? Will the Facebook movie be any worse than it sounds?

We’ve put together some thoughts, based on what we saw in 2009, on what we think might happen in 2010.

Fragmentation and convergence of social media tools

Social media tools will increasingly fragment and move away from their original platforms towards converged tools that enable you to manage a number of different social media platforms.

At the same time, social media tools will continue to converge, combining their individual strengths to better compete with the big players such as Facebook and Twitter.

This will mean there may be more social media tools to pay attention to in 2010 as more exciting features are developed as a result of tie-ins between companies such as Seesmic and Ping.fm.

We may also see more convergence of devices and social media. Millions are already using social media on their Xboxes and Playstations. In 2010 we’ll see more devices enabled to connect with social media platforms.

Mobile and Social Media –

Mobile will, more than ever become the social media lifeline for workers and consumers. 70% of organisations currently ban social networking at work. As a result of this, the mobile web will become important for employees wanting to stay connected to their social accounts.

Mobile social media will increasingly play a part in people’s offline buying decisions. As social media users begin to trust social media more and more, offline buying decisions (electronics, books, restaurants, bars, hotels) will be affected by consumer reviews accessed through the mobile web and geo-location-enabled applications.

Increased spend in social media

The Social Media and Online PR Report, published by Econsultancy in association with bigmouthmedia revealed that companies planning to increase spend in social media in 2010 but are currently struggling to find time and resources to manage their activity.

This means that there will be more competition for the audience’s attention online. It will no longer be enough just to be active on Twitter and Facebook providing customer support. Companies will need to go the extra mile to distinguish themselves from competitors.

Real time search

Google launched real time search in December (after being pipped to the post by Bing). This means that when you search for something like “UK Snow” to see just how bad Londoners are at coping with the white fluffy stuff, you’ll see people’s conversations about UK snow on Twitter.

As real time search results increasingly become integrated in search engine results pages (SERPs), it will be more important to have strategies in place for an official presence on real time social media tools such as  Twitter and Friend Feed.

With companies spending money on search engine optimisation, it makes sense that if Twitter conversation is appearing in the first page SERP, then social media optimisation should be just as important.

Whatever 2010 brings for us, what you can be sure of is that tie dye is on its way back and all the kids will be text messaging and searching the interwebs with their mobile iTelephones. You heard it here first folks.

Thanks to @AndrewGirdwood for some of his thoughts that contributed to this post.

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2. Reporting on Mumbai: Twitter and social media leading the way
3. Social media, ROI and the importance of influence

What is important is gauging the influence of the bloggers you plan to engage with. While an increased amount of inbound links is important for both Online PR and SEO, the influence of the blogger that is linking to you is more important. It is far more valuable to get a link from a highly relevant, respected and influential blogger than get many links from small news aggregation spam blogs that do not carry much weight.

When planning for blogger outreach, it’s vital to spend time researching which bloggers are most relevant to determine which could provide the highest quality of links.  You can never estimate how many bloggers will write about you and include a link as a result of  blogger outreach – this greatly depends on what the blogger outreach is focusing on and what the blogger could get out of it, as well as whether the blogger has time to write the news or finds it relevant to them. It should always be your top priority to treat blogger outreach as a conversation with a person. Not an automated distribution of a press release to a long list of nameless email addresses.

Online PR does not involve chasing a blogger up to find out if they got your email, this will always be seen as spam and will do more bad than good. Often, you may even get an extra mention from the blogger stating what a bad example of blogger outreach you are. You can never be sure that for example, if you give a product for review, this review will be positive. There is every chance that the review could be negative which would thus create a link that is detrimental to brand perception. However, by listening to this feedback,you can gain valuable insight into your products and how they can be developed.

While blogger outreach cannot immediately and directly change brand perception, a brand being active within social media, talking to customers, talking to advocates, thanking people for writing about them, giving support to those that have had a bad experience will help to greatly increase brand perception. People want brands to listen to what is being said about them and if they’re happy with your service, they will recommend you, which will in turn generate leads and sales.

The key is communication with your customers. Every complaint about customer service online is due to lack of communication between a brand and the customer. It always comes down to the customer not being satisfied by the response or actions of a brand as a result of not being able to talk to the brand. Being active in social media helps to facilitate this communication and in turn helps to improve brand perception and lead generation.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cambodia4kidsorg

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Kirsty Wark was given the pleasure of reading out a list of questions submitted by a mixture of Twitter users and readers of the Newsnight blog. What a fantastic opportunity this is to probe Twitter’s CEO about how they plan to make money or how they see their service developing in the future. But instead, what should have been a interesting and probing first UK interview by one of the BBC’s most grilling presenters, ended up being rather cringeworthy list of questions that echoed the arguments that pretty much every non-twitter user seems to come up with when they decide they don’t really understand the point in it.

Williams must have been more than a little bit baffled that in his first UK interview, he was answering questions such as “Isn’t this just really a service for reading what famous people are doing?” and “But do you feel comfortable about the fact that when you go on Twitter, and you look for Demi Moore, there’s several Demi Moores, you can’t verify who the real Demi Moore is – does that not worry you?”. Huh, Evan? Is that what keeps you up at night? I’m sure the fact that your company has been around since 2006, is projecting 25 million users by the end of the year and hasn’t yet made any decent money out it makes you sleep like a baby.  Figuring out who the real Demi Moore is must be a real pillow turner.

These are questions that he probably thought Twitter had cleared up a long time ago.

Then there was the bombshell, “are you aware that the archbishop Vincent Nichols is very concerned that Twitter dehumanises a very important part of our social life?”. Despite the fact that – as Shane Richmond points out in the Telegraph –  Vincent Nichols didn’t mention anything about Twitter, this again is a classic case of a person attacking something that they have never used and don’t really understand.  Williams replied quite rightly arguing “I would say that anyone who says that isn’t really familiar with the service, because it’s about humans connecting with each other, and often in ways that they couldn’t otherwise. It’s the opposite of dehumanising as far as I’m concerned”.

Thankfully, the interview gave us one interesting snippet. London is now the biggest twitter-using city in the world. That is, the biggest local community using Twitter. If you’ve ever used Twitter and are connected to people within your city, you’ll probably know as well as I do, the fantastic connections it helps you to make, the inspiring knowledge sharing it allows for and the vibrant dialogue it encourages. And if that isn’t “rounded communication” I don’t know what is.

Thanks to @CharlesArthur for providing a transcript of the interview.

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A story got me rather riled today. Tory Politico,  a blogger that in their own words, aims to “highlight the failures of the current government and promote the Conservative Party” had got in contact with the Tory press office to ask for a copy of a recent press release relating to a letter sent to Gordon Brown from David Cameron. Sounds like a perfectly legitimate and justified request. Well, apparently not.

Tory Politico was faced with what seems like a totally backward and baffling response from the press officer. “[I] was wondering if you could send me a copy of the press release that’s just been issued about the letter send from David Cameron to the Prime Minister” asked Tory Politico who received the response (I’ll paraphrase) “sorry I cant help you”, “bloggers don’t count as media so I cant send it to you”, “we feel that independent bloggers do not provide an efficient means of communicating the Conservative message”, “bloggs [sic] are not important”.

Now firstly, I  just want to make it clear I’m not on some sort of  crusade in support of blogs. I don’t need to crusade for blogging. It has already proved its importance, relevance and influence within almost every industry. From politics to technology and parenting to environmental issues. Nor am I on any politcal rant here. My politcal leaning is pretty much undecided at the moment.

Back to the issue… I’m sorry, what? Blogs are not important? You are a political party trying to rally support, influence the voting public and get your message out through as many channels as possible and you don’t think blogs are important? This blogger is an advocate for your party, he is spending his unpaid, free time to try to pursuade people that you are the party to vote for and you don’t think that is important? No matter how many readers and subscribers he has, no matter what his Technorati rating is (if that’s worth anything anymore) and no matter how influential he is, you don’t see it value in spending few seconds it would take to attach a press release to an email and send it to this blogger?

The imporance and value of politicians engaging with social media is clear and proven. It was shown blatantly by Obama’s victory last year. There has been so much coverage on the value that Obama’s social media campaign added to his political campaign. A few facts from Pew;

“74% of internet users–representing 55% of the entire adult population–went online in 2008 to get involved in the political process or to get news and information about the election”

“Nearly one in five (18%) internet users posted their thoughts, comments or questions about the campaign on an online forum such as a blog or social networking site.”

“One in three internet users forwarded political content to others.”

“Fully 83% of those age 18-24 have a social networking profile, and two-thirds of young profile owners took part in some form of political activity on these sites in 2008.”

Obama’s social media hub MyBarackObama actively encouraged users to create their own blogs about the campaign. At the end of the campaign, there were 2 million profiles with 400,000 blog posts. That’s 400,000 blog posts by advocates of Obama, all trying to spread the word and get the message out. And the Tories don’t think blogging is important.

Well good luck to them.

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