2009, The Year Social Media Gets Standards (Hopefully)

December 18th, 2008 by Nick Gonzalez

There’s been a lot of prognostication going on lately, looking to the future of social media. ReadWriteWeb has a great roundup of their thoughts. Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) will be be on Science Friday to talk about the future of social media.

My two cents on the future of social media

My hope for social media in 2009 is that it finally gets its act together to agree on some desperately needed standards. Here’s my list of what’s lacking.

Open Identity - While Facebook Connect and MySpaceIDs are a step in finally ridding us of log-in hell, it’s also created a new problem. Each service is fighting to become the web’s identity standard (more on that here). Publishers need simple solutions that don’t try to encourage “lock in” through deep integration.

Audience Metrics - Pretty much the only thing we know about social media properties is that a lot of people are there. Social media publishers need to help marketers understand deeper metrics about visits, time on site, and defined user actions. Actions like “sharing”, “messaging”, and “viewing” need to become defined metrics. These are now under the ambiguous title of “engagement”.

Marketing Channels - Social media sites need to build better channels for marketers. Right now social media marketing isn’t something you buy. It’s someone you hire.

These experts currently follow a rather hacky process of pluging into a variety of networks to cleverly evangelize your company. Not to say that social media experts aren’t needed, but rather the tactical aspect of their job needs to be productized. These experts should be focusing on strategy. Marketers need a way to easily and unobtrusively amplify their voice in social media. One example may be Twitter allowing marketers to start a conversational campaign targeted at users who twitter on a specific topic.

Tags: advertisers, publishers

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 18th, 2008 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 2 Comments

NC Furniture Outlet 7 months ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

I digged this for more news from you.

regards
FERMINA NEIDA
______________________________________________

reply edit reblog flag

3 /people/ETSUKOMISTIE/ /people/ETSUKOMISTIE/following/ http://www.furnitureoutletworld.com/

Reality 1 year ago 1 point
Please login to rate.

Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.

Nielsen began compiling ratings for television nationally beginning in 1950. Television debuted to consumers at the 1934 Worlds Fair. While the scale and speed of media adoption has changed, I think your belief that Social Media metric standards will be developed in 2009 is optimistic. Social Media tools and activities are still changing way to fast for that.

reply edit reblog flag