One thing I’ve noticed with trends and fads is that looking back on them, we usually say “What were we thinking?” With the passage of enough time, it can be difficult to remember what motivated us at the time. The reason(s) why something that was so important changed into the commonplace and then, a drudgery or worse, not cool anymore becomes lost over time. We’ve all seen examples of this and the same progression will occur with Social Media. I may be ahead of the curve with this, but there will come a time when Facebook will no longer be required but, instead, passe. Will you remember where you were at this pivotal future moment? It will happen at some point. Certainly not a question of if, but of when. When it does, will that moment become an indelible memory for you? One social media statistic I read recently was that if Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world with over 500M users, or, “netizens”. Will they experience the same future experiences and logoff Facebook never to return?

Another thing I’ve noticed is that trends based solely on technology have a finite lifetime. We tend to stay with something even when it’s past its’ prime. Comfort, resistant to change, the migratin effort and learning curve involved all play a part of staying with status quo, the familiar. We accept trade-offs and shortcomings; we settle. Until, of course, a game changer comes along. The bright, new shiny bauble that excites you, entices you, teases you — you have to have it.

As someone once said “Technology is cyclical”, there will be another widget/new thing to displace Facebook and occupy our time. It will have to be better, more convenient, easier. Also, it will need to make money. At some point in the (not so distant) future, there will be a decisive moment when many of us will say “Facebook, I haven’t used it in months. Who does that anymore?”

What lifetime do you think Facebook will have? Will we still use it in 5 years? 3 years? Next year? Til then, see you on Facebook.

I took a  look back in history from when the telephone first arrived to the mobile devices of today.  Making communication easy spawns an addiction to the facilitating platform and an addiction to it will always will be rampant among the young.

“The telephone has been accepted without hesitation by the younger generation, but it has suggested uneasy questions to older persons who have not been accustomed to it all their lives.” -1903

1903 – “It’s Appalling”- Phone accepted without hesitation by younger generation

1948 – The teenagers have tied up telephone communications

1963 – Telephonitis is a disease of adolescence

1972 – For six years my son ate, slept and lived in a small phone booth

1989 – Younger generation has phone addiction!

2009 – Too Much Texting Taking a Toll on Teenagers

2011- Young generation addicted to mobile phones

What are we in for next?

Click here to see.

The rise in popularity of Facebook has similarities.

Mark Zuckerberg stated that:

“In fact, in some ways Facebook is like a telephone conversation, with all your friends on the same call. But on this call, your friends can share photos, text, political summons to action, video, and music, or can click to make purchases.”

Hello!

It is April 14, 2011 and the weather is beautiful here in Greensboro, North Carolina!  72° and sunny.

UPCOMING TRENDS…

I have a lot of admiration and respect for the ad agency JWT.   They are thought leaders, amazingly creative and wonderfully successful.  I really enjoy their annual forecast of trends which you can visit at JWT INTELLIGENCE.  JWT Intelligence has a great tagline, “converting cultural shifts into opportunities“.  JWT has published “100 Things to Watch in 2011″.  Take a moment and enjoy the slideshow as it will certainly get your brain churning as you consider ways to create your own opportunities based on you own skills and areas of interest.

Technology is a major theme (as it often is) in this year’s forecast.

Of the 100 future trends, I have several highlighted below that interest me:

• #1: 3D Printing — Take a look if you have a moment at Shapeways Example Video.  It will be fascinating to see how this grows.
• #5: Auto Apps — Not sure if this is a good thing but it is here to stay and will certainly grow.  Perhaps you’ve seen the commercial with the Dad in Europe and his teenage daughter wants to borrow his car.  So as he is talking with her, from his hotel in Europe, on his smartphone (really smartphone and smart apps) he checks the car’s gas gauge and tire pressure and then starts the engine and unlocks the doors…all from across the Atlantic.  Amazing.
• #17: CAPTCHA ‘Advertising‘ — I am sure you have all been asked to enter several distorted letters into a box on a website which will then allow you to advance within the site.  CAPTCHA annoys me!! Well, advertisers are starting to use this as an opportunity to have visitors participate in the advertisement.  Companies are starting to use their slogans and taglines for their CAPTCHA.  I have not yet seen this but I certainly will soon.
• #35: F-Commerce — Facebook eCommerce is coming to your Facebook soon!!  Apparently several very large retailers can already sell products directly on Facebook but that trend will certainly increase…just too many users on that site to miss on that opportunity.  This could impact many companies within the Supply Chain as well as Marketers.  It will be fascinating to see how big this grows!
• #40: Group-Manipulated Pricing — Many group buying sites are popping up including Groupon and Living Social.   The innovation will continue to grow and change but it seems poised to be a successful strategy.

These are just a few examples that gave me pause.

Check it out at JWT INTELLIGENCE and be inspired!

Enjoy the day.

Patrick Flanagan

pflanagan@beacontechnologies.com

(336) 232-5668

(336) 944-4187

http://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickflanagan1

URL Linter – http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint

Facebook’s URL Linter is an extremely handy tool for testing an instance of the Facebook like button. It allows you to view how it will look in the Facebook feed. If you’ve ever tried to test a like button you know that Facebook caches the results for an unknown amount of time which can be very frustrating while trying to test.

It’s truly a priceless tool.

Want to know how to ruin your level of awesomeness on Facebook?  Here are the top horrible tips to mess up your dreams of total Facebook business and brand awareness domination.

1)      Automate everything.  I love Hootsuite, Networked Blogs, and Twitterfeed just as much as the next person, but if the only thing landing on your page is automated posts you are never going to succeed.  People connect on Facebook for the conversation.  They want a real person or brand identity, not a machine.

2)      Only post statements with no response needed. People hang out on Facebook because they want to engage.  Don’t just post links. Instead, ask questions, implement polls and start a conversation.

3)      Tag an image that isn’t a person. Want your followers or friends to check out the picture of your new storefront?  Don’t tag everyone to see the picture, post a link.  I for one don’t want to be tagged as the front door.

4)      Quantity is quality. Every time we engage with the community on Facebook we have the goal of brand awareness in mind, but posting frequently throughout the day just because you want to stay visible on their home feed is a good way for people to deny their associations with you on this social network.

5)      Keep your personal profile open to the public. Trying to start a private wealth management firm?  If people can associate your name to a business or brand, they will check out your personal Facebook page.  The same goes if you are applying for a job with a company.  I wouldn’t hire you to manage my money if I see that you play Mafia Wars and Farmville everyday between the hours of 9:30am to 4:30pm.

6)      Set it and forget it. Just having a profile or page out there isn’t enough to engage in conversations being had.  If someone posts a negative comment or question on your page and you don’t check it to respond you are showing everyone that your customer service is less than par.

7)      Create fake events. If you have a real event or limited time engagement, promote it, but do not create a bogus event about the financing offer your company has provided since 2006.  This should be a message, or a call out on the side or within the checkout process.

8)      Invite everyone to everything. My favorite dress designer is Calvin Klein.  Less is more and the tailoring is divine, so I am fan of the company page.  The company doesn’t need to invite me to its Fashion Week runway show though-especially since I live in North Carolina.  That just makes me extremely jealous. Plus, you aren’t offering me a ticket, so how can I even get in the tent?

I’ll admit it, I’m a little bit behind the bandwagon on Twitter.  I have a Twitter account and understand the basic concept, but my coworkers (particularly the Social Media geniuses!) are far superior in this area of social networking.  Which is why I found myself going to my favorite technical definitions site (Whatis.com) today to figure out just what the heck people use “hash tags” for… I’ve heard of them here and there and see thinks like “#northcarolinabasketball” in some of my friends’ FaceBook posts, but didn’t really understand what they did.  So, if your a little bit behind like me, here’s the down-low:

From http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/hashtag.html:

What is a hashtag?

A hashtag is a tag used to categorize posts on Twitter (tweets) according to topics. To add a hashtag to a tweet, you just preface the relevant term with the hash symbol (#). That will allow people who follow that topic to find your tweet and perhaps follow you as well.

As the conductor of our Social Media Transit System, I wanted to provide some quick feedback to help keep your wheels in motion.  It’s a big world out there and if you try to be everywhere at once, you will get burned out before you ever get noticed.  Listed below are some tips to help keep you “on track.”

Even if you aren’t ready to post your company photos on Flickr, go ahead and claim all of the user-names you prefer for all the social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, Linked in, YouTube, etc.).   A fantastic website to use to do this all at once is Knowem.  Once you have these profiles at least enter a bit of data with links going to your site.  Most social networking sites have great PR, so use that to your benefit.  Also, by having lots of profiles you will automatically begin to stack the search result shelves when users conduct branded searches.

With the little bit of time you can provide each week, make sure you “work smart and not hard.”  Set up a social media desktop application such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule posts, search for followers, and spy on your competition.

Take a bit of time each week to try to increase your following.  There is no point posting if no one is listening.  If you want to get followers on Twitter, follow people for the law of reciprocation.  If you want to get likes on Facebook, join groups and spread the word.

Another tip for increasing your following is to offer exclusive incentives.  People aren’t going to just jump aboard without a reason.  If you don’t have the budget to offer a promotion, or you are new to the market altogether, try to find someone big and influential and request them to tell their people about you. When it comes to posting, engagement is what brings the credibly up on your profile, so make sure to post or tweet something you know your following will want to share or comment on

Use social media to follow your competition.  Learn what are they doing to see what works and what doesn’t and then proactively leave them in your wake.  Not sure what your audience would want?  Ask them with poll questions, which in turn will increase your levels of engagement.

Remember, the biggest investment in social media is your own personal time.  By doing a little work every day, you can stay active without sacrificing other important elements to your marketing success.

The relationship between social media and search is very real and is not going away.  It is now helping to fuel the search engines’ fire to provide us with the best results and does so by using social media data as cues to better match what the search engines think we are looking for in the location where we can best engage with the information we require.

Search engines are achieving this goal by integrating social popularity in their organic search algorithms.  This popularity section seems presently to be the mix of social media relevancy and click-through rate.  Such has been more and more noticeable with Google’s expansion of Twitter feeds in their results.  In fact, even if you delete all of your tweets and your account, your tweets will still exist because Google assigns a number to every tweet.  (Just thought I would throw that tidbit of info out for everyone that assumes hitting “delete” is the end to unintelligent late-night posts).

Bing has also been utilizing Facebook’s Like buttons in their organic search results.  Their current factors of influence as to the relevance of the social mediums to use are the number of followers, fans, and brand names/keywords passed around the social networks.

This information is important! Search engines are no longer just regurgitating results; they are making assumptions from your Internet usage and applying your preferred means of obtaining data to push information you search back to you.  They are actually listening to their customers and providing them with what they really want, not just what has the best PR due to keyword density, URL age, etc.

It has been necessary for the search engines to keep up with all of these social networks that now take up more chunks of users’ time online, especially when you look at Twitter, who now has a real time search box.  While results are not always perfect, they are still improving every day, and if people continue to spend more time on social networks, the search engines must keep up.

No matter how popular social networks continue to gain strength and popularity, they will never prevent the need for search.  Seventy percent of online customers still find the sites from which they make purchases through search, but they also now spend a quarter of their time online in social media networks.

Trends will always be changing on the web, but have no fear, for the folks at Beacon will continue to be your guide in these new unchartered territories.

Finally! This great new feature is still in beta but it is exactly what Facebook marketers have been waiting for. Soon all of us will be able to track activity that happens on our websites as a result of someone on Facebook seeing or clicking on our Ads. Conversion tracking helps us see the whole picture and I am very excited to start using this on a future campaign.

Tracking is available in the Ads Manager Menu.

Fill out the form to receive script for your conversion page.

Taking a look at current events – we seem to have taken a step back a few decades into the days of the Cold War.  Apparently, more than 10 people have been arrested in the New York area for being “Americanized” Russian Spies.  Allegedly, Miss Anna Chapman and others were supposed to infiltrate American culture in order to gain access to valuable information that they could report back to their superiors.  Sounds like something out of a bad 1980s John Travolta movie (although there are many to choose from).

What separates Anna Chapman from others that have been arrested in US on espionage related crimes over the years is that she is apparently the first who was heavily involved in social media (I suppose it’s possible that Ethel Rosenberg tweeted in between rounds on the electric chair, but I doubt it).  One would think that spies would want to keep a low profile, but that was not the route that Ms. Chapman took – maintaining active profiles on both Facebook and LinkedIn.  Is that how the Feds caught onto her, did she make a mistake that revealed her true self?

So, if you are a Russian spy reading this blog post (I believe that represents at least 8% of my audience) – here are a few tips:

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1) Be careful with the status updates.

DO:  Write something casual and mundane

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DON’T:  Write down what you are really doing

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2) Stay general in with the relationships you are seeking

DO:  Be like everybody else

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DON’T:  Be extremely specific

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3) As much as you may want to converse with others like you, do not join any groups that will give you away.

DO:  Join groups that an average person would join

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DON’T:  Join specific groups that tell a lot about your real interests

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4) Do not use Facebook for contact with your handlers

DON’T:  Have a special contact button

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5) No pictures on the job.

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-EW