The face of Social Media & Marketing in 2009

Do you enjoy social media? Do you enjoy understanding the benefits of social media to the worlds of Marketing, PR, and Customer Service? Are you a social media junkie who wants to position yourself in a way to appeal to corporations looking to get with the times?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, then this paper is a must-read. It’s predictions for social media in 2009, written by some fairly well-known players in the growing industry. I loved this paper, in part because it’s great insight, but also because most of it has been what I’ve preached all along.

If you’re a little ADD, and 23 pages freaks you out, here are a few things that stood out to me:

• Human interaction trumps all. For the last…oh, forever, businesses have taken a “create an ad, dump it someplace, and don’t touch it” aproach. In 2008, businesses started using social media to connect to customers, and there was this revelation: Consumers LIKE interacting! In 2009, expect to see many more businesses adopting this approach to social media.
• A problematic economy will INCREASE social media marketing. Think about it: Ad agencies, TV, radio, and newspapers all cost money, and in some cases a lot of it. How much does it cost to set up social media accounts? Virtually nothing, and the entire planet has access to your company. Not bad.
• Realization that quality of friends & subscribers is more important than quantity. For the last year, there has been this mentality that the best way to get your product seen was to promote it with the most popular bloggers, YouTubers, etc. Slowly, some businesses have realized that this doesn’t really work effectively. In many cases they’ve learned that 5,000 subscribers that fit your target audience is better than 100,000 subscribers who don’t fit at all. In 2009, many businesses will put down the shotgun, and pick up the sniper rifle.
• Spectators are people too! Spectators are those people who watch your stuff, but never subscribe. For example, while I only weigh in with 2,200ish subscribers, almost a million people have viewed my material. The trend in 2008 was to ignore the people who didn’t “sign up”; in 2009, businesses will realize that the ones who don’t sign up to follow have great value.
• Redefining the metrics of advertising value. Many businesses are realizing that page impressions, clicks, CPM, unique views, etc, are all so 2007.  Social media is about satisfaction, engagement, and viewer retention. A blog or video that 1,000,000 people watch for 5 seconds and click out of is less effective than the one that gets 5,000 loyal viewers coming back each time, who watch all the way to the end. Expect more businesses to put to bed the use of traditional metrics to determine what’s valuable.
• Big business gets back to small-business approaches. Businesses that have grown so big to become faceless corporate entities are slowly realizing the value of good old-fashioned principles, like friendship has to be earned, fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and people want to connect to real people. Social Media in 2009 will draw more businesses into to world of real human interaction.

That’s the general gist. There’s a lot of great stuff that I didn’t put in here. One could honestly blog about 30 posts from notes on this paper. It’s good stuff. I also liked their prediction that Google will buy twitter. One can dream.