Social Media Trends

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·         Crowd-sourcing moves into the mainstream

·         Making the network the organization

·         Experimentation and big data

·         Wiring for a sustainable world

·         The age of the multi-sided business model

·         Innovating from Third World countries

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Crowd-sourcing moves into the mainstream:In the past few years, the ability to organize communities of Web participants to develop, market, and support products and services has moved from the margins of business practice to the mainstream. P&G created a social network of influential mothers (Vocalpoint) to drive word-of-mouth marketing. In markets where Vocalpoint influencers are active, product revenues have doubled.Facebook has marshaled its community for product development, recruiting 300,000 users to translate its site into 70 language. The entire French Facebook site was translated in one day.

Making the network the organization :Companies are pushing substantially beyond crowdsourcing to build and manage flexible employee networks that extend across internal and external borders. The recession underscored the value of such flexibility in managing volatility.

Experimentation and big data: Data are flooding in at rates never seen before — doubling every 18 months— as a result of greater access to customer data from public, proprietary, and purchased sources, as well as new information gathered from the social web and these newly-deployed smart assets. These trends are broadly known as “big data.” Companies are taking data use to new levels, using IT to support rigorous, constant business experimentation that guides decisions and to test new products, business models, and innovations in customer experience. This trend has the potential to drive a radical transformation in research, innovation, and marketing.

Wiring for a sustainable world : Information technology’s share of the world’s environmental footprint is growing because of the ever-increasing demand for IT capacity and services. Electricity produced to power the world’s data centers generates greenhouse gases on the scale of countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands, and these emissions could increase fourfold by 2020. The use of IT in areas such as smart power grids, efficient buildings, and better logistics planning could eliminate five times the carbon emissions that the IT industry produces.

The age of the multi-sided business model: Multi-sided business models create value through interactions among multiple players rather than traditional one-on-one transactions or information exchanges.Spiceworks offers IT-management applications

Innovating from Third World countries: Disruptive business models arise when technology combines with extreme market conditions, such as customer demand for very low price points, poor infrastructure, hard-to-access suppliers, and low cost curves for talent. In other words, developing nations may be a wellspring of innovation. Some of these “extreme” business models are spreading to traditional markets thereby creating new global competitors.

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·         Your customers are on social media.

·         Consumers will be more receptive to your messages when marketing through social media.

·         Marketing through social media can help increase brand recognition.

·         Marketing through social media increases your inbound traffic.

·         Marketing through social media increases your inbound traffic.

·         Social media advertising allows you to target and retarget ideal consumers.

·         Marketing on social media leads to higher conversion rates.

·         Marketing through social media is cost effective.

·         Social media marketing may help improve your search engine rankings.