The reason for doing this is simple: news breaks via social media more and more frequently. Just this week, for example, director of Liverpool Football Club, resigned because of a ridiculous and abusive reply email he sent to a fan. The story was originally a blurb in the ‘sports rumor’ category but then gathered enough steam and attention to make it to virtually every UK front page and forcing the resignation.

Another story that gained momentum with far reaching implications is the Facebook ‘Bra Color’ viral debacle. No one knows the origin of the Facebook idea that encourages women to post their bra color to somehow raise breast cancer awareness. Yet, this prompted many prominent bloggers to bring attention to the phenomenon and question its worth, and furthermore justly questioning the line between marketing and the pink ribbon campaign/real charity/real contributions to breast cancer awareness. As the dominos keep falling, the spotlight shifted to questioning participation of certain companies in promoting or tying their products to Breast Cancer Awareness month/campaign. So it starts with an anonymous campaign and ends up bringing companies like BMW and Eli Lilly into an unwanted spotlight.

Is there a better reason to mandate Social Media monitoring?

• Burst of the free content bubble: Free content and access has been a bubble that is bursting as we speak.  More content will go behind walls with a resulting loss of web traffic.  This may not be a long-term solution, but because of the current competition between Google and Microsoft, content providers can access a revenue stream that makes sense for their brand and quality of content and does not solely depend on traffic figures.  Google vs. Microsoft war makes it possible for publishers to maneuver between the two and actually make money. Be ready for more protected content.

• True user centricity: User experience, more than ever, is about speed and user engagement.  Users expect immediate access even on a mobile platform.  Google’s blog recently had an interesting write-up on how important speed is to user experience; even minor slowdowns cause very high page abandonment.  Everything on a page will be sacrificed for speed.Prompts for immediate user input on the huge platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Google, Seesmic, etc…) have trained users to expect a similar experience across the web.  ‘What do you want?’ What are you doing?’ are the immediate and central questions.  Even brochure- like corporate sites will have to change their strategy to prioritize for these expectations.  Prompts of what users want will become central in favor of featured content and animation.
  Immediacy and engagement will be key to web experience more than ever.

We shall see what happens in 2010, see you then!

So here are some educated guesses/predictions for the upcoming year.  Please voice your feedback or add your own.

• Commoditization of services: Loyalty towards providers/publishers will erode for convenience.  The huge success of products like Seesmic (which allow you to use Facebook, Twitter, etc… from one dashboard) account for large amounts of activity and this is likely to grow.  So is it about Twitter or is it about status updates? Is it about Facebook or staying in touch with your network?  Is it about the actual iPhone or the apps?There are so many services and so much pressure to open the gates in order to stay competitive that it is the commodity services that work across platforms like Seesmic, similar dashboards, and app providers that will grow rapidly as a result.
  
  The service will become more important than the provider.

• Exclusive deals, not acquisitions: This goes back to an earlier post about the ‘Cold War’ between Microsoft and Google, and is rooted in content/service providers being able to play Google and Microsoft against one another.  Much like during the actual Cold War when various countries could go back and forth in their loyalties in order to get the best benefits and aid, in a similar way, publishers can forge relationships knowing they have options between the two.Because such conflicts are long-term, the publishers (e.g.. Yelp, Twitter, etc…) know they have time and are in no rush to sell off their complete sovereignty and would rather sign short term access deals to show revenue potential (precisely as Twitter has done recently). So therefore do not expect huge acquisitions.

Stay tuned for Part II…

(You can participate by adding #forwomen to the ideas you tweet, and you can watch the conversation at: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23forwomen.)

I’m excited to see where it leads and what the participation will be, as I have a hunch that there are a lot of people out there, particularly on Twitter, who will have a lot to say about the topic.

What does this have to do with digital business trends?

The connection is that there are new ways for companies to look at demographics online. The temptation with a topic like this would be to look first at the demographic and then at how to engage them.

But how we look at demographics is be changing. Online activities blend across demographics, and as Ruder Finn’s Director of Social Media recently noted in an op-ed for PR Week, intent is the new demographic.

This means is that age, race, gender, etc, are not the only ways to determine how to reach a targeted audience online. First you have to look at what people are doing online, and only then can you get a better idea of who they are.

As PR Week’s Nicole Zerillo pointed out in her recent Marketers continue to fall into gender-stereotype traps article:

criticism demonstrates how companies – including well-funded, marketing-savvy ones – still struggle in determining the right way to market to women.

The article highlights how “woman-targeted campaigns” don’t necessarily look at the underlying issues that create a need for the campaign in the first place.

The Wall Street Journal asked last week in “The Forgotten Market Online: Older Women“:

Are online marketers so youth-conscious — because it “feels right” — that they’re ignoring lucrative markets just when they’re most needed? The Internet is neither new nor young. The fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is women over 55, according to the Tracking Facebook blog. And the underlying assumption that young people are still the Web’s most fertile market doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

This underscores the need to look first at what people are using the Internet for, rather than who they are.

A recent study from BlogHer, a leading online network for women, looks at where women go online to find trusted information. They found that women are twice as likely to go to blogs as opposed to social networking as trusted sources of information.

This survey combines the ideas of intent and demographic, by looking at intent within a demographic.

How do you think this research can help formulate your next PR campaign?

Have already been posted, and another one is due up Friday. I encourage you all to comment.

Also, Ged Carrol, Ruder Finn UK‘s new director of digital strategy has been hosting a blog on PR Week’s UK site:

Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers? Life online

Some recent posts:
That ain’t Digg bait, it’s just good PR

The name of the game

Interview with Matt McGinnis of Dell Global Comms, Enterprise Products

Enjoy!

Extremely hilarious video on integrated eye-popping web placements to leverage buzz for up-leveled cascading paradigms.

Intel’s chairman on antitrust silliness and the secrets of high-tech success. He say

- The business is bigger than the business.
- Don’t mess with Moore’s Law.
- Invest during hard times.
- Consensus is good — except when it isn’t .
- Follow the business, not Wall Street.
- When something works, don’t re-invent it, reproduce it.
- It pays to have good competitors.

50 CEOs who find tweeting a personal and professional delight.

Here’s the list boiled down: http://is.gd/BkPv

It has a great interface, and helped me find @alansmurray‘s great feed.

IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional society, turns 125 today, while announcing the first Global Engineering the Future Day.

Designed to raise public awareness of the opportunities in the technology industry, Engineering the Future Day recognizes the contributions and impact that IEEE and its members have made for the benefit of humanity.

The IEEE saw the need to increase awareness of technological advancement and its impact due to global decrease of students entering the fields of engineering, computing and technology. For example, the number of engineering specialties in Chinese universities has decreased by more than half from 1997 to 2006, according to the Chinese Ministry of Education.

In the U.S., although university enrollments are at an all-time high, the number of students in science, technology, engineering and math programs has remained stagnant for the past 25 years.

This lack of growth can lead to America facing a shortage of trained professionals in fields that fuel tomorrow’s innovations in healthcare, alternative energy and communications. And that would spell doom for digital business trends blogs!

Take a visit to IEEE 125, and see what technologies are emerging, and what’s being done to encourage tomorrow’s engineers.

The May 11 issue of Fortune Magazine is a perfect demonstration of what the three largest business magazines have done for decades. Its cover story, “How Bernie Did It’ is the culmination of a four-month investigation into the details of Bernie Madoff’s life and business operations written and reported by three of Fortune’s best editorial staff members, one of whom is a Pulitzer Prize winner. This issue of Fortune is also an example of why the magazine and its competitors Forbes and BusinessWeek, will soon no longer be able to publish these kinds of stories. The May 11 issue has 92 printed pages and covers. There are only 21 pages of paid advertising compared with more than a hundred pages in a spring issue 20 years ago.

Written by Russ Daniels,  CTO of Cloud Services Strategy at HP.

In light of all of the historical comparisons about the current economic situation and its proposed fixes, I’d like to offer my own perspective based on technology trends that have the potential to re-ignite growth for decades. My analogy comes from what at first sounds like an unlikely source: the automobile industry.

Can a lawyer hire a third person to send a “friend request” to a witness? According to an opinion from the Philadelphia Bar Association’s Professional Guidance Committee the answer is no.

Larry Page’s grandfather was an assembly worker at the Chevy plant in Flint Michigan, and his dad thought that computers were a fad. A touching story about his dad.

Rupert MurdochRupert Murdoch took a swipe at MySpace rival Facebook Thursday after News Corp. reported weaker-than-expected sales at its Fox Interactive Media unit, which consists mainly of MySpace. FIM online ad revenue during News Corp.’s fiscal third quarter ending Mar. 31 dropped 16% while the unit’s revenue overall fell 11% to $187 million.

The IT organization and the business units should be much more in tune. Here’s one way to make that happen.

There are too many “life” recording devices, information sharing platforms, and people to control for an organization or corporation. What happened to Domino’s with “rogue” personnel posting content of inappropriate and damaging activity is not too different from what lead to the exposure of Abu Ghraib abuse in 2004. The point is that these incidents are likely to happen as they reflect not only deeper underlying issues such as mismanagement and organizational practices, but now more than ever actions of individuals can have a huge impact. These incidents also tend to skew in a negative direction as it is much more likely that something shocking and inappropriate will get more attention than potential positive stories.

It is necessary for any organization to accept that a similar incident may happen to them at any time. It is impossible to have 100% satisfaction from all company stakeholder groups and focusing on draconian prevention practices will not likely work. These incidents again show that it is necessary to cultivate a positive social media presence not just to drive revenue and other goals but as a risk management tactic in case of crisis. Preparing a tiered social media crisis plan should be on the agenda of most companies and only serve as another reason to develop a social strategy.

We have seen many obituaries for various types of media in the last few years. While the following summary statement will be an oversimplification, it can all be condensed into the impending death of newspapers, magazines, TV, traditional websites, and the subsequent rise of mobile and social media. I believe that there needs to be a clarification about these issues.

It really seems that there needs to be a distinction between the two issues at hand: that of media consumption and that of media monetization. Media consumption is far from dead. From various studies (industry and in-house RF Insights research) the media consumption is growing. Even today’s Nielsen’s “3 Screen Report” (click here for pdf) shows that TV viewing is at an all-time high. Social Media, while trendy, still feeds on things that occur outside of social media: hot stories, campaigns, issues, products, etc…

The other issue is monetization. Recent magazine failures are not due to lack of readers but to lack of advertiser commitments. The classified section, the key moneymaker for newspapers, seems to be a lost battle, but newspapers still have the content that is wanted and demanded by users. They just want to consume it in different ways whether it’s through an iPhone app or Twitter feed. They also don’t want to pay for it anymore with subscriptions or perhaps even by viewing ads (hence the short form of the online New York Times or its iPhone app). It is also worthwhile to note that monetization has been an issue for social media darlings as well. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are quite lost in monetizing their highly used platforms. And while TV viewing is at an all-time high, a closer reading of the Nielsen’s report identifies that even the high consumption of TV content may not lead to easy advantages:

1. An astounding 29% of US homes have DVR technology. That can really doom the standard commercial spots
2. 31% of all internet activity occurs while also watching TV meaning that user’s attention may be in multiple places

While these issues are not new, the point is to try to distinguish between consumption and monetization before declaring the death of various media. Is the lack of monetization sustainable? We shall see….

Inspired by annual prediction and end-of-year reviews, here are a few things which I hope will not happen next year within our industry:

• More new niche “beta” social networks that do not work
• SPAM hitting Twitter
• A new free web analytics solution
• A hyped comeback of Cuil
• Either a way to monetize Facebook or a government bailout
• Microblogging affecting the course of history

And last but not least…

• More irrelevant thought leadership pieces from the “experts”

It can be a decent year if these things can be avoided, but we shall see….