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The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras

Categories: Forrester, Future of Social Web, Social Media, Web StrategyPosted on April 27th, 2009

Expect the Groundswell to continue, in which people connect to each other –rather than institutions. Consumer adoption of social networks is increasing a rapid pace, brands are adopting even during a recession, so expect the space to rapidly innovate to match this trend. Clients can access this report, but to summarize what we found, in the executive summary we state:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

We found that technologies trigger changes in consumer adoption, and brands will follow, resulting in five distinct waves, they consist of:

The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

Update: CRM Magazine has more about the five eras, focus in on the graphic.

Timing of the Five Overlapping Eras:
It’s important to note that these eras aren’t sequential, but instead are overlapping. We’ve already entered and have seen maturity for the era of social relationships, have entered social functionality but haven’t seen true utility, and are starting to see threads of social colonization with early technologies like Facebook connect. Soon these federated identities will empower people to enter the era of social context with personalized and social content. The following diagram demonstrates how we should expect to see the eras play out in the future –with social commerce the furthest out.

Interviews with 24 of the top Social Companies:
Research isn’t done in a vacuum, that’s why we conducted qualitative research to find out what we should come to expect. We came to these conclusions based on interviews with executives, product managers, and strategists at the following 24 companies: Appirio, Cisco Eos, Dell, Facebook, Federated Media Publishing, Flock, Gigya, Google (Open Social/stack team), Graphing Social Patterns (Dave McClure), IBM (SOA Team), Intel (social media marketing team), KickApps, LinkedIn, Meebo, Microsoft (Live team), MySpace, OpenID Foundation (Chris Messina), Plaxo, Pluck, Razorfish, ReadWriteWeb, salesforce.com, Six Apart, and Twitter.

How Brands Should Prepare
What’s interesting isn’t this vision for the future, but what it holds in store for brands, as a result, companies should prepare by:

Don’t Hesitate: These changes are coming at a rapid pace, and we’re in three of these eras by end of year. Brands should prepare by factoring in these eras into their near term plans. Don’t be left behind and let competitors connect with your community before you do.

Prepare For Transparency: People will be able to surf the web with their friends, as a result you must have a plan. Prepare for every webpage and product to be reviewed by your customers and seen by prospects –even if you choose not to participate.

Connect with Advocates: Focus on customer advocates, they will sway over prospects, and could defend against detractors. Their opinion is trusted more than yours, and when the power shifts to community, and they start to define what products should be, they become more important than ever.

Evolve your Enterprise Systems: Your enterprise systems will need to connect to the social web. Social networks and their partners are quickly becoming a source of customer information and lead generation beyond your CRM system. CMS systems will need to inherit social features –pressure your vendors to offer this, or find a community platform.

Shatter your Corporate Website: In the most radical future, content will come to consumers –rather than them chasing it– prepare to fragment your corporate website and let it distribute to the social web. Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are.

Translations
If you translate this blog post, I’ll add your link here and credit you.

Dutch: Marketing Facts Team, Bas van de Haterd

Spanish: Estategia Digital by Pablo Melchor

Danish: Social Media Marketing by Peter Ulstrup Hansen

Danish: dSeneste by Søren Storm Hansen

Polish: Marketing Technologies by Dawid Pacha

Italian: Digital Ingrediants by Stefano Maggi

Russian: Shchepotin by Denis Shchepotin

Czech: Vlad Hrouda

French: We are Social by Sandrine Plasseraud

Korean: by Jamie Park

Hebrew: Blink by Israel Blechman

Indonesian: Wib’s Web World, by Wibisono Sastrodiwiryo

German: The Social Media Soapbox, by Stephen Rothman

Portuguese: Live from Sao Paulo, Brazil, by Dax

Swedish: JMW, by Brit Stakston

Norwegian: Cruena by Harald, Creuna

Arabic: Technoemedia, by Mohamed Hassan

Chinese: Seaberry, by Sylvia

Japanese: MinoriG Translation, by Minori Goto

Romanian: Blog de Comert Electronic by Adriana Iordan

Persian: Lameei, iclub.ir

Want to translate it into your language? I’ll be happy to add you, read these suggestions.

This project took a team effort, and I’d like to thank Josh Bernoff a guiding force in my career, Emily Bowen who kept the project going, Cynthia Pflaum for the quantitative data, Megan Chromik in our editing team for the polish, and Jon Symons in our PR team for the media outreach.

This is also cross posted on the Forrester blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals. Thanks to Matt Savarino for catching a small typo.

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Tags: Future of Social Web, Future of the Social Web

This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 4:53 am and is filed under Forrester, Future of Social Web, Social Media, Web Strategy. 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.

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January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Hugo Guzman

Interesting stuff...thanks for sharing
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Peter du Toit

Great info! I agree fish where the fish are :)
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Meryn Stol

Agree on the whole. I always find these categories a little artificial: Really "Forrester-speak". :) I think the recommendations are the most interesting. I'd make a separate post out of that.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Meryn Stol

You say it yourself: "What’s interesting isn’t this vision for the future, but what it holds in store for brands, " . I'd like these recommendations to be fleshed out with concrete first steps to take. Doesn't have to be more than links to relevant resources.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Jeremiah Owyang

Meryn The recommendations are fleshed out in the actual reports. Our clients (brands) have access to see them.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Meryn Stol

Hmm ok... Then I'll need to get the details elsewhere I guess. :)
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Patrick Boegel

Interesting categorization of the development into eras. Any consideration to the impact of scale on the 5th era? Just as a recent example with Facebook, their format evolution was not well received by what is not an insignificant number of members, and yet the reality is - that change - negative impact not withstanding is not rolling back.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Jeremiah Owyang

There will be a give and take between communities and brands. The thing is, Facebook doesn't have a competitive alternative that users could go to. In my report, we suggest that active communities could define specs for products, and bid MULTIPLE companies to build it.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Patrick Boegel

I completely understand that Jeremiah, just wondering if the nature of scale impacted or perhaps better said impacts the thought process for very complex long term brand relationships, ie Health Insurance, Financial Services, a college/university choice, where consversation and user invovlement can be complicated. Very interested in the full report either way. Thx.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Richard Binhammer

good stuff Jeremiah, enjoyed and some good thought provokers there for the future
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Alp

Nice paper but really expensive for young people. $750 means $41 for page.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Maria Reyes-McDavis

Great information, understanding the future's potential is more important than ever on the social web.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Anders Dahlberg

Interesting, but very general and hard to apply. I see companies more as å provide of tools/stage for conversation, aka the gold rush mining vs selling tools
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Jeremiah Owyang

Alp, Many of Forrester's clients are large brands who have a subscription. We're still sharing a great deal on this blog, and have given the report to bloggers to cover, so there's value to be had there.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Paul Fabretti

Jeremiah (and the team), a great piece of work and, I imagine, a labour of both love and loathing at times! I have been very interested in this area as I have looked at the shift in skills to deliver social media activity changes from one of basic coding knowledge to much more human, interactive skills.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am J. D. Ebberly

Fantastic article! I found it SO intriguing that I've even printed it out!
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am frank barry

"How Brands Should Prepare" is a great bit of information. Jeremiah, it would be nice (i'd be reading) if you expanded in future blog posts about the "How Brands Should Prepare".
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Jeremiah Owyang

That's likely to be a research report I'm thinking about writing Frank
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am A Mitchell

Probably correct in assuming that most online social networks will neither spawn nor solidify to the point of being considered ‘affinity groups’ with the level of cohesion, unified budgetary authority or organized implementation capability of NGOs, churches, or employee aggregations. Even in the era of social commerce. I hope I’m wrong.
January 1, 1970 at 12:33 am Vlad Hrouda

Great post, understanding the future's potential is more important than ever on the social web.

Типография

I have just finished reading the report and find it fascinating. Jeremiah, You have nailed many aspects and issues that need to be more clearly understood by marketing professionals. I will be writing a full review after I have had time to distill it down later today on my blog.

manhattan pressurized walls

A first sight, social networks are very easy : people, interactions, relationships, a hudge potential of value and, at the end, incredible and unexpected results. Unfortunately, for many reasons.Social networking is also applied to business though.

Emeri Gent [Em]

7 of 7 Likes @ Social Web Article

Sally no need to reply or reciprocate, I am at the web-strategist site today and having heard about recommending the use of "Likes" yesterday at Fred Wilson's site at AVC http://www.avc.com/ I am also trying this feature out.

I am experimenting with "Likes" as a notational tool as well as qualification as to why I would actually click it (mere social form or polite engineering is insufficient criteria for me at a personal level).

What I liked about your comment is actually that it became a jumping off point to discover Dow Jones Insight, where I learned about the conversation book and consequently introduced me to two new points of interest for my own journey:

1. Daniela Barbosa
http://danielabarbosa.blogspot.com/2009/05/conv...

2. The Conversational Corporation
http://conversationalcorporation.wordpress.com/

and of course the the conversation ebook. Your comment was therefore a good use of my time. Don't trouble yourself to respond for this now becomes an entry in my Disqus page which is for my future reference.

[Em]

Emeri Gent [Em]

Great that the comments section isn't closed here since this is one way I keep track of things that I have come to late in the game. I am on the fish side of the pond so the fishing rod of curiosity rather than marketing learning brought me here.

That curiousity is driven by a simple question I am now in part going to keep my eyes out and open for in casual surfing tradition rather than gotta-know-right-now-this-minute-or-I-am-social-media-dust kind of way. The question I am going to noddle over, mull, think, chew, dwell and meditate on is simply

What is the Social Web?

Sure there is a pretty good scope of answers here, but this exercise I engage for my own cerebrum and for the colony that is emerging around my own personal space on the web which is my "freedom oasis".

[Em]

Andrew

Era of Social Commerce? No thanks, dude. Slash and burn social networks for business, branding and commercial purposes and your target customers (social media users) will flock to pastures unfettered by advertising, branding and commercial intrusions. Injecting commercial efforts into social networks should be limited and targeted very carefully. Don't go barging into the medium or you'll ruin the landscape.

Paul Marsden

Jeremiah, interesting and unique vision of social commerce - we’ve taken it and added it to the Social Commerce timeline and word cloud over at SocialCommerceToday.com

http://www.socialcommercetoday.com/?p=1121

Roger Marris

Jeremiah,

Thank you for all your insightful dialogue. Your research, blogs, tweets et al have always been informative and it has been great to expand my knowledge through what you have written. Good luck on your next move.

Roger

Cathrina

I have been marketing for over 3 years and found that there are so many social networking sites and people are asking about how this will help them. Most efforts are driven by those who take their work seriously until there are some positive results. As for me I think the community as much as they are already communicating with friends and family, is left all up to them. Although with my professional and personal goals it allows my family to see what the island's new way of building communities is all about. So by taking a step further, it wouldn't hurt at all to take the next step since this is all very positive news for everyone.

Tugce Esener

Hi Jeremiah!
Great article, very insightful for both companies and individuals! I wanted to contribute to it by translating it to Turkish. here's the link to the translated article: http://www.mienotes.com/2009/07/sosyal-webin-gelecegi-bes-donem/

ayhancanpolat

Thanks Tugce,
It is really useful translate. When I prepare some stuff about the Social Web, I used your translate, Thanks again

Amitav Chak

www.shopnics.com is move to the Social Colonization space. I think we are the 1st one in shopping space. We have also took advantage of facebook stream such that online user can be in touch with the friends while making the buying decision.

sylvia

My Chinese version is here: (中文譯本在這里) http://bit.ly/GTq4Z

Лев

Да уж Ну у вас либо талант писать, либо это стыбрено откуда-то! :)

Israel Blechman

The Hebrew version of the post: http://blinkit.co.il/?p=354.
Thank you very much for this enlightening text.

Mattia

Not really a full italian translation, but a quick summary is here: http://www.coolshop.it/coolblog/le-cinque-fasi-del-social-web/

Mattia

Dax

Yeah a great post!

Hey Jeremiah I'm following you!

Check my brazilian portuguese version here:
http://daxfdr.wordpress.com/2009/05/22/five-eras-of-social-web/

Sue Sutcliffe

Great post Jeremiah! I've linked to this from my blog as I think the pictures say a 1000 words, and will save me much ink LOL.

Lennie Rose

You are seeing the future and showing it to us. Remarkable. Thank you!

The Futurist

While the pictures and the words look nice, I find it hard to relate to the timing. Things may happen faster than we expect.
Twitter may be popular with marketers and unashamed self promoters like myself, but it has far greater potential as a tool for those who probably can't see any benefit for them from twitter at the moment.
Identity and security are obvious issues with a web and mobile based text communication system, and are needed to enable any meaningful usage beyond a gossip channel.
There is so much more it will be used for.
It's all just a form of communication, email, txt, twitter, facebook, myspace etc. Marketers can use it or abuse it. In reality it will be the consumers who decide whether to use it or not.
Social networking is not likely toprovide the opportunity to 'push' ads on consumers and I suspect ad pushing tweeters will find themselves with rapidly shrinking lists of followers.
There is a small leap to be made to the point where twitter-like services become essential for everyone. It is just after identity and security are applied.
That may not be as many years away as the diagram shows.
Broad adoption could happen much more quickly if that point of usefulness is reached. It is a communications interface, the opportunities are limitless.

Bart Poll

Great presentation today at CSN Conference #csn09 in Amsterdam!

Looking forward to reading the report. Thank you for that too!

Jean Paul Barthet

Extremely interesting read..... makes me look forward to the future with great excitement!!! :)

jeremiah_owyang

Patrick, The whole point of a report is to turn my notes into something meaningful, even if I did release them (I'm not planning to) it's written in a way that makes sense to me, not the rest of the world. Good thought, I may consider this in the future for other reports, I simply didn't prepare to do so for this one.

Patrick Mason

there would be value in releasing your raw notes from the interviews, let us form our own opinions....I recognize the challenges this might pose, but an interesting opportunity don’t you think?

Sally Hammond

Great research and intersting view into the future of social networking, branding and ecommere. I am very interested in how companies (big brands) are going to tackle their 'influencer' network; coming from the marketing and public relations perspective. Today, we look at a 'web' of influence and each author can provide an influence to a companies brand but those lines are blurring with social media and social networks. The trend that I am seeing is the challenge to be able to keep ones finger on the pulse of what customers, employees, external constients and journalists. When you add in global and multi-language, this task seems daunting. The 'old school' techniques of monitoring and measuring the effectivness of a message, brand, product annoucement can no longer rely on the traditional methods. I would love your thoughts on what you are seeing in terms of trends with this part of 'communication' vs. ecommerce.
Thanks for the great 'insight'
Sally

Aaron Strout

Jeremiah,

This is fantastic work. I am VERY excited about the possibilities that your new thinking unlocks (we're a perfect fit for era 4 & 5). I look forward to hearing more about it.

Best,
Aaron | @aaronstrout

Michael Wamboldt

Oh, by the way, this is a must read article.

Michael Wamboldt

An interesting aspect of this transformation will have to include the linking of non-discrete topics. An example is in order. Most of today's social networking is based on discrete topics, be they people, products, ... One of the interesting challenges will be to link communities who are more interested in 'fuzzy' topics, typically expressed as non-discrete business problems, such as creating an effective supply chain management system and delivering an effective web ordering system are fundamentally related.

Communities will link once the leading edge 'observers' learn of the connections between the communities and topics, but that initial linkage will become more and more difficult because of the explosion of topics.

This is the hurdle that needs to be crossed to get to the era of social commerce, IMHO.

Tom Chapman

Fantastic insight into the future development of the social web, thank you Jeremiah and team. Your interview with CRM magazine compliments this post. I'm intrigued to see how PR companies will embrace the future web, the way in which they will represent communities and groups to influence companies, organisations, and institutions! Brian Solis is a guiding light on Social CRM much like yourself and I'm certain you collaborate on thoughts in order to make sense of this space. SalesForce in my own opinion is an organisation that has fully embraced the social web and is making significant steps in shaping the future direction of social media in practise; especially within the context of B2B where I think relationships can be managed most effectively.
Personally I'm waiting to see an organisation integrate social networks, social commerce, enterprise 2.0, social crm etc... Threading social media throughout the entire business piecing the jigsaw together making an entire social organisation - this will not take long I'm certain.
Looking forward to more brain food from you J :)
Bests, @TomChapman

Darren Yan

Jeremiah,

I noticed that the move to the subsequent eras following 2007 is over a period of 5 years. That seems to suggest that the number of online social advocates will create the multiplier effect that'll motivate web owners to move into a social web sooner rather than later.

Darren

philip

Great article! Thank you!
Posted it on our community site: http://www.consciouscreatives.net/group/c3expansion/forum/topics/the-future-of-social-web

Think the implications are far reaching. As we watch the demise of money as a non-sustainable system, the evolution of these value exchange channels are crucial. Combined with time banking and gifting, we can create a whole new economic system ;-)

Justin Smith

Jeremiah,

As usual, great report. I am particularly interested in the era of "social colonization" which we are just beginning. Just this week, Facebook announced new extensions to the stream API. Developments like this should accelerate the pace at which community, identity, and privacy traverse the web with us, which brings about exciting new opportunities for product development by publishers and application developers, many of which were tried and failed during earlier eras of the web. The "socially colonized" web brings about fertile soil for new products and product adaptations across a variety of verticals, and I'm really excited about it.

Justin

Dan Austin

Well, I haven't yet had access to whole report but I image implications for accessing and gaining customer insights are going to change and accelerate.

Shira Adatto

Jeremiah,

Very insightful piece. It is exciting to see how some of this will play out especially as people begin to compartmentalize their larger networks into niche groups with like-minded interests. This is exactly what Zibaba is trying to do with their social shopping applications for social networks and online retailers. While you emphasize that brands need to begin to prepare, the social networks themselves also need to be adopting the technology that will let them monetize their vast user base and at the same time give the users the platform for what will eventually lead to the era of social colonization.
@shiraadatto

jeremiah_owyang

Laurent, thanks, Feel free to setup a briefing to show me an example of social commerce when you have a mature product.

Mary-Jane. I'm afraid I don't have those answers, I don't focus on those areas, sorry.

Derek, Never heard of a green lightbulb! But I take the praise regardless, thank you.

Derek Showerman

Jeremiah,

I have found visuals to be incredibly valuable to organizations new to the industry. These visuals helped a client of mine pop the proverbial light bulb (green of course) above the head. Thx and keep up being great at what you do!

Mary-Jane McCarthy

First, let me just say I have been following your posts quite often lately. I wanted to ask whether it is true that the EU just agreed to have all websites ask for the agreement of the visitor when a cookie is being passed through the browser. I think that would be very difficult to manage for us, the not-native internet users…. Do you know anything about this? Supposedly this would turn all websites more complicated, including blogs? What are cookies and why are they dangerous? Are cookies from your blog safe?

Thank you and very interested in your reply,

Mary,

Laurent Rozenfeld

Hi Jeremiah,
I found your post interesting. Information must be valuable and the social web must evolve or it will likely become stagnant. You make an interesting point about the eras. I agree with the eras, but the timeline is such that our team knows social commerce will happen much more quickly than that. Our platform is such that this will happen long before 2011. Beta testing for our platform starts soon. Perhaps you or your readers would like to check it out. (blog.zackbrandit.com)
Thank you for making such important points. Everyone needs to be more aware of this kind of thing.

businessethos

Smashing report Jeremiah!

You give your readers lots to chew on---
usability is queen.

@businessethos

jeremiah_owyang

Rolad

Thanks, that's something we've thought long and hard about. We know that many users don't often change the 'toggles' and settings for their different social networking tools, or from the ol' portals of yesteryear.

The thing to watch is if social network preferences start to get more intelligent, where your historical behavior gives some context for your future preferences. In the end, users will have to opt in and approve actions, but the goal is to not make them to it in excess.

Take Plaxo's integration with Facebook today --they are reducing the tiresome effort of having to "Friend" people.

Expect more of this to happen in the near future.

Rolad Smart

Jeremiah,

I think this summary is very useful, thanks for sharing. Part of what I find most interesting is how user behaviors will change as the social web becomes more structured. For example, I suspect that people will have a new need to set up levels of access to their identities as they move from one space to another, passing through firewalls, sites, etc. By this, some spaces will be aware of my entire social network, while others may only be aware of small parts of my network. We already see users starting to structure such relationships online today, though there are limited tools to do so.

Emeri Gent [Em]

6 of 7 Likes @ Social Web

Rolad no need to reciprocate, I am at the web-strategist site having heard about recommending the use of "Likes" yesterday at Fred Wilson's site at AVC. There is only one question I have for you in that I could not locate you on twitter. Do you link there?

Otherwise what I liked about your comment is that it introduced me to your work at

http://www.rolandsmart.com/

which I found interesting for my own reference point and inquiry.

Thanks
[Em]

Harold

Jeremiah! Great post. Some incredible forward looking thoughts on the whole social network dynamic. It's difficult creature to grasp as it changes so rapidly and is more fluid dynamics funneled through tech.

You've given me some things to think about and I really appreciate that.

Wei

Will SNS take power away from CRM? It is like saying email will take power away from CRM in 1995 when email became new communication tool. SNS and community are communication channel for consumers and brands. The challenges for CRM system is to use this channel to communicate with consumers. This is called CRM2.0 (http://crm2dot0.blogspot.com)

jeremiah_owyang

Eggirl, I haven't seen any that are doing it well.

Appirio, who I referenced in the report, is trying to siphon bits of user data in FB

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/03/06/social-crm-when-registration-pages-go-extinct/

Glad you're learning with me, I learn a lot from the commenters too.

EGGirl

As with your other posts, I really appreciate your analysis of this space. I learn something every time I read a post. Thank you.

Question re: evolve Enterprise Systems - which brands/organizations are doing a good job of integrating information generated from social networks (whether it be one they've created or another) into their proprietary customer database?

Would love your perspective.

Saju Joseph

You must have really spent a lot of time to come out with this. Keep it up.

Martin Hosking

A fascinating piece of work - at least in snapshot. I am not sure, however whether the era of social-commerce isn't going to land upon us sooner than forecast. The recessionary environment is driving people from the malls and big brands into more meaningful transactions (this is a feature of recessions in general) thus sites like Etsy and certainly we at RedBubble are seeing ever increasing interest and traction.

Steve Sarner

Great perspective - and excellent follow on comments too!

Greg Merkley

Do members of multiple social networks really want a portable, unified identity? Efficient, yes, but it doesn't seem to fit how we interact online or offline, which is by having somewhat different identities (or at least different aspects of our identities) depending on the relationship and context.

And how would a unified identity fit with individual social network business models? Isn't the data a strategic asset for each social network?

Sarah Sturtevant

What a fascinating analysis of social media, its evolution and future direction. I work with industrial companies who tend to be slow adopters when it comes to all things online, preferring old school, traditional sales tactics to engage with their buyers. But I have seen a gradual change lately in the level of urgency from my clients to leverage the web more efficiently. This kind of research is very useful as I attempt to guide them in their online marketing and branding efforts. Thanks, Jeremiah et al!

Emeri Gent [Em]

5 of 7 @ Social Web

Sarah no need to reply or reciprocate to this comment, simply linking your blog to my own Disqus page.

http://www.waterloomin.com/blogs/marketingm?aut...

[Em]

greg group

This is a very interesting view of the future. I totally agree with the inportance of consumer advocates and their influence on brands in the future.

Thanks for sharing.

rob,BtG

excellent observation, thanks. will be a great tool for all to prepare with.

http://twitter.com/robbtg

jeremiah_owyang

Paula,
It's going to take folks like you to help brands get to that 'aha' moment. Thank you.

Gianandrea,
In many cases, communities will segment by region and language, much as they do now. There's one thing to remember, that not all information is passed explicitly (writing or talking) but some are non-verbal, or implicit. Expect technologies to aggregate this implicit content such as what have I bought, how did I rate it, and if I bought it again.

Ronald Lucero

This will happen sooner than the expected maturity. The only concern is the adoptability of the corporate community. Many of them are still locked up by their traditional marketers and advertising agencies who still believe in conventional branding.

gianandrea facchini

Great post, as usual, but I feel that there is a huge barrier still on site: language.
The world real divide will no longer be the access to technology but the fact that some billion people can write and read in English, some other billions in Chinese, etc.
I think that social context and social commerce need a solution to this issue to get fully implemented.

Paula Dauncey

Very useful research. I particularly liked the section on how brands should prepare. The one point that I discuss with our clients regularly is regarding transparency so they understand that social media will open them up to the world whether they like it or not. This is normally the area that then makes them ready to discuss how to 'shatter their corporate website' and 'not hesitate'.

David D. Griffith

Absolutely awesome work and articulated so well in word and picture. Would I ever love to see the complete report! I'm certain not to alone in that sentiment.

Olivier Amprimo

Jeremiah,

The "Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are" is not new, it's just not widespread. This requires a level of agility to cope with and put companies at the mercy of changing technologies and copyrights or broader legal policies of SN. Ning and Facebook are here to remind us that and prevent a lot of companies to play the game.

Alternative option is to make your website the preferred place by creating an environment where people can create their own activity, network, micro-services that are related to services offered by the company. Some people call this a composite portal, and they can be 2.0. It needs agility in coping with standards to be as open as possible, but offers companies the opportunity to master analytics.

At some point we might want to bear in mind that one of the most promising business model of social network is selling analytics, not ads (time to move beyond Google). Add the need to comply to SN's choices (above) and your last point consequently may lead to make it very expensive for corps to have an online presence.

Chris Cobb

Very insightful study. Imagine being able to join a community where everyone with a similar interest is there with content and commerce. Talk about relevance!

Kyle W

I think you're confusing 'brands' with companies. No matter how much marketers would like, they are not remotely the same the same thing.

Hugo Guzman

Interesting stuff, though I suspect that many mainstream, old-school brands will fail to grasp these trends until after it's too late. I've spoken with literally hundreds of top brands in the past two years, and only a small percentage seem to grasp the socialized future that awaits them (and its implications on their brand presence and bottom line).

Eirik Hansen

Jeremiah: Thanks for all the great work you share. Read a lot of your stuff and find very interesting and useful.

jeremiah_owyang

Sanjay thanks

I've found that vendors are more optimistic about social commerce than brands are. Many brands have product team that are not yet willing to let customers take the drivers seat in marketing let alone innovation.

Keep in mind that true social commerce in how we define it is beyond ratings and ratings and feedback. But when communities spec out products, and then bid to different brands to build it. We haven't seen any examples of this to this degree... yet.

Sanjay Dholakia

JO,

Excellent report -- nice breakdown of behaviors and recommendations. One thought that I would offer and would love your thoughts on is the timing of era #5 (social commerce).

My view is that it willa ctually happen much sooner than you show on the timeline. We are already seeing it happen in many customer situations -- the community takes on greater and greater ownership of the brand. Companies love this strictly becasue they see it is driving commerce for them -- we have some that are seeing shopping cart sizes increase -- other see over 40% increases in sales.

With that sort of result -- in a capitalist environment -- my belief is that companies will actually push to make eras 2-4 become reality if it is serving to drive era #5. In that sense, era #5 becomes less of a follower and more of a driver.

Would love to conitnue the dialogue.

Again, excellent report and analysis.

Emeri Gent [Em]

4 of 7 @ Social Web

Sanjay no need to reply or reciprocate to this comment. Your comment led to me finding out more about your company:

http://www.lithium.com/

I will get a chance to study Lithium's approach to communities for my own personal study, again no need to respond, I am simply jotting this note down for my Disqus explorative purposes only.

[Em]

Christine

I'm writing a research project on the emergence of social web in Vietnam, where I currently live and work (and go to school). I'll be citing your works in my report often! Coming back to the Bay Area just in time to hear you speak at the 140 Twitter Conference! Thank you for speaking at it.

IndianaLotto

Great reading, thanks for the info.

jeremiah_owyang

Thomas

I've outlined what some of this means on this post: Social CRM, when registration pages go extinct:

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/03/06/social-crm-when-registration-pages-go-extinct/

The report outlines a new type of social contract where people will expose parts of their identity (which they will control) and brands will have to offer them something in return.

Prem Aparanji

Good work there Jeremiah! Should be able to get the report by tomorrow.

A slightly off topic query: can I reuse the diagrams anywhere on the non-commercial social web? They have not been shared under CC or any other such licensing terms. Can I link to them from your Flickr stream in my blog posts or use them in slideshare preso?

Thomas Schmitz

Jeremiah,

Does your research include barriers to evolution? It appears to me that two important barriers will be data capture and source tagging.

Source tagging is simple. Businesses want their names or brands attached to their content. Will companies participate in social media mash-ups if they loose their identities?

More critical, it seems, is the need to capture data. Businesses want people/companies to enter the marketing or sales funnel. Right now, data flow in mash-ups tend to be one-way. For example, from my blog to Facebook. Facebook is not giving me critical contact data like e-mail addresses or phone numbers. That's a problem.

There is a bumping of heads here. Sellers use social media to influence and gather information. Buyers use social media to gather information but keep a barrier between them and the sellers. Social media platforms are caught in between.

One thing is for certain. How this issues get solved will influence heavily the evolution of social media.

Emeri Gent [Em]

2 of 7 @ Social Web

Thomas no need to reply or reciprocate to this comment. I found your comment about source tagging interesting. I used to work many years ago in this particular industry but obviously things have advanced much since I have left it and your comment simply reminded me that there is advancements in terms of data capture technologies and interfacing with the social web. This is something I will check down the road, for now I simply want to make a personal note of it.

[Em]

jeremiah_owyang

Jennifer, I completely agree that there will be different types of contacts an individual will have.

We call this "Facets" of a "Persona". First, we all have one persona, but we all have different groups and relationships, which we call facets.

Expect us to have not just granular controls on identity systems (Facebook already allows this, although the deployment is poor) but expect people to have more than one identity and login, just as we currently have different email addresses today.

So what's the difference? We can now access a complete persona (all work friends) across multiple networks easily.

Jenifer Olson

Hi Jeremiah,

Great information!

Quick question: Do you believe there is a need for technology to give people the option to customize their online personas, without which the timing and very future of the social web itself may be in jeopardy?

Here is a recent Clickz article talking about the need for personalization: http://www.clickz.com/3633522. It states...

"What's needed is the ability to compartmentalize our online personas in a more granular fashion that recognizes the different types of relationships we have in our lives. The whole world -- your boss, your business contacts, your social acquaintances, your close friends, your spouse, and your kids -- don't need to have access to the same information about you, but you'd probably like them to have some access to you, just in varying degrees.

"All 'friends' are not equal. And if we don't start recognizing that fact (such as with some sort of 'Circle of Friends' functionality that recognizes the difference), the compartmentalized consumer might just start shutting us out in ever-increasing numbers."

Thanks for your thoughts on this!

Jenifer @jenajean

Emeri Gent [Em]

3 of 7 @ Social Web

Jenifer no need to reply or reciprocate to this comment. I am simply making a note for my own Disqus records as to why I liked your comment.

You mentioned personalization, which is something I was following up a long time ago when Christopher Locke had introduced a now abandoned project at personalization @ .com - the present link is now owned by someone else, so is no longer relevant.

It was ahead of its time and this particular personalization community folded about 8 years ironically through lack of support (I don't think this would be the case today). Anyway, your comment reminded me of that, as well stirred a reminder that later on, I want to start looking at the whole area of personalization again.

Again, no need to respond back, this is simply a part of my own personal exploration mandate.

Cheers
[Em]

matt yorke

Excellent piece of work..very insightful and easy to implement in plans and thinking.
Matt

jeremiah_owyang

Rich

I can't comment on Ad Age's study as I was not involved.

Regardless, brands, media, should first focus on first the consumer adoption --it's clear this is a trend not to be ignored.

Social Marketing Impact

This is such an exceptional post, for all digital marketers to read. Understanding what's coming will be important in the coming months/years for social media and social marketing. Everything is moving so fast, great stuff!

Maria Reyes-McDavis

Rich Nadworny

Every marketer should put this diagram in their toolbox. I love the last suggestion about the corporate Web site.

What's crazy, though, Jeremiah, is that AdWeek just put out a study showing how reluctantly brands and marketers actually want to move into this space. While it focuses on online media, it seems to show the opposite of what you're suggesting, showing a growing gap between those who will get Social Web and those who will be left behind.

Or will they just be the laggards coming in late in phase 2-3?
http://digitalstrategy.typepad.com/digital_strategy/2009/04/the-times-are-a-changing-or-steady-as-she-goes.html

Rodney Rumford

I have just finished reading the report and find it fascinating. Jeremiah, You have nailed many aspects and issues that need to be more clearly understood by marketing professionals. I will be writing a full review after I have had time to distill it down later today on my blog.

Cheers and excellent work!

Openworld

Jeremiah,

Outstanding article - one question...

>>[Social commerce] is when communities themselves define what the products should be –and then dictate to brands how they should be built. Brands that don’t jump on this may find their competitors will ‘bid’ for the community spec.

Do you see tribe followers self-organizing to do the same? Very few if any leading Twitterers, for example, have created systemic paths for followers to earn Twollars or similar karma points in return for creating value for other tribe members and/or good causes.

If current top-of-the-pyramid social network leaders fail to establish such support ecosystems and reputation-building paths for their followers, do you see groups defining what they would like to see -- and then moving to tribe leaders that are more committed to creating conditions for uplift?

We're considering launch of a "Freedompoints" feedback-based system that can recognize notable inkind contributions to actual and virtual communities, and would welcome suggestions for next steps.

Best,

Mark Frazier
@openworld (twitter)

Emeri Gent [Em]

1 of 7 @ Social Web

Mark no need to reply or reciprocate to this comment. I am simply recording my "like" for purposes of my Disqus page. I did include you onto my Twitter page, it is obvious to me that you bring a depth of experience that I will "recruit", so again this twitter linkage is for my own observations, plus I don't see the point of why one would follow people that from a purely mental logistic point of view cannot be "followed".

I hardly have enough time to follow 36 people (which is capped), otherwise I view Twitter as a people accumulation process, and becoming a "collector of people" is for collectors, not for those people who simply want to use social media as a learning portal.

Again, no need to respond or reply (or reciprocate at Twitter - since I don't want followers). Otherwise I will catch your tweets on my selected "team" and it was great to find out about you here.

[Em]

justinrfrench

i really like the flow, and yes being patient, transparent, and developing lasting relationships is key for long term success through social networking. companies must come to realize this especially. great insight as usual. cheers,
twitterholic justinrfrench

Richard Stacy

Agree very much with your five steps on how brands should prepare - especially point five - I spend my time trying to get organisations to understand that the game has shifted away from their corporate site and the days of walled gardens are over. As I summarise it - advantage and value no longer lie in Channel, they lie in Content, Conversation and Community. Understanding that is the main brand challenge.

I tend to look at things from a history / information rather than technology perspective - and see three phases. Phase one was when information was completely tied to (and controlled) by its means of distribution. Phase two (the start of social media) was when content became more liberated as the means of distribution became more accessible - but place of distribution (e.g. social network) still shaped the information to an extent. Phase three will be the world where information is totally separated from its means of place or distribution. It is the world of the connected crowd and we are starting to see its dynamics in twitter usage - especially the TagSpace concept. A genuine TagSpace lives across all current and future social networks http://tinyurl.com/bnlk6r

Wish I was Forrester client so I could read the report in full!

Goofydg1

Great post

jeremiah_owyang

itpinoy

Social commerce is much more than user ratings and reviews like we see on Amazon or eBay.

This is when communities themselves define what the products should be --and then dictate to brands how they should be built.

Brands that don't jump on this may find their competitors will 'bid' for the community spec.

Although in a small way, Techcrunch 'crowdsourced' to it's community the creation of the CrunchPad, a early example of how this can play out.

itpinoy

interesting... esp the social colonization. as for the era of social commerce.. this is already in place.. ive been seeing many social sites that cater e-commerce...

thanks!!!

jeremiah_owyang

John thanks, that's a helpful guide, the mainstream times line up similar to what we're seeing.

Khalil Aleker

This is excellent... thanks so much for this information!

Alex de Carvalho

Excellent piece, Jeremiah, congrats. This is hugely useful. Incidentally, news organizations should pay particular heed to "Shatter your Corporate Website."

Scott Meleskie

Really great work... Interesting insights like always!

John Furrier

I'd like to share my post on the four stages of marketer in social media.. high level but my efforts in my research at SiliconAngle Labs is to understanding what makes social media scale? That is the elusive goal today. Happy to collaborate with you Jeremiah and others if interested.

http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=3677

John Furrier

congrats Jeremiah - great to see you still pumping out great stuff. Keep it coming. Enjoying all the sharing you're doing as well as the deep in depth stuff.

Nice work

Paul Miser

Excellent insights Jeremiah. It's going to be an exciting ride over the next few years to see all this unfold. Keep us up to date!

Niv Calderon

great piece of work.

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