Keynote: Three Future Trends of Social Business (Slides)

I’m presenting here at Webcom in Montreal, sharing the State and Future of Social Business.

In fact, I think the Cluetrain as we know it, while right for many years, needs modification to represent how the social web is changing. I took the first three theses of the mainfesto and translated it to represent how I see advertising integrating with social as well as optimization and Social Performance software.

The three trends that I see impacting the social business space include (but are not limited to):

  • Trend 1: Corporate Websites Reborn. I assert that corporate websites as we know them will be defunct, instead they will dynamically assemble content on the fly, making every page dynamic based on social data.
  • Trend 2: Social Becomes Automated: Bots among us? Sort of. We’re already seeing the rise of Social Performance Software emerge, and this will enable brands to quickly respond (yet there are risks)
  • Trend 3: To be Heard, You Will Pay: With every brand using social networks promoting their latest product, the space is getting saturated, as a result, social networks will monetize by making content visible, via ads.

I recently completed a research report covering Trend 2: Learn about the Social Media Management System space, and my upcoming report on the integration of Paid, Owned, and Earned, will publish in June.   A lot of this focus is on the customer interactions, but for a complete view, also see Charlene Li’s report on internal enterprise social networks and my research on how companies are organizing internally, to understand how companies are trying to ‘catch up’ internally.

The slides are embedded below

13 Replies to “Keynote: Three Future Trends of Social Business (Slides)”

  1.  In fact, I™m just starting out in management media and working on to find out how to do it well – resources like this blog post are a great resource. As our website is based in the US, is kind of new to us The reference mention is something that I worry about as well, how to show your own real enthusiasm and share to the community.

  2. Very interesting read.  We need to strike a balance between human interaction, emotion, and empathy with the march towards automation and automated agents, bots, etc.  I am concerned about the potential for gaming and a new form of spam to be generated!

  3. Thanks for posting your slides, Jeremiah! I’m sure you added a lot of great insights in your talk, but the slides do a nice job of condensation.

    I think your Trend 3 (pay to be heard) will become significant very quickly because of Trend 2 (automation, especially through social performance software). Internal social teams and automated tools will be de rigeur for corporations that are desperate not to be left behind…or to seem to be left behind. This will lead to more and more volume, so that to actually be heard will become more and more challenging.

  4. I don’t want to argue but if you may have reason in the future that you describe you are far away from the Cluetrain Manifesto phillosophy or message.
    Spam is growing each day, conversation is not authentic but business oriented, interest will be less and at last social media will become a mass media…

  5. As I said in Montreal, your Trend 1 doesn’t seem so new to me. How is that different than a dynamic portal page other than the addition of social information? Personalization trend came by a while ago, I’d say almost 7-10 years back. I don’t disagree that web sites will try to incorporate more social data. 

    At first I thought you were going the route where social sites completely replace the need to have a web site at all, and that we’ll be using a ‘hosted page’ or fan page on FB or other site.  Is the web going full circle back to the AOL days? 

    Ironically, Doc Searls’ new book The Intention Economy is talking about the very opposite of what you have on slide 5, i.e. rather than advertising continuing to try to guess your information, a negotiation between one’s browser and the site to selectively share information. As I mentioned, this may already be happening without the VRM technology: FB already does that for companies wanting to advertise except that users do not have a fine degree of control.

  6. Thanks Rawn, it was great chatting with you too.  I’m familiar with the VRM concept, I sat down with Doc about 7 years ago and he shared this radical concept with me.

  7. Very useful slides indeed, i truly like the point about how companies organize for social business. This is an interesting insight for org.

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