When Time Magazine names Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year and Hollywood releases a movie entitled The Social Network, it's fair to say 2010 is the year social media came of age.
And while Zuck made headlines all year - mainly regarding privacy issues - Facebook was not the only social media story by a long shot. Here are the top three social media stories that caught my attention in 2010:
- WikiLeaks: Love him or hate him, WikiLeaks front man Julian Assange caught everyone's attention this year by dumping massive amounts of classified documents onto the Internet. Best case is he embarrassed diplomats from around the world, likely forcing them to be more secretive. Worst case is he revealed the identities of locals co-operating with allied forces in war zones such as Afghanistan, endangering their lives through incomplete or improper redaction of documents. A great debate erupted over whether Assange is a hacker or journalist, to which many wondered aloud what's a journalist in this day of self-publishing? Todd Gitlin saw Assange as a non-journalist, writing in The New Republic "the twinning of Julian Assange with Daniel Ellsberg as a sort of tag-team of noble leaking, an aristocracy of transparency, strikes me as glib and unconvincing, even if the two men have at times presented themselves as brothers under the skin. . . . Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers was a great democratic act that helped clarify for the American public how its leaders had misled it for years, to the immense detriment of the nation's honour. By contrast, WikiLeaks' huge data dump, including the names of agents and recent diplomatic cables, is indiscriminate. Assange slashes and burns with impunity. He is a minister of chaos fighting for a world of total transparency. We have enough problems without that."
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Haiti: When the traditional lines of communication went down and news organizations could not access this tiny Caribbean island devastated by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, user-generated content filled in. Venerable news sources such as The Guardian, the BBC, the New York Times and CNN mixed and mashed traditional reportage with crowdsourced media to give an impressively detailed picture to the world of this catastrophe.
"Members of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook spread messages and pleas to send help. Facebook was overwhelmed by - and blocked - some users who were sending messages about updates. The American Red Cross set a record for mobile donations, raising $7 million US in 24 hours when they allowed people to send $10 US donations by text messages. The OpenStreetMap community responded to the disaster by greatly improving the level of mapping available for the area using post-earthquake satellite photography provided by GeoEye, and tracking website Ushahidi co-ordinated messages from multiple sites to assist Haitians still trapped and to keep families of survivors informed. . . . Google Earth updated its coverage of Port-au-Prince on 17 January, showing the earthquake-ravaged city."
- Groupon: Deal of the day site Groupon didn't pioneer social buying - that was Woot.com in 2004 - but boy it sure made it mainstream. The concept is simple: Groupon emails subscribers one deal per day from a retailer and if enough people take the deal, it's a go. Sort of like Costco coupons by email. As PBS reported in its MediaShift column: "Various reports tag Groupon's sales at between $500 million to $2 billion, with Forbes calling it the 'fastest growing company ever.' But maybe Groupon was believing its own hype by passing on a massive $5 billion to $6 billion takeover offer from Google. Were they being smart to wait for a better offer or an IPO? Or would they rue the day they turned down all that money? Time will tell." Whatever the outcome, advertising is changed forever thanks to Groupon's success.
There were many more social media stories throughout 2010, but the above three were, excuse the cliche, game changing. Speaking of games, last year around this time I hauled out the old crystal ball and made a few predictions for 2010. How did I fare? Let's see:
- A front-runner will emerge in the single sign-on world - "The big three" of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, plus many other sites, have settled on OAuth as their preferred form of authentication, which gives the handy single sign-on protocol huge momentum. So I was right-ish.
- Twitter will launch an ad-based business model and paid pro accounts - Twitter brought promoted tweets, trends and accounts to market, but no freemium (paid account) model to the masses. I was half right. Or half wrong, depending on your view.
- Facebook will open more content to the outside world - It did, allowing business pages to be indexed by Google to drive traffic and allowing individual users to open up as much content as they like. My crystal ball was firing on all cylinders on this one.
- The migration of marketing dollars to digital will accelerate - Digital advertising overtook U.S. newspaper advertising in 2010 and eMarketer.com reported 2010 was a tipping point toward increased spending on digital advertising. Take that, palm readers!
- Location-based services will experience low adoption in 2010 - Pew Internet reported last month: "As of August, only four per cent of American adults who used the Internet also used location-based services, which allow people to 'check in' to physical locations via their cellphones to earn coupons or keep up with friends." Uh huh.
There's the year in social media from my vantage point. Next week - new predictions with plenty of opportunity for me to be wrong throughout 2011. Meanwhile, have a happy new year and experience the real social media - your friends and family.
Doug Lacombe is president of Calgary social media agency communicatto and is so used to being wrong at home he can't believe some of his predictions panned out. Add your comments and predictions on Facebook at facebook.com/communicatto.
Note: This article was originally published in its entirety on my Postmedia News social media column.
2010 the year social media came of age is a post from: communicatto - Social media agency in Calgary Alberta