In my last post, I talked about how we are already experiencing the future of social media. However, I also talked about going out on a limb, so now I turn to predictions and forecasting social media. More specifically, I'll outline the future of the top social media site (Facebook), then I'll go out on a limb by predicting what the whole industry will look like in a couple of years.
From Social to Interests
In this TechCrunch post, Max Levchin labels Facebook as "the rich white pages". The title partly reads the "next big company will capture the interest graph". Facebook is a great directory because most of our friends are on there, but it is not inherently an interest based platform. More importantly, if most of our friends are in one place, then that means a flood of information will force us to seek higher ground, or to focus on topic specific information. That's why Google has been so dominant over the past several years-with a flood of information on the Internet came a need to sift through it all. Google was great at that, but now social media is the next flood of information, so we are seeing a lot of Stream Aggregators, Social Media Monitoring Systems (SMMS), Social Analytics and Social Search companies springing up. I do not think Facebook is the higher ground. Facebook has a massive user-base, but it does not have a focused interest based information feed that users will take for granted. It is merely a social feed of your friends sharing relatively random videos and whatever piques their interest at that moment.
Facebook, Groupon, LinkedIn, Zynga and Twitter are the highest valued social websites, but despite the nature of online business (One large company can buy another successful website), all of these social sites are still around today because they took the advice for entrepreneurs to heart, "Don't sell your company". These social sites will continue to grow over the next two years, while heavily influencing the industry with their changes and acquisitions. Ok, but where will the social graph goliath (Facebook) be in two years?
I believe that Facebook has so many users and so much momentum, there are few events that will derail their success and trajectory. Their biggest obstacle is the inevitable Initial Public Offering (IPO). The SEC will force Facebook to go public because of the controversial secondary-market trades that are occurring. Once Facebook goes public, the internal political dynamic will change dramatically. Technological innovation will slow to a crawl and this I think will be the point at which Zuckerberg and his colleagues cash in. I'll talk more on this line in a future post, but for now, let's move on from predicting the top players' future to predicting what the social media industry as a whole will look like in two years.
Discovering Social Media
Discovery lies in digging through the variety of online communities. The New York Times published an article on niche communities and this is where I believe social media is headed. That NYT article did not do justice to the potential of category-specific communities. The future of social media is in discovering unique communities that are built around personal interests or careers.
Gender will be less important, as Johanna Blakley eloquently points out in this video. I'd take this a step further though and say demographics will be hardwired into marketing and relationships because every online community will feature a certain demographic profile. The members of one online community will be stereotyped. In turn, those members will not complain because they know precisely why they are a part of that online community.
Interest Graph
An interview of Brian Solis highlights the paradigm of the interest graph being entirely focused on personalized content streams, such as sharing photos, engaging in business and networking, and going to events. Variety in social media empowers anyone with internet access. People who discover this variety will easily organize an event, save money travelling, save money learning a new language, save/make money in business networking, join an online book club, or do all of the above.
The interest graph is not only about getting automatic suggestions popping up in front of you, but it is about easily finding content that truly speaks to all aspects of your life. The big idea here is having social websites cater to its users, providing all the information you want and need in a customized interface, which will also synch with other accounts to make it easy to share and help out friends in their search for the same custom digital lifestyle.
Sending and broadcasting content on different websites forces variety in social media. Users need different platforms to carry out various functions, such as email, microblogs, videos etc. My point is that one website cannot do all of this successfully, so variety will win. Look no further than the Google and Facebook War that has been raging for months for proof that large tech companies are trying to offer "everything" within their website. The reality is that each company will focus on a few functions really well because beyond those capabilities, traffic dwindles and mal-focused side projects are called off.
Innovation is a key element in how I see the future of social media. When I talked about the nature of online business, where one large company will buy a new website, I did not point out the critical trend. Even though we read about a large company buying a successful startup once a week, there are new social websites going live almost every day. Innovation in social media will drive this industry to a highly refined digital social layer. Creative, new and shiny interfaces will compete with the big established social tools because within the social sphere, when something catches on, users continue to adopt it and share. Innovative entrepreneurs will prevent a monopoly in social media, so we will be left with a vital variety.
In this post, I hopefully shed some light on the future of social media for you, or at least got your "go-out-on-a-limb" juices flowing.
How do you see social media in two years? Do you think I am way off, or spot on?