1) Community Engagement will become the Driver of Local Media

Local news used to be the province of the local newspapers, radio stations and TV. It’s become clear consumers will digest local news online as newspapers shut down, and on the Internet, all media are equal – TV, radio and print websites compete for the same eyeballs. A swelter of recent big media portal deals – for example, MSN/NBCU/Hearst,  to cover local news threatens local media institutions through sheer size and scale. Curatorial portals – Huffington Post’s local editions and Outside.in (with investment from CNN among others to support content development for CNN Local editions) will aggregate the news, and local reporter infrastructure will be nurtured at citizen journalist engines like Examiner.com or AOL’s Seed.

Here’s the problem: local is local. Media portals need to figure out how to engage the community at a grass roots level so they have drivers and participants pushing the conversations and attracting their peers.  Portals believe they can scale and develop the website traffic required to support a local advertisement model. However, communities may develop their own home grown commercial systems for the same reasons why “buy local” is becoming a mantra; and the portals aren’t entitling ownership of their local media systems to the community. For that reason, a community may rather spend its local advertising dollars with an on-the-ground local publisher like Minnpost or OaklandLocal, or even a Chamber of Commerce sponsored local media resource than CNN Local.

2) Mobile + Local advertising = Penny Saver 2.0

The first local advertising and search media are starting to emerge: Postabon facilitates the broadcast of local discounts and coupon offers and Milo searches for specific products at the large chains like the neighborhood Best Buy by accessing the store’s inventory database. Expect popular geotagging applications like FourSquare and Gowalla to integrate local coupons and product search. These coupons are not perceived as advertisements. If they save you money, they are called “unexpected cash”.

These systems help solve the consumer impulse buy decision (“I’m shopping at the mall tomorrow, what stores are having sales?”). Traditional search engines haven’t been able to answer these temporal questions down to the local level (try querying Google to find a snowboard sale in your town this weekend).

Related: Examples of Twitter hyperlocal advertising models

3) Mobile + Advertising + Pubsubhubbub = Alert systems

The real time web is pushing business society into a new value paradigm that rewards those who can react instantly and systematically to opportunities. A concept not unlike Wall Street program trading, these new systems work on alerts that ping users for decisions. Mobile devices eventually won’t need “refreshes” to alert; they are always on and by extension, almost coerce its owner to be “always on”.

For consumers, marketing companies like Local Thunder will connect merchants with their community through rich media content development and RSS feeds for alerts. Google’s Pubsubhubbub essentially deploys RSS feed data in real time so alerts can be time and location targeted.

We start getting into Augmented Reality / Minority Report territory when coupon alerts popup as one walks by a store, but some company will make this real time location based alert system a reality, if not a hit, by the end of 2010.

4) Advertising as Content

Infomercials got it right; advertising as content engages customers at the story telling level. And the content may be ridiculous:

new ad from the California Milk Board

Today’s business can no longer resort to trite marketing, and say “buy from me because I’m honest… high touch… lower priced… give great service” with a straight face any more. It now comes off as, well, an advertisement.

Advertisements used to be crafted to lead into the “call to action”. In 1960′s Madison Avenue’s ideal world, consumers would make the purchase decision based on the facts presented in the ad or by the incessant aggregate impressions made in what has always been called “branding”.  In the fuzzy world of social media marketing, where is the call to action?

5) Everybody becomes a marketer, and some will become sales closers

The call to action still originates from consumer need. A call to action may simply be an attractive price, but in many circumstances, the transaction close is facilitated by a personal sales pitch or a referral. As advertising becomes content driven, the combined testimonials for a product or service become far more persuasive to support the call to purchase. Testimonials and ratings of local services (like the current standards  Yelp.com and Citysearch) will be built into every local media resource (see Postabon‘s rating system). In fact, Yelp has elevated the standard so that the 5-star review is becoming the minimum parsing criteria for real estate agents because so many have this grade.

Bad, or even 4 star reviews are now potential disqualifiers

So how can somebody profit from providing testimonials and otherwise supporting the marketing efforts of others around them? Locals will do the same things they did pre-Internet with their Chambers, Lion’s Clubs and networking groups – support each other. New social media – enabled referral systems will be built out locally through Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and through the new local ad applications.

The bigger trend will be the development of local affiliate marketing systems that compensate referrals. Think of websites that have an Amazon affiliate widget or link that compensate owners if their users go through the widget to buy Amazon stuff. Companies will provide applications to build local merchant guides for use by other local business websites to create networks of affiliated services. And local affiliate marketing systems is only a start; affiliate marketing programs extend sales forces without adding overhead, and we’ll start seeing mainstream adoption by enterprises developing strategic partnership programs.

Related: The essence of affiliate marketing

5)a) Everybody can become a traveling sales person

Anybody can become a virtual mobile storefront using the upcoming Square, a secure, simple to use iPhone application with a credit card reader that allows anybody to become a street merchant. Point-of-sale becomes redefined when anybody can potentially sell anything anywhere.

6) Virtual socializing and Webinar ubiquity

Webinars are social media too. They are already changing the landscape on how people meet for business on the cheap, and worry the airlines.

2009 British Airways face-to-face campaign

Current webinar systems like Webex are still too difficult to use. Within 2010, some company will develop a simple to launch, one-click web meeting system that can broadcast live discussions across ad hoc participant groups. Call the concept adhoc webinars. Why will this work? Webinars can become venues like happy hours where groups can meet and share. The key is ease of use, anybody should be able to participate so weekly scheduled meetings can expand as more people know about them. Imagine Robert Scoble producing a one-click webinar party every Friday afternoon to discuss ideas – he would essentially have an interactive TV program that can be produced on the fly without studios and cameras.

Virtual socializing is the natural evolution to social networking because it’s location independent. One example in the real estate world are the virtual REBarCamps that aggregate speakers and audience together in a virtual national conference.

7) The grass roots Web

Website and application development should be simple enough for normal folks who know nada about code, but still want to custom develop a clean, workable application by themselves without hiring tech talent. The ascendance of plug/play blogs and WordPress themes and plug-ins, and Ning based social network applications facilitate the quick building of applications by non-techies. Add in automated features like Facebook Connect, Twitter Lists, Posterous posting, and the latest mini-applications that provide snippets of value to the website, and website development is becoming accessible and experimental to the masses. However, I’m frankly surprised there isn’t more activity to provide simple plug/play applications to individuals and SMEs… will 2010 be the year?

Speaking of websites, the next great media company won’t have a website (h/t Steve Rubel).

Related: How to build a community media resource

8 ) The stream is more important than website

Anybody immersed in the social media already knows this. The content stream constitutes a conversation, and can be perceived as far more “real” than a calculated marketing-focused website presentation. The same new paradigm that makes an advertisement seem  promotional applies to websites. Yes, conversations can happen on websites but there are likely many more occurring on Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and other blogs that are deemed more credible because they are third party commentary.

fr. Fast Company http://bit.ly/5bRTxL

AshtonKutcher.com the website does not exist. He is a Twitter celebrity whose breakthrough social media credential was challenging @CNNBRK to a 1,000,000 follower contest. Media presence isn’t just website traffic, it’s providing value to the readership through new media channels… which leads us to the reason why anybody can now become a media resource, if not a media star:

9) Curation is the new syndication

Mass media used to rule syndication, now anybody can curate and present content across a panoply of social media platforms. Curating breaking news is key to readership – it’s the reason why people follow CNN, Marketwatch or engadget. Twitter has distinguished itself as the forefront application for breaking news, and anybody can use Twitter Lists to curate Twitter feeds by topic, geography and industry. Curation tools, like Outside.in Publisher for hyperlocal news, are being developed for local content publishers.

Curators are the new news editors, and the window is open to create new media properties. Curated local media will be a focus because there’s a media void that both national media and independent journalistic efforts are now trying to fill (see #1 above).

Related:

Hyperlocal curation of real time news

Build a dynamic community media resource on Twitter in one hour

10) A new era of open social media (the adjective “social” will soon be redundant)

Facebook and LinkedIn are closed networks simply because they require confirmation of “friend” status. Frankly, it’s just too much manual clicking to accept a lot of friends. Twitter has distinguished itself as an open network that can amass networks of millions of followers, and is the application closest to a personal broadcast media. Facebook certainly sees the power of massive networks (being the biggest one itself), and in order to compete with Twitter’s broadcast power, will unveil similar broadcast functionality. Simply put, in 2010 Facebook will create an opt-in setting that allows users to open their status updates to anybody who wants to follow them. Becoming a Facebook Fan today is similar but statuses can’t be filtered within the main feed. Once 350+ million Facebook broadcast systems are potentially unleashed, they can be curated categorically like Twitter Lists and conversations more conveniently filtered. Yes, Facebook already has Friendfeed as the model, but it needs to be simpler to use, and will likely cede to a new Facebook open network product.

LinkedIn can open itself up the same way. Since LinkedIn is a more industrial network, value would be derived from curated lists developed by users based on industry or discipline. Although LinkedIn Groups encourages industry conversations, they are generally sparse and hard to follow if one has joined many Groups.

Once networks open up, conversations become even more multi-channel than they are today. A Tweet that gets syndicated across Facebook, LinkedIn, and other networks will provoke dialogues characteristic of each network. Clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic see this coming and have integrated multi-channel monitoring systems. In the latter part of 2010, evolved versions of Google Wave and the Google OS, and possibly Facebook, will provide the same multi-channel operability integrated into their offering.

Related: Check my 2009 predictions for social media last year.

Zappos has become iconic as THE enterprise that embraces social media – it occupies a singular position that no other company seems to be able to touch so far. And it’s surprising that we haven’t heard of any other company that hasn’t institutionalized social media as an important facet of their organization. Social media is generally being recognized as innovating business disciplines from marketing to business networking to HR. Why aren’t more companies, particularly in the service industries, getting all their employees to social network with their client bases?

At Domus Consulting, we’re fortunate and honored to work with companies who want to infuse the culture of social media into their organizations. We call it Zappos-izing the company. The process of training every employee in a company on how to use Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for networking and communication purposes will yield four results:

1. Internally, it will facilitate online social interaction across the enterprise with no departmental or geographical borders, and transcend the office siloes that naturally inhibit information flow.
2. Externally, it will make the enterprise’s relationships and dealings with their client base more transparent by using the public conversational pipes of social media.
3. It will create more business opportunities by connecting the enterprise “network” with other forming networks within client and partner organizations. As any Twitterer knows, it’s much easier to have a conversation with someone else on Twitter when you don’t need to schedule an appointment with their gatekeeper.
4. It will change the corporate culture because the social media is…well, fun. People in general are at first reluctant to join social networks because it seems scary to open themselves up to the world. Once they dive in, they realize the water is fine, and most enjoy the interaction and the networking opportunities they bring. Many become fanatical. The feeling of belonging elevates company spirit.

Just result #4 is a good reason to implement a management edict to attend training webinar sessions.

Daniel McCarthy, CEO of NCI, a publishing / local advertising company with a business based on nurturing local client relationships, saw the social media opportunity and embarked on Project Massive Network, with the mission of getting NCI employees AND their clients onto the social media. In the spirit of transparency, he has even opened up the webinars we’re doing together with NCI to show the methodology. Dan will be chronicling the Project on his blog Viral Housing Fix; the first installment is up. You’ll also be able to follow the progress with #NCI, the Twitter hashtag system that allows participants to comment and Q&A about the Project.

LinkedIn was never very transparent. Although they offered up a LinkedIn API to developers in June, 2007, I can’t name one developer-based LinkedIn API built application (I can name partners like NY Times), while I can point to hundreds of Facebook and Twitter apps. (Google LinkedIn API for confirmation). I’m not a developer, but I’m guessing LinkedIn keeps its user data too close to the vest. Without access to the user data (think of the automated CRM and social graph analytics possibilities), LinkedIn just doesn’t have anything else to offer a developer.

LinkedIn Groups made LinkedIn a more communal experience and extended its utility beyond being an online resume. Here’s one more way LinkedIn’s obsession with proprietary data will hurt its user base (I received this email today from a LinkedIn group organizer):

LinkedIn Groups

• Group: Social Media Marketing
• Subject: New policy changes at LinkedIn are negatively affecting your Social Media Marketing group! Speak up for us!

“Hello, everyone – I am using a new feature on LinkedIn to contact you about something very important to all of us – social networking. I’m sure you joined in order to find information and resources, get feedback and network with other people interested in Social Media Marketing. But LinkedIn has just made some policy changes that have severely restricted what group managers can do and makes the functionality of this group much more limited.

What they have done:

1. Taken away my ability to send you the monthly email newsletter that I have produced in the past. I can no longer access the group’s email list.
2. Taken away my ability to send you individual welcome letters or direct correspondence. I can’t even view who is a member of this group, it is limited to seeing only 500, not the entire 15,000+.
3. Forced advertising onto profile and other pages – but the group managers do not profit. There is no revenue share. I don’t make a dime from any of the work I put into LinkedIn.
4. By disabling the email list download, I now have ZERO visibility into group performance reports that I used to have through my email management system. I can’t tell how many people are unsubscribing, how many undeliverable emails there are, etc. etc. LinkedIn has NO reporting capabilities whatsoever.

They claim they had to do this because some unscrupulous managers were building lists for spam. Their response is penalize all the legitimate group managers for the actions of a few bad apples. There are far better ways to deal with this issue. I pride myself in moderating and managing this group to the best of my ability. For almost a year, we have grown at 25% a month. LinkedIn overall has grown almost at much. The fact is, it is groups like ours that makes LinkedIn successful. But now they are biting the hand that feeds them. My ability to interact and network with you as individual members has been completely hamstrung. This is the only way to reach you individually. I URGE YOU TO TAKE ACTION AND VOICE YOUR OPINION. Ask them to rescind this heavy-handed and totally unnecessary tactic. Send an email directly to the Founder, Chairman and CEO of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman. You can send an in-mail from his personal page: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?viewProfile=&key=1213&authToken=gzEL&authType=NAME_SEARCH&locale=en_US&srchindex=1&goback=.psr_*1_*1_Reid_Hoffman_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_*1_Y_us_94901_*1_*1_*2_*2_*2_Y_Y_*1_Relevance#h274-147 Thanks for taking the time and for participating in Social Media Marketing. Let’s keep growing and improving it, and that means growing and improving LinkedIn, too.

Cheers, Mike Crosson Moderator

The online conversation happens everywhere on a ubiquitous cloud.

I Twittered a link to a NYTimes article:

My Twitter feed is incorporated into my FriendFeed account

Which then gets fed into my Facebook account:

Where friend Ross Rylance commented on it.

Veterans of Facebook, Friendfeed, Linkedin and Twitter know this phenomenon well. This is a simple, practical demonstration of the new personal syndication: belonging to all these major social networks / platforms expands and distributes your message. Write once, be read everywhere.

When your message is distributed, and somebody like friend Ross responds in conversation, that conversation gets distributed through Ross’s networks, and the conversation spreads. This is the essence of VIRAL.

From TechCrunch:

Breaking: Facebook Surpasses 175 Million Users, Growing By 480,000 Users a Day (population of Atlanta = 520,000)

Is Twitter Worth $230 million? Probably - Last week’s big social media topic was Twitter’s new $35 million round. It’s growth rate will continue to be remarkable as it moves mainstream. Currently 10.5 million users.

The Portable Graph is essentially a massive database of contacts residing in various social networks. Some social networks can be defined as either “walled” or closed, for intimate or group association, or open, for amassing a broad, popular network.

Cartoon from Office Offline

Closed networks like LinkedIn and Facebook require “two-click” friend confirmations. A salutation is sometimes protocol (I try to say hi to new Facebook acquaintances). These hurdles take time and make it harder to build networks quickly.

Open networks like Twitter and Friendfeed don’t require friend confirmation, just one click on the “follow” button. They facilitate the building of massive stranger networks united by an amalgam of relationships with the hub. This network of strangers can form the basis of a broadcast network.

Friendfeed made it hard to develop a massive network because it was so cumbersome to find friends to follow. They just made it easy by offering a tool that imports Twitter contacts also on Friendfeed. I just made Friendfeed a massive network by importing all those Twitter contacts, and will now focus on Friendfeed as a broadcast application.

Social networks once kept themselves walled to keep users inside and engaged, just like the Berlin Wall. They are now realizing that import tools that facilitate friend portability is a killer app. Facebook Connect is also a type of import tool demonstrated most strikingly today during CNN.com’s coverage of the Obama Inauguration. That’s a separate article:

Final note, 26% of my Twitter following were also on Friendfeed.

The Portable Social Graph is a killer concept behind the future social media business model. Very few can envision it because few live examples exist melding social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter into more traditional popular websites – ecommerce sites like Amazon, media sites like NYTimes or Hulu, and corporate/organizational sites like Toyota or NFL.com.

Razorfish, the new media ad agency, and its CEO Shiv Singh explain the potential power of Facebook Connect to bring social groups (“the social graph”) into transactional websites. Brilliant presentation…

LinkedIn raised $22.7 million and their new investors include enterprise systems company SAP and publisher McGraw-Hill.

Strategic reasons? (just guessing)

An enterprise system company like SAP can port LinkedIn’s personal profile data, networks and network communications within the enterprise system. This automates the user experience so they may continue to work on LinkedIn, and have SAP capture this work. That’s only the first step; SAP and other enterprise systems will likely find ways to port bookmarking applications like Delicious and micro-blogging applications like Twitter or Yammer. They would use feed-based aggregation to port these data into their systems until they start looking like “Enterprise Facebook or Friendfeed“.

A publishing company like McGrawHill could leverage LinkedIn profile information to provide context to their articles in their magazines like Business Week. For example, LinkedIn could provide a “opt-in” on user profiles that allows publishers like Business Week to link quoted personage to their LinkedIn profile. Example: Pat Kitano says “blah blah”… LinkedIn would become the online Who’s Who, as well as a Who knows Who.

The participants of the “mature” social networks – MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn – tend to replicate the same network contacts, generally those associated with the individual or industry. The micro-blogging applications Twitter and Friendfeed, and to a lesser extent MyBlogLog, have set up “following” systems that encourage anonymous network linkage. The result is the development of “cloud” social networks that aren’t based on existing personal networks.

With Twitter and Friendfeed, it’s easy to massively follow others.

Why attract lots of stranger followers? Viral presence. The essence of social networking boils down to a form of fame… recognition and stature within a larger community.

For certain industries like real estate, the mission is to virally connect to everybody in their neighborhood with a home.

Sociological conclusion:

Attracting a stranger community through Twitter or Friendfeed eventually populates the more discrete networks of Linked and Facebook where some form of personal association is implied. It’s the aggressive extension of the Six Degrees of Separation, and progresses the evolution of society from local to global. As any social media participant experiences, who knew my next ten new friends would be living an average of 1,000 miles away from me?