“Social commerce” became a buzz word in the summer of 2010:

Here are eight new trends in social commerce that will appear in 2011:

1) Demand based shopping applications

Groupon demonstrated how supply in the form of retail inventory can be packaged into deep discount opportunities. Demand is the inverse – how many people in the community want 49ers tickets, a dinner at French Laundry, or the hottest electronic gadget? Applications will develop that meets demands from local shoppers. Requests can be input into an application, and addressed either automatically from an inventory warehousing system like Walmart or manually with a “bid” price and location for pickup.

The implications? By fulfilling demand direct from consumers in aggregate, both large chains and SMBs can fulfill orders far more efficiently and reduce sales and marketing overhead.

2) Identity brokering and qualification

The transparency of the social graph will facilitate transparent match making systems that expose all parties to a transaction. One example of an old marketing paradigm where identity data was hidden is the mailing list – tradeable, sellable, undifferentiated and an acknowledged source of spam. There’s always been a seamy side to traditional lead generation and affiliate marketing systems because one doesn’t get to “opt-in” before receiving spam or a phone call to your request for more information about, say, a home listed for sale.

With the detailed social graph, every match can be qualified. Supply/demand applications will evolve to create matches where both parties to a transaction can easily vet the other party before a dialogue takes place. The “Groupon” concept of offering a kind of reward to attract local business will extend to SMBs like accountants, lawyers and real estate brokers who haven’t yet participated in offering an online “daily deal”. Moreover, advertisers can qualify leads by researching them on social networks like Linkedin or Facebook. In fact, leads will presented not just as a simple name and email address, but as a profile based on their social graph so it’s easy to see whether that lead might be your best friend’s cousin.

3) The reduction of the sales force.

Why? Just as anybody can create a social media presence, anybody can now become a marketer and create a social commercial presence.

Online commerce distribution – getting the exact product to the consumer purchaser as efficiently as possible – disintermediates sales forces, which function as middlemen to provide conversion value. Now social/mobile commerce is set to do for local SMBs what Amazon did for national brand products – create the variegated distribution channels that make it easier for consumers to find and purchase what they want from SMBs.

Take group buying as an example. Hundreds of competing “Groupons” (including all the local media/news who advertise with Daily Deals) can’t all be knocking on every cafe in every city to source a deal. Deal aggregation engines such as Wantsa, TheDealMap and Yipit are/can create deal syndicates that present publishable deal inventory. Now publishers can trade off sales staff and marketing overhead for affiliate income from deals sourced by others.

Social commerce facilitates this trend because literally any business or media outlet can be an ad publisher. For starters, they can publish a free deal on Facebook Deals or Groupon Stores, and then escalate their marketing presence by adding their deals into syndication.

4) Social Commerce conversion – the call to action returns

Marketers have always tiptoed around social media marketing. They need to message their product, but not bluntly pitch it. Group buying succeeds at creating a call to action in the form of a time sensitive deal, but the most efficient social media marketing strategy is to engage the customer into discussing your product. Here are the methods for social commerce conversion:

The simple one-click Facebook “Like” (and corresponding “share” buttons on social media) is the quickest way to market deals across the Social Graph.

For consumers, checking reviews is the due diligence step. They already want what the business offers, and the 4-5 star reviews just converts them.

Conversion can be triggered by influencers, just ask any teenage girl. Marketers will court influencers with perks. New analytical applications will ascribe dollar value to the referral or “like” of individuals and groups.

Customer service becomes a marketing channel. Consumers respond to Zappos – inspired great service. Every business/brand should have a customer service landing page, whether it’s on-site or on GetSatisfaction.com

5) The emergence of the pure social commerce campaign – game changing brand marketing

Have a new product? Can’t get it into traditional distribution channels? And even if you can get it into Target, how do you market it to get consumers to notice it? This was the challenge facing entrepreneur Dr. Robert Wagstaff with his simple tongue scraping invention to counter bad breath. Expect more products to template the Orabrush marketing approach in the same way Zappos has become a beacon for great customer service. Here’s the ABC/Nightline video:

If you don’t watch the full video, here is the takeaway:

• YouTube = TV commercial
• Facebook = National media buy
• College business class = Business incubator

6) Facebook is a defacto platform for social commerce, but it may be too massive for local socialization

Facebook is just too big for most users. A Facebook page for a city or neighborhood can’t be customized to the individuals of the community. Granted, every business may eventually have a Facebook page for their customers because Facebook has become a defacto platform, almost like the archaic World Wide Web, or more loosely AOL in the 90′s. But social commerce will become relevant at a local level when online meets offline, creating virtual town squares where communities of local folk congregate. But they need on-the-ground participation and management to flourish as social vehicles, otherwise the sites are ghost towns.

How does social commerce become social at the local level? To get the consumers to aggregate around local commerce offline, there needs to be a relevant community overlay on top of the deals. For example, Japan has a social network of housewives who input the best shopping deals that day manually for the benefit of others in the community. Unlike a one-off Groupon deal where buyers are unrelated, the housewives form a local social network tied together initially in their pursuit of a deal.

2011 will see further development of these niche networks based on geographies, culture and industry. You can see this development happening with the launch of more exclusive social networks like Namesake, Quora and Path.

7) Globalization of social commerce

More than half of the Asian-Americans living in the US today were born in their native country. Melting pot Americans use applications like Skype to maintain their connection, but getting products they grew up with is still done by overseas shipment from relatives (personal note: we get CARE packages from Japan all the time). The next frontier for social commerce could be descriptively coined Cost Plus World Market 2.0. Overseas trading firms / commerce entrepreneurs can source timely products at lower prices mirroring native country labor costs, utilize just in time shipping and warehousing systems, and market via their global cultural social network systems. This is not an iterative variant of global, undifferentiated trading marketplaces like eBay or Alibaba, it’s a new window of opportunity for building the next set of global commerce properties that focus on very specific sets of customers. Here’s a good example of a social commerce site for Indian women – Exclusively.in

8 ) And obviously, location based apps will drive social commerce

I saved mobile commerce for last just because it’s the most obvious, and the trends have been well documented and recognized. Here are some of the things that consumers can already do on a location based app:

Check-ins are being monetized with deals and other perks on every LBS. But we all know that.                                                                                       .

The Christmas 2010 shopping season goes down as the year of the in-store price check. The store is now the showroom, and the phone app the cash register.

Here’s what’s coming in the future:

Mobile device as credit card. Obvious to anybody who knows mobile services in Europe and Asia.                                                                             .

Local shopping search in real time. Couldn’t find that sold out product at Best Buy? Apps will provide real time inventory to find what you need.

Extend real time demand based applications across other industries beyond retail – hotels, airlines, concerts. Looking for a hotel room at 10pm? The new apps will find you a good deal, mainly because any hotel inventory at 10pm is open for negotiation.

Related articles:

10 Media Predictions for 2010 – 12/17/09

How did I do? Reviewing 2010 – based on 2009 Media Predictions

10 Trends in Social Media 2009 – 1/1/09

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.

Happy New Year!

1) 2008 Crushed the Old Media, 2009 will see New Business Models

Two blog posts describe the destruction:

From Editor & Publisher 12/30/08: No Bull: 2008 — The Year Newspaper Stocks Collapsed (h/t Inquisitr )

The statistics behind the collapse of newspaper stocks in 2008 are sobering as New Year’s Eve approaches:

GateHouse, down 99.55% in this calendar year
McClatchy, down 93.6%
Lee Enterprises, down 97.3%
Journal Register Co., down 99.58%
Media General, down 92.47%
Gannett, down 80%

Oddly, the winner in the sector is the company being beat up the most in the financial press, The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT). Times stock is down 59% this year.

From Six Pixels of Separation 12/30/08: Mass Media – Mass Destruction – analyzing the recent poignant admissions of capitulation by mainstream media

The Rise of New Business Models?

Frankly, predicting new business models within the media industry is difficult with its complex web of content distribution relationships spanning theaters, international distribution, cable and satellite distribution. However, with the success of industry ratified models like Hulu and the sense of inevitability that content is destined towards freedom, 2009′s recession will force new media models into play because the old models aren’t working any more.

Business Week’s Steven Wildstrom notes that consumers can’t find many great old movies on DVD or online in this era of the long tail retailing.

The battle is between an industry that wants to tightly control who gets to see what when and customers who want to watch what they want wherever and whenever. This clash is slowly being resolved in favor of consumers. Movies are becoming available for download and on DVD more quickly after theatrical release. Director Steven Soderbergh has a deal with Mark Cuban’s Landmark Theatres and HDNet that allows some of his movies to be released on disk and online the same day they show up in theaters. I expect more movies to be launched this way.

The day you can choose to see a new movie in a theater, on your TV, on your laptop, or on your iPhone is still some time off, but it is coming.

2) Retail Crashes in 2009; Consumers Will Demand Online Presence

Consumers demand online presence for retailers, travel, cars, real estate… everything. Those who aren’t providing that presence (note Sears.com) are being dragged down by a low margin / high leverage bricks and mortar business model.

From CNN/Money 12/31/08: Thousands of Stores to Disappear in 2009. The recession will place a premium on new online business models that enhance profitability and scale more flexibly than physical retail systems (shipping by UPS is more scalable and profitable than the logistics of retail distribution and warehousing).

3) In Particular, Consumers Will Demand Corporate Social Media Presence

Zappos has proven that instituting multiple pathways for corporate communication and support, such as Web 2.0 apps like Twitter, is fueling its growth:

Zappos seems to have married the best of all these worlds: It has “excellent shipping options and also excellent customer support – online and on the phone. They often upgrade you to faster free shipping and are easily available to answer questions or complete returns.”

The key execution concept here is to move customer support into the frontline using real time online (and offline) applications, and not hide them behind a frustrating phone-tree ridden call center. Then give the support crew identities (435 Zappos employees have Twitter accounts ) so they can own their service quality and receive credit for building their online reputations. One company stands out to provide this kind of online third party customer support – GetSatisfaction.com. More will show up, I’m surprised the 24×7 overseas call center operations haven’t picked up on this.

4) The 2009 Recession will Elevate Social Media Marketing as a Corporate Cost Control Measure

Brand advertising has generally employed one-way messaging to consumers who typically respond to brand commercials as agenda-laden, or even spam. That’s why Tivo fast forwarding of ads is a value proposition. Brand advertising developed in the 1950′s with Madison Avenue’s recognition of the power of the new visual media to branding. It worked because broadcast TV was, at the time, the most optimal means to distribute the message.

Brand advertising is expensive because it employs the vertical professional services of advertising agencies – creative, research and production – to develop “campaigns”, and ad budgets for mass market placement. Social media in part threatens to disintermediate advertising professionals by leveraging “crowdsourcing” to test marketing and advertising concepts more quickly and cheaply.

From Umair Haque The Shrinking Advantage of Brands

But cheap interaction (pk: via the social media) turns the tables. The cheaper interaction gets, the more connected consumers can talk to each other – and the less time they have to spend listening to the often empty promises of firms.

In fact, when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches – instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.

Corporations will begin to see that achieving good reviews and referrals from social grading systems like epinions, Facebook or Yelp are more effective and less costly marketing vehicles than ad campaigns.

5)  Consumers Won’t Buy Based on Week-Old News

Just as the internet has made the morning newspaper a digest of old news, Twitter and other micro-blogging applications are changing news digestion through minute-by-minute citizen broadcasting of breaking news and events. This amplification of news content is not data overload because the news is filtered by the user/reader who view through feedreaders, sites embedding RSS feeds, and special search criteria. Sites that track transactional data and news in real time – Marketwatch.com for stocks, Google Blogsearch for updated blog commentary, Search.Twitter for Twitter commentary – will be in demand.  Who is willing to purchase GM stock without checking the news? Who will buy a home during this period of economic instability based on month old National Association of Realtor reports? Real time reporting, done most efficiently by citizens (some with professional motivation like real estate agents), will provide value to consumers.

6) The Focus of News Will be Distribution over Creation

Before the Internet and citizen journalism, mainstream media owned the content it created (news, music and movies) and charged a lot for the consumption of that content. The social media now produces a lot of the online content and is disrupting the media industries by pushing the price for content consumption towards zero. Online news sources are now positioning themselves to be the most comprehansive “news re-sources” and in 2009 will start steering their readership to authoritative sources who generally will not be their own journalists. Well known respected bloggers and Twitterers will benefit from the exposure.

7) Discovery is the Killer App

Yelp on iPhone does it well. Go to any unknown city, and Yelp uses the iPhone GPS to find a well reviewed restaurant or nearest gas stand within seconds. The best new applicatons of 2009 will create discovery opportunities. Discovery is best facilitated by: 1) referrals from a social network, and 2) breaking news of actionable content, 3) new contextual search capabilities that deliver higher relevancy results than a typical search engine.

The ideal discovery app is an online clearinghouse system that leverages the aggregate social media to broadcast needs and wants. For example, when I want to sell my car, I would want to broadcast this fact once (on say Facebook) and have it distributed across numerous social networks matching “want to buy a car” queries, in particular those within a 30-mile radius. The match would track degrees of separation, similar to how LinkedIn connects two unrelated people with synergetic interests, and provide relevant and viable social connections between two parties.

8 ) The Question: “How does Facebook Help My Business?” is Finally Answered.

Facebook Connect, and its social network cousins Google Friend Connect, and the still obscure MySpace ID will facilitate the portability of social networks, or the “social graph”. This will be one of the most powerful applications towards creating a social media business model in 2009, but is hard to explain to social media newbies. What does it mean?

Through Facebook Connect, consumers log into other sites using their Facebook login details. Once inside the site, users can discuss or post their activities in real time to their Facebook network. The effect is to bring in their network of friends into the hosting site. For example, a teenage girl may visit a Facebook Connect – enabled retail fashion site like Forever 21, buy an awesome sweater at a deep discount sale price, and broadcast this fact to her large Facebook network. A few of her Facebook friends do the same thing, and by extension, you can imagine the instant viral marketing power of each new succeeding Facebook network put “into play” for a good sweater deal.

9) Social Capital is the New SEO

Developing a strong online reputation that the social media can point to is far more credible than a search engine referral. In fact, the more social capital one owns, the better the search rank anyway.

What is Social Capital? In most practical terms, it’s the measure of how powerful your social network is in referring business to you. As any social networking strategist will tell you, the best way to build social capital is to “link” and develop relationships with the social “hubs” – people that are also well connected.

Twinfluence, a Twitter analytics application, demonstrates how powerful Twitter’s reach can be:

• Reach is measured as the sum of the number of followers plus the number of second degree followers.
• Social capital is calculated by dividing the reach (6,960,480) by the # of followers (7,325), which estimates that each follower averages 915 followers themselves.

Twitter is a highly viral application that builds social capital quickly because Tweets are distributed and shared frequently, even up to the minute, compared to other media. Most Twitterers can confirm how often top Twitterer names like Guy Kawasaki appear because their second degree followers are conversing with or referring to Guy.

Quibblers will say what’s the use of 7,000,000 strangers within reach? Answer – this is ubiquitous consistent viral branding built on the same principles of 1950′s Madison Avenue – brand advertising simply makes you well known and easy to recall when potential clients have the need you can fulfill. Even better, Twitter’s branding provides a Web 2.0 social system of reputation management that unlike brand advertising, allows clients to confirm credibility.

10) The Ascendancy of the Social Media while Blogging Takes a Back Seat

Blogging used to be about creating content. Today’s mainstream blogs are about distributing content. The “blogs” now garnering much of the traffic – Huffington Post, Engadget, etc. – have become mass media digests.

It’s the portability of content that now matters. Online presence can be measured by where and how often your name and word show up across the Internet. The more entities distributing, reblogging and retweeting your content (including mass media publishers who use blog syndication services like Blogburst and Newstex), and the more services chronicling your activity/content (Friendfeed, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.) the more renowned you become. And that can lead directly to celebrity, position, or just a business break.

The blog is not dead, it still remains the foundation for commentary and expression. It is now a component of a more comprehensive social media strategy.

11) The Social Media and Cloud Collaboration Team Up to Create “Everyman” Applications

We all know ideas, business plans and startups ferment around water coolers. The leaders and hubs of the social media comprise a new virtual water cooler. 2008′s explosion of Twitter and Facebook API based applications demonstrate the ease of application development. Non-programmers can now develop low cost applications, and the social media water cooler will be instrumental in driving the ideas that build new businesses.

For example, Domus Consulting and a group of Bay Area real estate bloggers built Homescopes.com, a real estate marketing website devoted to breaking housing market news in Northern California, and are expanding its presence to 100 bloggers. Domus is helping other agent groups and brokerages to develop their own Homescopes-like properties, which can potentially develop into viable online assets.

The collaboration of geographically separated participants into a new venture or business is made easier by social networking and cloud collaboration tools. 2009 will bring in a wave of new “Everyman” applications.

12) If you liked this post, check out how these trends apply to a specific vertical – real estate – @ 10 Leading Trends in Real Estate for 2009 at Transparent Real Estate.