Social Media: The Next Generation

xxxooo to iMedia for running this piece first

If you said "social media" to a marketer 18 months ago, chances are they'd have thought exclusively of social networks. No more. We're seeing social capabilities incorporated into virtually every digital experience. This has brought opportunities and dilemmas for marketers. I say dilemmas because lots of brands got online by pounding to fit a broadcast-shaped peg into an interactive-shaped hole. They developed one-way websites, banners, and search programs. Social media analytics tools are showing us that this model had many flaws.

But as more and more brands embrace social for the two-way offering it is, it's important that we keep abreast of major news in the segment.

This article is designed to give marketers some highlights of what new initiatives, offerings, and companies appear to have traction. It's not for the social "expert." Rather it's geared to the generalist who wants a survey of some of the more important and interesting developments.

Without further ado, check out this summary of social developments divided into four "buckets":

Facebook Open Graph and the socializing of content sites

Facebook's new Open Graph (OG) initiative is a means of adding value for its members across the web while simultaneously enabling content publishers to offer social features. In OG's launch week, more than 50,000 sites incorporated OG components. Many of those implementations were small, such as adding a "like" button embedded in content. But here are some of the ways it's being used on a grander scale:

Pandora is leveraging Open Graph to facilitate the sharing of music and discoveries between friends. Capabilities include:

•See a list of friends who use Pandora
•See which artists and songs are "liked" by friends
•Import Facebook pic into your Pandora profile
•Listen to friends' stations
•Get music suggestions based upon music you "liked"

The Huffington Post has socialized its content by offering a "Hot on Facebook" module, a "what your friends are reading" module, and a "like" button on most stories.

Newspaper sites are incorporating a sort of "your news" box that lists the latest "news" you have received on Facebook.

Yes, Facebook's hit some roadblocks and hurdles over privacy. Assuming it gets past those, Open Graph will make profound changes in how we consume content.

Promoted Tweets debut

The big news on Twitter is Promoted Tweets. These are sponsored tweets that appear in the Twitter Search results.

Twitter announced Sponsored Tweets and its charter sponsor list (Best Buy, Bravo, Red Bull, Sony Pictures, Starbucks, and Virgin America) in April. More recently, Twitter altered its terms of service to ban the Twitter platforms and third parties from embedding sponsored tweets into users' tweet streams. Twitter shared this rationale:

First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction. Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization.

UnFacebooks and user control

Partly as a response to concerns about Facebook's privacy missteps, a number of alternative social networks are attracting attention. From tech blogs to Elle.com, the UnFacebooks are a popular story. Of course Orkut, MySpace, and Friendster are also trying to capitalize on Facebook's stumbles. But here are some new sites getting play:

Diaspora: Billing itself as "an open source personal web service that will put individuals in control of their data," Diaspora is the brainchild of four NYU students and has raised more than 20 times its initial funding goal. The idea behind Diaspora is essentially opt-in, versus the major social sites' opt-out approach. It is working feverishly to get everything going this summer. A word from the founders:

Pip.io lets users define different "rooms" of people that they want to share information with. Users can also define if they want one- or two-way communications with their rooms.

A self-described "social operating system," Pip.io is clearly trying to be more than a social net. When you visit, make sure you are using Firefox or Chrome, not MSIE.

Story of My Life is a new platform enabling members to tell stories in a variety of media and make them private or public. I love the idea of letting more people tell the stories of their lives. And not just in words.

Does it sound like a blog platform to you? Yes, but the community features make it more than that. And it's really more about defined stories than a stream of consciousness.

Social search

The biggest proportion of online dollars goes to search, so let's take a look at some of the "new" social search offerings:

Mahalo bills itself as a human-powered search engine that combines machine results with expert and consumer recommendations. From its beginnings as a search-focused entity, it has now added a lively Mahalo Answers section and Mahalo How To, where experts help users accomplish tasks.

Wowd (disclosure: a Catalyst:SF client) helps users understand what content is popular now and what content users like best. Users download the application, and conduct searches that reveal:

•The most popular pages related to the search query
•The freshest content available on a topic, whether just created or just viewed by other Wowd users
•Real-time content from most sites, not just a select few
•Pages that other users have rated as most valuable
Wowd is for people who are interested in the latest information on a topic -- in the things that are happening now and the content that has just been created or updated.

By combining a sophisticated search algorithm with consumer behavior and ratings, it provides a unique perspective.

Delver is a social shopping community that helps people find the best products and make the best buying choices with the help of friends, family, and the community at large. The idea behind this offering is to create a community around shopping and help people learn from each other about interesting products and the best places to buy them.

The bigness of this concept is that the site is out to make online shopping fun, rather than a utilitarian experience.

The portals (and Meebo)

The social strategies of the major portals are very different from one another. At one end of the spectrum, Yahoo is leveraging social content from its own sources as well as third parties like Facebook. Apparently, Yahoo has concluded that trying to create a new social media entity won't work. Instead it blends the information available from existing platforms to enrich Yahoo channels.

On the other end of the spectrum, Google is still trying to create a homegrown social platform to help it become a leader in providing social content. One of the more interesting integrations is its flavor of social search. By linking your Google profile to social platforms, you get search results that include comments and content from connections.

Google Buzz is a social sharing service integrated into Gmail that lets you share statuses, text, photos, and videos easily. Public and private sharing are offered.

Google Wave is a collaboration platform that creates a shared space for teams. Participants can add text, photos, and videos in real time. The vision for Wave is to replace a variety of other applications with a single environment.

Microsoft's strategy sits between these two poles, though it's closer to Yahoo's. Bing is leveraging existing third-party communities to socialize search results. Now tweets, blog posts, and shared links are incorporated in results.

But Bing is also striving to create unique social-centered experiences. One example is how it integrated social into Bing Shopping. According to its blog, "With a single click you can ask for advice from your friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter for their take on a product you saw on Bing Shopping."

Meebo's strategy is to focus on its strength in instantaneous sharing to carve out social territory. Its new "Meebo Bar" offers publishers an easy way to socialize content and promote virality. This ad-supported bar appears when a Meebo user visits a bar-enabled site. Users can send pages and content via IM of course, but also through email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and Yahoo.

Conclusion

Sharing content and opinions is something consumers seem to want in many of their web experiences, not just on specific social sites. How some of these companies and platforms will work with marketers, or indeed if they will work with marketers, remains to be seen. But consumers show a marked unwillingness to pay for content, so my guess is that many of these companies will be a-knockin' on our doors before long. That doesn't mean that they will work with us using the classic advertising model, though.

I would be remiss not to mention blogs as the "sleeper" of social. It seems that these high-quality, high-passion, high-depth environments often get overlooked by marketers. While social nets and Twitter can offer us enormous reach, so can blogs, many of which offer the added benefit of expert perspective and depth of content. They may not be the shiniest of the social objects, but in my view brands would do well to spend more time and attention on them.

An article like this omits other good companies and developments. If you are working on something that is more real than vapor and want me to talk about it as a follow-up, send me an email through PeopleConnection. If I like it, I will be happy to follow up with a brief piece about you in the blog section of this site.