The future: where we are now and where we should be

by Antony Mayfield, Vice President, Head of Social Media, iCrossing

You would be forgiven if your mind was boggling at this point, after a dozen or perspectives on what’s going on in social media and advertising. My apologies then, because we are going to push the bogglement one step further in this final chapter with a look to the future of social media and marketing.

Caveat time

Only a fool would put his name to predictions about something as fast-moving and complex as the emergence of social media on the web, where it will go and what it means for the industry. In lieu of a fool, you have me and this chapter.

In seriousness though, it is not a cop-out to say the one thing you can expect in social media and marketing in the coming decade… is the unexpected.

The shape of things to come

In the face of such hopeless odds of being absolutely right, let me offer three trends that will be important for us to pay attention to when it comes to evolution of social media and indeed the whole web, certainly over the next couple of years, if not the next decade.

1. Growth: Big numbers, like the 100 million users of Facebook, trick us into thinking that the revolution has happened, it’s arrived and we can now make sense of it. But studies by analyst house Forrester show that the longer people have broadband at home the more sophisticated their use of the web becomes, the most likely they are to use social media. Expect growth, lots of it.

2. Ubiquity: While the numbers of people uploading content, leaving reviews, starting blogs, taking part in forums will continue to grow, so will usage. Some have described social networks becoming like air, an ever present layer on the world that we will be constantly dipping into using mobile devices.

3. Ambient intimacy: The Facebook newsfeed feature and latterly micro-blogging services like Twitter have given rise to a phenomenon sociologists are calling ambient intimacy, where large groups of people are able to share their thoughts and opinions. The reaction of early adopters has been one of nervousness followed by blissful embrace of this new way of communicating. Again, it is early days for this form of communication, this sub-set, feature of social media but it is likely to develop further and will have implications for how content and conversations work online.

All tomorrow’s brands

And for the marketing industry, what’s the future likely to bring? Let us take three trends here too:

1.Useful marketing: As Google says, “It’s all about the user”. When it
comes to being successful on the web this is a key principle and one which increasing numbers of brands are learning as they begin to engage with people in social media. Marketing must be useful in order to earn attention, and earned attention is the only kind there is when users can choose to ignore or block advertising if they wish. In this context, even paid for space is simply seen as buying opportunities to earn attention.

2.Data-driven everything: Data in marketing has often been seen as the preserve of direct response specialists. With so much data available in the networks about people that are important to a brand, about the needs and behaviours of customers and influencers, there will be no corner of marketing in social media that can’t be measured, no insights that cannot be supported with evidence in the form of data. As social media use becomes more ubiquitous we will see even “offline” campaigns and content as being often measurable, as echoes of their influence are seen in changed online behaviours.

3.Native digital marketing: The first phase of web media and marketing
might be thought about as a time when models of thinking were imported from channel media (broadcast, print) to a world of networks. In the coming years we will see consensus emerge around new models of research, planning and execution in a web that is dominated and defined - particularly in terms of the user experience - by social media. These will be what we might call truly native, digital strategic marketing approaches,
informing the strategy for brands from a perspective that is web first, embracing its full potential.

Caution: revolution in progress

If there has been a constant in my conversations with clients and colleagues in the industry over the past couple of years working in social media it has been that everyone feels as if they are behind the curve. In a way everyone is: how can a whole industry adapt at the pace of the web?

The preceding chapters in this book represent a range of views from the pioneers in the UK marketing industry. Do not expect them to agree on everything, or to be right on everything - it would be incredible if they were.

When you look closely at revolutions past - be they technological, political, commercial or combinations of all three - there is a recurring theme about the perceptions of people living through them: they rarely know what is going on.

So, enveloped as we are in the “fog of revolution”, what hope have we of being right about the future of social media and marketing? Not much. Media and brand owners and their agency partners alike need to keep their minds resolutely open to possibilities. As F Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “...the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

The most successful brands and agencies in this new world may well support the ones that are able to hold several, sometimes opposed, ideas about the world in mind simultaneously, behaving in an agile way to push resources to the ones which turn out to be most successful.

To request a published version of this document for yourselves or your clients, please email Amy at the IAB.