4 trends shaping the future of social media

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The Creative & Digital Media Landscape Beyond 2030

The Future of Social Media

9.10.14

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Better Understanding the Creative & Digital Media Landscape

Social Media Today

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Social Media is Being Leveraged in Increasingly More Diverse Ways

To ExpressPersonal chatter, humor and wit, activism, personal announcements

To SellCommercial usage, customer service, brand image

To ReassureGovernments, politicians, state initiatives, damage control, announcements

Algorithm-DrivenBots, newsfeeds, machine-driven

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It’s Being Adopted Across the Age Spectrum

In May 2013, 74% of women were users of social networking sites, compared with 62% of men. Between February 2005 and August 2006, the use of social networking sites among young adult internet users ages 18-29 jumped from 9% to 49%

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It’s Being Adopted Across the Racial Spectrum

Minority adoption of technology is gradually overtaking usage by the wider population: Among the biggest drivers of these increases are spikes in technology adoption among foreign-born Latinos and Spanish-dominant Latinos.

3 key demographic characteristics are correlated with technology adoption:

• Life Stage: Young people ages 18 to 29 have higher adoption rates than those ages 65 and older.

• Education: Adoption rates are higher for those with some college experience than those with less than a high school diploma.

• Family Income: There is a correlation between with technology adoption–those with higher incomes also have higher adoption rates than those with lower incomes.

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Contextualizing the Future of Social Media


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Understanding the Cultural Context of the Future

TODAY 2030 2050

European Union Institute for Security Studies “Citizens in an Interconnected and Polycentric World”National Intelligence Council “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”

http://europa.eu/espas/pdf/espas_report_ii_01_en.pdf

http://www.dni.gov/index.php/about/organization/national-intelligence-council-global-trends

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Contextualizing Technological Innovation

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4 Trends Shaping the Future of Social Media

10©2014

We’re witnessing the emergence of a global, immersive,

invisible, ambient networked computing environment

Invisibility

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INVISIBILITY

“Hundreds of experts agree that trends now underway will make the internet more important even as it becomes less visible in daily life. They believe it will become more “like electricity” and produce vastly greater human and machine connectivity that will change everything from personal interactions to the decisions made by governments around the world.“

PEW Research Center, Digital Life in 2025

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Microsoft believes technology is becoming more natural and intuitive. Leveraging gestural and voice recognition, their Natural User Interface (NUI) projects focus on future computer paradigms by keeping the human user in mind.

Examples of Invisibility

Koubachi is a plant sensor for indoor plants. The hardware/software system brings customers’ plants to the internet to help plants live longer & grow faster.

Browser add-ons likeGhostery and AdBlock Plus help users maintain anonymity while they browse the Internet. We can expect more products to emerge, some of which we will need to pay for, to help us manage our privacy and the information being gathered.

“LG is promoting a future where all home appliances talk to each other, and to you. The idea of appliances contacting their owners doesn't sit well with some... In the future, refrigerators may use some type of tagging technology to alert the appliance automatically to the presence of food that might go bad, he said. The fridge then, of course, could text its owner to make sure the sour food wasn't consumed.”

CNN.com, When Refrigerators Tweet and Washing Machines Text

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/focus/nui/




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Humanization of BrandsConsumers are watching brands try to be their

friends with a healthy level of skepticism

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“Brands will never be your friends because they are trying to sell you.”Tyler Tangalin Social Media Community Manager @ Peter Mayer

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Humanization of Brands

The business landscape saw a dramatic rise in Corporate Social Responsibility programs around 2010. Since then, social media has perpetuated what is sometimes referred to as the ‘humanization of brands’.

Today’s consumers expect brands to ‘feel human’. While much of this

depends on in-store experience and the brand ‘voice’ on social media, some

brands are emboldened to vocalize their opinion on a variety of social

issues.

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Chipotle positions itself against the industrialization of food. Before making a big statement on TV, they were talking about food integrity (i.e. anti-biotics, organic food).

Humanization of Brands

CVS boldly decides to stop selling cigarettes, solidifying its commitment to health and asking smokers to join them along the way.

Chik-fil-A took a controversial stance against gay marriage in a statement made by its CEO. Acknowledging the long-term damaging impact of these statements, the brand is now working to counter their position by being more ‘urban’ and forming ties with gay rights advocacy group Campus Pride.

When the FDA rejected Prop37, a bill mandating the labeling of foods that contain GMO’s, retailer Whole Foods made a bold gesture by assuring their customers that the store itself will label products with GMO.

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Monetizing OpennessCompetition between open-source and closed eco-

systems is spilling out of tech into other industries

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Monetizing Openness

Without these two opposing forces, the technology industry would cease to be what it is.

Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Google’s Android are traditionally open source operating systems

Apple, Oracle, IBM, HP, and Microsoft are traditionally not, but they are gradually targeting outsiders through open-source products.

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The two opposing forces are creating a development culture where code and data is kept free, but everything is trackable and quantifiable.

Digital Tools, Built by the Average Person: open source makes it easy to skirt bureaucracy to get started on your projects by starting with the community editions of most open source software.

Monetizing Openness

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Driven by new research in the fields of biology and neuroscience, we are starting to see vivid links between computer and neural systems. We are expecting to see an uptake in wearable technology, the production of bionic limbs, and 3D printed organs as new research uncovers new realities about our bodies.

21©2014

Tesla is opening their patents so that the thinking behind their patents will be accessible and useable to all. They are placing a focus on battery technology, which is critical for the advancement of green tech and alternative energy.

Monetizing Openness

Github is the open-source community’s Wikipedia. Source code is shared freely, enabling people all over the world to be digitally creative. It is a staple site amongst the open-source software community for developers.

“Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

“The problem with the open source community is that it is, by design, not owed anything for its work, yet expects utmost deference to be paid. To be clear, Linux could have never gotten off the ground without the community that surrounded it. But that does not mean that every business based on open source tools (provided that business returns the various and direct changes to open source code when applicable) must grovel at the feet of a self-designated cabal of protectors. The same can be said of 3D printing.”

John Biggs, TechCrunch

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Plug ‘n’ Go

Cloud computing, biometrics, and artificial intelligence are expected to transform how people and machines interact.

Our identity will become a highly mobile construct that can plug into a variety of “devices” which (beyond the phone) might include the home and automobile.

You’ll be able to take your social content, history, and personal data wherever you want to take it.

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“Identity will become the most valuable commodity for citizens in the future and it will primarily exist online. Ideally, all people would have the incredible self-awareness to closely manage their online identities and the virtual lives they lead. Monitoring and shaping them from an early age so as not to limit their opportunities in later life.”

Eric Schmidt, The Future of Identity, Citizenship and Reporting

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Sharing Economy platforms have reconfigured our relationship to material possessions, particularly larger purchases like transportation, power tools, and hotel bookings.

Plug ‘n’ Go

Facebook Connect was introduced to the web to expand the company’s footprint in the online space. Instead of creating seperateaccounts for each site visited, you can just plug-in your FB account and engage.

Apple’s Touch ID uses the fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 5s to authenticate the user and allow access and to make purchases on iTunes. With the launch of iOS 8 and the new iPhones, Apple introduced Apple Pay, which combines a NFC chip on the phone and Touch ID for secure payments. Retail stores and banks are installing readers so that users can use their accounts through their phone for payments.

“Due to easier access to data, identity’s meaning increasingly relates to the multiple providers and apps that an individual maintains. But today, users are accessing organizational resource from outside the firewall, on more devices. More users are telecommuting. Users may have a desktop, a laptop and a smartphone. The smartphones may be either company owned or employee owned. There are more cloud applications being used, adding to the complexity of managing identity and access. There’s now more tied to the professional’s identity than just passwords and permissions, and companies are trying to mine value out of that data.”

Klint Finley, writer at SiliconAngle

27©2014

Skills for the Future of Social Media

Working in social media today means you are doing one of 3 things:

1. Community Managers take notes, gauge the community’s temperature, follow changing interests, identify influencers, post responses/prompts

2. Creatives create the content

3. Strategists analyze the community. They might do scenario-planning,

Some agencies believe in collapsing these responsibilities while others want to parse them out.

28©2014

The growth of social media is driven by two core human needs: the

need to connect and communicate

What Will Never Change About Social Media