Arun Rajagopal

Be Brand Social in 2010 December 31, 2009

As the world gets ready to welcome another brand new year, it’s a good time to get a pulse of where social media is headed to in 2010.

In his ‘6 Social Media Trends to watch out in 2010’, David Armano says that social media will be ‘more popular, more exclusive and more mobile’.

Among other predictions, Niall Harbison believes social media will focus more on the ‘quality of information’ than the ‘quantity of followers’.

Jackie Huba says that what was hot in 2009 will be out in 2010. Her prediction for 2010: social gets integrated into business functions. And about time that happened.

Marketing Sherpa and MediaPost report that social media marketing budgets will increase in 2010, largely at the expense of other media.

B. L. Ochman predicts that blogs amongst other social media channels will become the hot ad medium of the year and ad agencies will finally take the lead in social media.

Brian Solis reminds us that the future of interactive marketing lies in the ‘golden triangle engagement’ – a converging point of social, mobile and real-time web.

Brian Morrisey hits the ball out of the park when he says that marketers will/should treat social media as an integrated part of a digital strategy, than as a stand-alone area for experimentation.

In ’10 Ways Social Media Will Change In 2010′, Ravit Lichtenberg says that ‘social media will no longer be social media’ but a ‘single, cohesive experience embedded in our activities and technologies’ and ROI measurement of social media engagement will matter ever more than before.

What are your social media predictions for 2010?

My belief is that more enterprises and brands, especially in the Middle East and other social media nascent markets will get on the social media bandwagon with varying measures of success.

Some of the challenges they will face are lack of social media expertise, issues of controlling the message, trying to conform this ‘new social way of communications’ with the traditional way of brand communications, being transparent in conversations,  pains of creating value over noise, constraints in marketing budgets and working with ‘people who know the real deal’, the pressure to prove ROI at the outset of social media engagement, the diverse challenges in communicating with Arabic and English-speaking audiences etc. That was a handful, eh?

My recommendation to brands who are stepping into social media waters in 2010 is to use your social media experimentation to rethink your digital strategy (if you already have one apart from a corporate website). Social works best when it is in sync with your digital activity.

If you are smarter, you should be taking lessons learnt from social media and applying them to your current marketing strategy. You should be thinking more on the lines of what could work better for you in the present than what has worked well for you in the past. You should also be keeping a close watch on your competition as well as what other social media savvy brands around the world are up to. Learning from their successes and failures shortens the curve for you.

Your marketing should be tied to goals – measurable, attainable and contributing to your bottom line. And to get there, you will need to work with pros who straddle the new age domain of ‘integrated’ brand communications with relative ease  – a world where advertising, digital, social media marketing and public relations blend together seamlessly.

This post is inspired by ‘Being Brand Social‘, a recent column I wrote for BusinessToday, a leading business publication in the Sultanate of Oman. The article introduces social media, discusses what’s in it for brands and explains why many brands struggle with social media marketing. Click here to read.

Happy social media 2010 to you!

Image source: Future or Bust. Vermin Inc on Flickr.