Dan Greenfield, VP of Earthlink corporate communications, asked several bloggers to share what they felt was the most notable developments in 2006 that will impact social media and public relations. It is a good question without an easy answer, but I have picked the top five trends in Social Media that I noticed in 2006, and how I see these playing out in 2007.
YouTube was a huge story in 2006, and with the Google deal, it sealed its fate as one of the Top five trends. I love the Time piece about its offbeat founders, read it if you haven't had the chance. It opened up the way for all kinds of consumer-generated content. It's easy to make videos and the flash format, which can be easily shared and viewed with nothing but the browser, plus YouTube's allowing video to be embedded in any website or blog is huge, and viral. No more errors that you don't have the right plugin. Nice. In 2007, I predict there will be a major infringement lawsuit that will define (and unfortunately) tame video on the net.
Second Life (www.secondlife.com) broke through into the mainstream media in 2006 and brought a flood of speculator corporations into its confines. (Second Life is an online society within a 3D world, where users can explore, build, socialize, and participate in their own economy.) It has been impressive to watch the list of corporations and residents who have built thriving businesses grow larger everyday. In fact, today Big Blue (IBM), opens up a massive build in the Second Life to the public (12 sims), which will mostly be used as an internal communications development sandbox, and to assist some of its customers, like City, who hope to break into the space. "Communication Overtones" has a group that meets in Second Life once a month called "Second Thursday in Second Life." My prediction for 2007 and beyond is that 3D spaces and virtual reality, that have been developed in Second Life and in other places, will start to break free from these silos and show up right in your browser. IBM calls it the 3D Internet.
Pay-Per-Post, Flogs, and Fake Social Media Campaigns, need I say more? The truth is that as social media come of age, they will be abused by those who would see themselves profit short-term at the expense of long-term gain. I predict that these scandals will only grow in 2007, and that leads to the next trend.
If in the name of public relations these abuses are continued, then social media communities will reject us outright. And it has already started to happen, most notable is Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia. But Second Life also banned PR folk, at least in Dreamland, which represents 10 percent of the landmass in Second Life, the residents voted to ban "unrepentant" PR and Marketing Flacks. I predict that in 2007, there will be more bad PR for public relations, but I also predict that many people, who take time to know these communities will operate quite well within them. Just like PR today in the real world, PR in the Social Media world will live on, albeit with something to prove.
The press release turned 100 this year, and the public relations and marketing community started to really talk about how to make it better and improve its usefulness. Todd Defren, Shift Communications, started the conversation with his take on a new format for the press release that he called the Social Media News Release. Then, a hot debate ensued, with everyone talking about what was really needed, with some focusing on content and others on distribution and format (the release particularly) to make press releases more readable by the machines and to incentivize major web companies, like Technorati, and distributors, like PRNewswire, to create tools for it.
Source: www.overtonecomm.blogspot.com
