SOCIAL MEDIA TREND: ERASING, NEW BLOGGING AND MORE GAMING

We are going to see a trend toward getting rid of our old online information.

Erasure is what the new trend is called. It is what we do when people want to selectively edit their social history. Tools empowering users to delete photos, clean up their wall… It is done to help protect someone from an employer. The discussion this year will shift hiding information to forgetting information.

The other big trend will remains gaming. Yes it was big in the last few years but this is going to be the biggest year for it yet.

More people are investing and experimenting. The next Angry Birds game will be social. All set out to help people when they are waiting and commuting and killing time.

The other big trend for 2012 is bloggers writing posts longer than a tweet but shorter than a standard column/post. Every day it is easier to publish content for mobile devices and the next leap will be authors who optimize writing for mobile audiences.

SOCIAL MEDIA: AT WORK

Many companies have been banning social media sites from their Internet network use. 77% of employees have admitted to using sites like Facebook and Twitter while at work and 87% of those people have also admitted to it not being business related.

Media networking is so important to college graduates that 56% of them refused to work at a place where these sites are banned.

Media sites are an obvious distraction, not only to the employee, but also to the employer. What employers are slowly realizing is that these sites can actually be beneficial to their companies consequently leading to the debate on whether or not they should actually be prohibited.

In reality, an employee can’t be stopped from visiting their Facebook accounts but employers can definitely be monitoring.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR YOUR BUSINESS: HOW TO BE FASCINATING

If you are a business and using social media, your main goal is to be seen and more importantly, to be revisited. The only way you are going to attract visitors and repeat visitors is by establishing yourself as an expert of a fascinating subject matter. The key here is to provide content constantly which isn’t always easy to do, and it takes up a lot of time.

Here are four tools to help:

1. StumbleUpon. This service allows you identify what subjects you’re interested in. It will then take you to pages that other StumbleUpon users have liked in that subject. Cuts down your research time tremendously. www.stumbleupon.com

2. SmartBrief. Once you subscribe on this site, they have subject matter experts doing the research and sending it directly to you.  www.smartbrief.com

3. Alltop. This one is a great source for free information. It has 900 subjects to choose from. It also presents the five most recent stories in the topic you choose as well as best websites and blogs about the subject. www.alltop.com

How do you determine whether you are successful in your social media efforts? If people are re-tweeting it, favoring it, sharing it, or emailing it, you have done your job at being fascinating.

CELEBRITY TREND:
MAKING MONEY FROM TWEETS

There's a new celebrity trend that has the Kardashians and Charlie Sheen among stars earning up to $71 per character for sponsored tweets. More than ever before, brands have been paying for influential Twitter users to write about their products since Justin Bieber was just barely over 1 million followers. A tweet can run $10,000 or more. Companies pay for actors, musicians and reality stars to tweet now. Kim and Khloe Kardashian tweet about their products all the time.

CampusLIVE, is a website that connects advertisers with university students. It paid Lindsay Lohan $3,500 for a tweet about the company. Why? Because she has 2.6 million followers. It prompted 4,500 clicks. It won't use her again as the one tweet tapped her fan base now.

LIFESTYLE:
‘SOCIAL GIFTING’ TREND

The Internet is making life easier for us in many ways. It is even facilitating our gift buying. Especially when you’re buying a gift as a group, things can get complicated. Many sites are popping up online to help.

First there is Social Gift (www.socialgift.com) This site provides different and original ideas for a gift you and your friends can split. It implements a voting system to simplify the decision-making process. They also have a loyalty program – where you earn points to buy gifts for yourself.

Let’s Gift It (http://letsgift.it) is a site that helps with the payments. People never like fronting the money or being the one collecting and this site resolves the issue. You share gifts via Facebook or Twitter, and the site splits the costs and uses e-commerce system to collect payments.

Then there’s Giftiki (www.giftiki.com) which collects little amounts from all your friends. Combined you can buy something you really want rather than receive a lot of random knick knacks.   

SOCIAL MEDIA TREND:
75% OF RECRUITERS NOW USE IT

The trend today is using social media to find jobs. 75% of recruiters now use social media when screening applicants. It’s important to know this if you’re looking for a job because it could drastically increase/decrease your chances. Anita Walicki is an expert recruiter for Hays Specialist Recruitment, an international company with 13,795 jobs in 25 countries, based in England.

Job-posting site use is on the decline while social media is on the rise when looking for employees. Job posting sites often result in a flood of unqualified candidates. Statistically there is now approximately 50% overall decrease in traffic on the top five work sites in Canada: Workopolis, Job Boom, Monster, Working.com and Career Builder. The drop in traffic is quite drastic.

If you're a looking for a job and planning on using social media to help you, the most important thing is to make sure employers and recruiters can find you. Make sure you make it easy for them to be able to contact you or find you within minutes. If another person has a large network or is very connected - connect with them. When your number of contacts increases - so does your visibility and prominence. Make sure you have clear condensed educational and work profile as well as your interests if it pertains to the job you are looking for.

LIFESTYLE TREND:
ONLINE ‘INFLUENCE’

ONLINE INFLUENCE is now a new barometer to dictate how much overall influence you have in society. Can you believe this?

These days, one’s worth seems to be sadly measured by the number of “friends” or followers on social media sites. I know it's crazy but your online reputation is emerging as the new level of one’s social standing and your standing is important for consumers, brands and marketers.

Going forward, marketers will use "social scores" to find the right online influencers for their brands. One such way to know the intersection of online reputation and influence is Klout, a social scoring system that assigns individuals and some companies, a grade from one to 100 based on data points from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

According to the website MASHABLE, influence is defined as “implicit or explicit effect of one thing (or person) on another,” which online can be further simplified to “can someone’s words (and/or video) make you think or do something?” While this can be negative (think of Jim Jones or David Koresh), let’s focus on the positive. It becomes easier to understand influence when it’s broken down into its core components:

Brand, Expertise and Trust

While there is much debate around online branding, it is clear that personal branding is important to online influence.

What is personal branding? Corporate branding is the messaging effort by a company to make people feel positive about their products. Personal branding is the sum of your online activities and sets an expectation about who you are. Personal brand is truly an aggregated representation of online activity. Can you build a personal brand by interacting on only one social service? Sort of, but it’s incomplete. It’s impossible to gain a true picture of who you are simply by looking at your photos on Flickr, or just reading your blog. Trust grows by being able to view a person’s social content in aggregate. This is why life streaming applications like FriendFeed have grown so rapidly. In terms of measuring online influence, the stronger the personal brand, the more influence one wields online. The most important component of online influence is trust. Trust is defined as creating a consistent expectation that a person will always act in your best interest when given information.

Expertise is another core component of influence. One can gain knowledge on a specific topic, but expertise is a title that can only be given.

MOBILE TREND:
LOCATION SERVICES

Foursquare and Gowalla have people checking into the locations they go to and letting everyone know where they are. Facebook has also jumped into the mix since they have the biggest network with - Facebook Places. Why are people into it? As humans we have a desire for community. It's the same idea as Norm from Cheers. Everytime he walked into the door, people new his name and he had a seat saved for him. The reason that made us feel good was the sense of belonging. With these new applications, we have that in a virtual way. It's a continued feeling of taking your whole network along with you. 

On the other side, it's a valuable tool for businesses. Lonn Shulkin of Canadian based BAM Strategy interactive marketing agency says that when we check in, we are essentially telling local businesses where we are and that we are ready to be marketed to. Businesses could take advantage by giving really relevant messages, offers, specials, etc. It’s a matter of capturing immediacy and driving customers to the right places at the right times.

These businesses are now able to access customers directly. For local businesses and small businesses in general, they’ve always been limited because they could only reach out financially and physically a block or two from their location and hope that word of mouth takes off. Location services gives these companies the ability to be proactive – through Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla.

Right now only 4% of the Internet population uses location based services. Even so, Foursquare and Gowalla were media darlings this year. I predict that in 2011 it will get more narrowly focused, which means people are more likely to use those services. 

SOCIAL MEDIA:
HOW TO GAIN INFLUENCE ON TWITTER

New research shoes that simply having a large Twitter following isn’t enough to make you influential. Lady Gaga has over 9.2 million followers, Justin Bieber has over 8.6 million and Britney Spears has over 7.3 million. It seems as though these numbers don’t matter.More important to measure influence are how many re-tweets or mentions a user attracts over time.The most-followed Twitter accounts belong to celebrities and major media brands.The most-mentioned accounts also tend to be celebrities.

How can you gain influence on Twitter? Focus your tweets mainly on one topic. That also means tweeting posts by others about your core topic. Also, keep an eye out for relevant hash-tags, which allow you to follow topics on Twitter rather than specific Twitter accounts. Use hash-tags in your own tweets to attract more attention to your contributions or theme.

FACEBOOK:
MORE BANG THAN TWITTER

If you’re a business owner, recent studies show that you’ll probably get more bang for your buck on Facebook than on Twitter. Cumulative activity is higher on Facebook than it is on Twitter. Facebook has a wider reach and greater emphasis on real-world ties.

Meantime, absolutely everybody is getting in on the social media movement, including Pope John Paul II. Who would have thought? He revealed a page to promote the late pope’s beatification. This is not the first time the Vatican has used Facebook to reach out to people. In 2010, they created a page detailing Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the United Kingdom. The page is still active today.

FACEBOOK:
CAUSE OF RELATIONSHIP TROUBLE

Facebook is now considered a top cause for relationship trouble. Lawyers are now demanding to see the clients’ Facebook pages before they start court proceedings. One spouse connects online with someone they knew from school. The person is emotionally available and they start communicating through Facebook. It's now out of control.

Four out of five lawyers reported an increasing number of cases that cited evidence from social networking sites. The site is being used for other legal battles like child custody cases. The pictures on the sites, even those posted by friends, are a rich source of evidence.

FACEBOOK USE:
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MEN & WOMEN

A recent study showed that women use Facebook differently than men.

Here are four fun facts about the popular social networking site.

1. Women in their 30’s are extremely active. They make up half the activity on social network sites.

2. They tend to use Facebook to check up on their exes. 48% of single women and 43% of married women do it.

3. Women Facebook users tend to be insecure and narcissistic. Additionally, women who judge their self-worth by their looks tend to upload more photos to the site

4. They use Facebook and upload photos to compete for men and to get attention.

SOCIAL MEDIA TREND:
LOCATION-BASED APPS

The latest trend in social media is the location-based app. We all know apps are very popular but now there are ones that help save money at your favorite restaurant or store by just walking in.

HTR sat down recently with tech expert Craig Agranoff author of Checked-In: How To Use Gowalla, Foursquare, and Other Geo-Location Applications For Fun and Profit and tech correspondent for CBS News in Florida.

He uses two of the most popular apps, Gowalla and Foursquare, which just surpassed 7 million, as examples to describe what these social media services can do for you. They allow people to check into an establishment. Once you’re there you press a button and it notifies all your friends of your whereabouts. On the other side of the spectrum, it gives a business owner the chance to offer a special to the people that are in their establishments. They can give you instant lists of the best attractions in an area as you travel through. It’s great for tourists. There’s also a feature called ‘notes.’ It allows you to leave a note for someone at any location and they will be alerted to it on their phone once they arrive at the same spot. No more worrying about your significant other forgetting the shopping lists.

These apps certainly sound cool but statistics show that we have not yet embraced them. Just 4 percent of adults use these online services. The Facebook Places app could quickly increase interest with easy access to a large clientele. A third of small businesses are already using the app because it encourages people to spend!

As a business owner, you would be foolish not to use the free tools that Facebook gives you. Facebook allows people to check into establishments, and you could reward them with loyalty points. It’s almost like a virtual check-in card on your phone. After the customer has reached a certain amount of check-ins there, the businesses can reward the people for going there. These apps are going to expand even further. We could soon have our favorite stores or restaurants catering to us without even saying a word!

The book is called: Checked-In: How To Use Gowalla, Foursquare and Other Geo-Location Applications For Fun and Profit. Learn how to use apps to improve your marketing and keep you ahead of the curve.

You can buy it on Amazon for $19.95 US

FACEBOOK:
STREAMS MOVIE

If you feel like watching The Dark Knight, Warner Brothers is letting you have it thru your Facebook for $3.00. You can now get movies streamed through Facebook and you can use Facebook at the same time.

The move could be bad news for Netflix, which sells a streaming service for $7.99 a month. Shares of Netflix recently dropped 5.8 percent on concern that Facebook's 500 million-plus users would give it an edge.

This is exactly what Netflix and others haven't been able to do very well: integrate video with social networking. Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sanandos says it ihe isn’t worried - "Nobody goes to Facebook to watch movies"

NEW FACEBOOK FEATURE:
FACEBOOK EMAIL

Facebook is launching an email service. Users will be given an @facebook.com email address. Essentially it ties together three forms of communication - SMS, email, and instant messaging.

It has three key features:

1. Seamless Messaging - users can contact others through whatever medium they choose - whether it be SMS, email or instant message - all from the same place. One home to everything you do communication wise.

2. Conversation History - see everything you've discussed with each friend as a single conversation. It wouldn’t be dispersed anymore between your email inbox, your phone, your chat windows, etc.

3. Social Inbox - a personal message will no longer be sandwiched between a bank statement and a bill.

Mark Zuckerberg believes this is the way the future of communication will work. He defines next generation messaging in seven words: " seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal and short"

It allows users to communicate on-the-go through whichever messaging tool they prefer, and the receiver will get it in whichever way is most convenient for them. So if you want to reach out to your friend via text message, and they want to reply using their email, it's possible!

Some are worried that current email clients like Google with Gmail and Yahoo with Yahoo Mail might suffer. If the idea catches on, and everyone really does use Facebook for all their communication needs, they might just dump their old email addresses.

This is a possibility - yes, but will people really take the time to change their email addresses once they're already established? I think Facebook email will be a threat to other email clients if they make the switching process easy by allowing people to sync their email address.
Facebook email will be out in the next couple of months. Initially, it will be invite-only but eventually all users will be offered a Facebook email address.

SOCIAL MEDIA & TECH TREND:
ZAGAT SURVEY

Now turning to social media and tech trends: texting, tweeting and cell phoning etiquette.

A recent Zagat survey proves restaurant-goers think it’s rude to text, tweet, check e-mail or talk on cell phones during a meal.

Tim Zagat, the founder of the survey says that it’s becoming more and more of an accepted practice.

What does this mean? The people who are annoyed by it are the same people who are doing it.

Some only do it half way, saying they would never answer a phone call, but would reply to a text.

Results of the survey in LA show that 67% feel that texting, checking e-mail or talking on the phone is inappropriate and rude.

In New York 64% thought it was rude.

TREND:
TWITTER LOCATION


Now moving on to the latest in Twitter news. They unveiled a new tool to share 'tweeting' locations, a feature that can let the world know your whereabouts. The new tool is optional to Twitter users – giving them the opportunity to include their location in their 'tweet' statuses. (My g-d, this language is confusing). Locations will not be included unless users turn on the 'tracking' tool. Twitter launched this new feature in response to the growing popularity of services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt, that broadcast people's location. Facebook is expected to jump on the 'tracking' bandwagon soon. It could be a useful business tool, helping Internet services sell more advertising to companies looking to sell products and services in certain neighborhoods at a specific time. People on Twitter often already share their locations in their tweets, but that wastes space in their limited 140-character space. This tool poses risk, and Twitter advises all users to be very careful. A site called Rob Me Please was recently launched and reminds users that burglars can use the location information to help pinpoint when nobody is home.