My Social Media wishes for 2010

The end of 2009 is just around the corner and literally last night I bought a large 2010 wall calendar to put up on our wall in the kitchen to keep my family organized. Yup, 2010 is almost here . While I spend time to finish up 2009 projects, write reports and reviews I can’t help to think about the new year and the opportunities it will bring.

So here is what I wish 2010 will bring for Social Media.

1: NO MORE FAD TALK

Hoping that even the biggest skeptics will finally stop calling the Social Media phenomenon a fad. I understand that Social Media has reached the critical point of world-wide participation in such a short period of time that many traditionalists are still catching up to understand how to interpret it not even mentioning participating in it.

Let’s look at the Social Media adoption numbers:

• 2/3 of all internet users around the world are now participating in social media one way or the other (Nielsen)
• 350 million members are using Facebook
• 200K videos are being uploaded to YouTube daily
• There are 130 million blogs indexed by Google
• PAY ATTENTION TO THIS STAT: 77% of all B2B decision makers are now using Social Media and Word of Mouth to make business buying decision (Forrester).

Not convinced yet? Social Media/Web 2.0 has made significant behavioral and social changes since the industrial revolution incl. introducing concepts such as citizen journalism , open source & crowd sourcing.

Still not convinced? Watch this:

I believe 2010 will be the year we finally stop convincing the skeptics that social media has a future and move on to shaping that future and working on individual projects that encourage making the best of social media concepts for the benefit our communities and our businesses.

2: GETTING SERIOUS WITH SOCIAL MEDIA MEASUREMENTS

Ok, in 2010 I hope for

• No more whining about Social Measurement difficulties.
• No more traditional measuring tactics like counting impressions to determine the value of your effort in Social Media.
• No more excuses not to tie social media measurements to your business goals!

Sounds hard? It is. But believe me there is no better way to take your corporate social media program to the next level then by clearly identifying your Social Media strategy with measurements that are tied to your business goals.

Corporate Execute Board’s Social Media Maturity Diagnostic project I participated in helped me realize that you should approach measuring social media as work in progress. It’s easy to start measuring volume and transactional metrics, but we want to progress past that to figure out how Social Media can change your stakeholders’ attitudes, behaviors and finally how you can measure financial outcomes of your efforts.

Get inspired with these social media measurement success stories

• Dell makes $3 million from their twitter outlet handles

• Avaya makes $250K from single tweet through needs-based listening & engagement

• Pitney Bowes saves $300K in call deflection with the help of their user forum

3: MORE COMMUNITY MANAGERS

It’s very encouraging to see businesses beginning to understand that the way to participate in Social Media is by contributing and building trust and there is no better way to do that than by putting a human face on their participation in Social Media. Let’s face it, we don’t friend or follow brands. We make friends with people behind the brands. The concept of a community manager is fairly new and I am hoping I will see more community managers getting hired as businesses begin to appreciate the value they can bring to corporations. The job of the community manager is not only to participate in Social Media channels on behalf of the brand but most importantly to connect with customers and stakeholders on a personal level always contributing more than they are receiving. Another important job of a community manager is to understand the social media ecosystem of their business and to establish relationships with influences in these spaces and finally finding, getting to know and helping your brand’s ambassadors.

Here is a great group of community managers I got to meet throughout my career who truly understand what it means to represent a brand in Social Media.

• Amber Naslund – Radian 6
• David B. Thomas – SAS
• Wendy Harman – Red Cross
• Beth Harte – MarketingProfs

Not sure how to get started? I recommend “the New Community Rules” book by Tamar Weinberg as a great primer for new community managers.

4: THE MORE EMPLOYEES PARTICIPATING – THE MORE MEANINGFUL THE CONVERSATION BECOMES

I hope that in 2010 more businesses realize that the only way to make Social Media participation meaningful and sustainable for your company is to let more than just a handful of marketers and communicators be active in Social Media. With proper training, clear Social Media guidelines and ways to measure the results of their efforts it’s time to let more of your subject matter experts, engineers, sales pros & R&D participate and hold meaningful conversation as the only way to sustain deep engagement across various Social Media channels. Jeremiah Owyang describes the social media organizational structure that supports multiple social media contributors as the hub-and-spoke model and recommends establishing a strong governance model with a multi-functional Social Media Council as the main governance body to ensure transparency across all Social Media engagements. This is the model I hope to establish in 2010 for the brand I represent.

It will be fun to look at this list at the end of 2010. I am optimistic this will be a great year for Social Media!

Now it’s your turn. What excites you about Social Media for 2010?