Three Hot Trends In Social Media That Will Shape 2011

Six years is a lifetime in the world of social media, so making predictions about hot trends for 2011 requires long-term vision. “Six years ago we had no status updates on Facebook, no photo sharing on Flickr, no video uploads on YouTube and no micro-blogging on Twitter,” said Fred von Graf, a social media guru who spoke Nov. 8, 2010, in the digital marketing class of Thunderbird Professor John Zerio, Ph.D. “We have gone from nothing to where we are today in six years.”

Von Graf, managing partner at Web3Mavens in Tempe, Arizona, said rapid innovation will continue to change the social media landscape in 2011. But he identified three major trends that organizations can count on as they design their marketing and communications strategies.

Mobile Applications
The first trend involves increased demand for smart phone mobile applications. Von Graf said smart phones using the Android platform already sell for $30 or less, which means more and more people will start carrying the technology everywhere they go.

“Social media applications will be closely integrated with the proliferation of these smart phones,” von Graf said. “Everything we do on the mobile devices will be closely tied to social networking.”

Location-based Applications
Many of these mobile applications will use global positioning system (GPS) technology to broadcast information about people’s exact locations to others in their social networks. “These location-based applications are popping up now,” von Graf said.

Foursquare.com already allows 4 million users to track the locations of their friends on their smart phones. Von Graf is working on a new game called Hexxa that will incorporate location-based technology. And a new Thunderbird iPhone application, which the school plans to launch in spring 2011, will alert T-birds when another alumnus is nearby.

“Location-based technology will become far more closely integrated in the future,” von Graf said. “It’s going to tie into everything you are doing and your friends are doing.”

Gaming Applications
The third major trend that von Graf sees developing in 2011 revolves around social gaming. “Gaming ties into the essence of who we are as people,” von Graf said. “We love to achieve goals and we love to share the moment.”

He said organizations that capture the power of gaming in their mobile applications will attract loyal followers.

“What you are doing is tying into the essence of who we are as people and using that power to create incentives built into us to do these things,” von Graf said. “There are going to be more gaming layers. On top of what we are doing today, you can take something mundane and boring and make it fun with a game.”

[This article has been reproduced with permission from Knowledge Network, the online thought leadership platform for Thunderbird School of Global Management https://thunderbird.asu.edu/knowledge-network/]