2009: The Year Of Social

From an online perspective 2009 could be labelled as the Year Of Social as social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook dominated the online world and have begun to enter into the mainstream conscience. It is becoming clear that people no longer wish to visit a static page to simply be presented with a few choices. Individuals now want to engage, communicate, and most importantly they want to interact with the site and with others who may have purchased the same product as themselves.

The proliferation of social sites and the stream of real time data being created has made enough of an impact in 2009 that even Google and Microsoft have jumped into the market. The search giants have now begun to pull data from sites such as Twitter and Facebook and display it in real time as it relates to your search query. Google has taken this one step further by displaying real time data on the first page of its search results for many queries.

The days when people found what they were looking for by simply launching their favorite search engine, typing in a search query and pressing enter are no longer the only way to find what you are looking for and in fact it may not even be the best way to find what you are looking for anymore. Instead more and more people are now turning to their friends, family members and increasingly to their social networks to tell them what to buy, what movie to see, where the deals are and where the best service to be had is.

Word of mouth has always been the most effective way to market to individuals as nothing is as powerful an endorsement as hearing from ones own friends and family that a product or service is a must have. The problem in the past was that word of mouth never scaled as well as a television commercial could. That is to say a television commercial in the past could theoretically reach a far greater number of people than word of mouth could. What we are now seeing is that with social networking tools such as Twitter and Facebook the word of mouth message can be scaled to a global audience that reaches even more people than traditional advertising routes ever could and at a fraction of the costs associated with old media advertisement.

So if 2009 was the Year Of Social, what is in store for us in 2010? For 2010 I see a lot more of what we witnessed in 2009 as more and more businesses and individuals begin to embrace social networks as more than mere fads. Much like in the early 90’s when commercials had a .com address affixed to the lower portion of the screen I think we will see companies attaching their Twitter address and Facebook pages to their advertisements.

Look for companies to reach out to consumers through social networks more and more to not only promote but to also gather feedback on products and services and to help consumers who may have had a bad experience with their product.

The world we live in is becoming an increasingly small and intimate one. It is my belief that in 2010 we will see word of mouth through the use of social networks become more important for us the consumer as we tend to trust recommendations from our friends, families and those in our networks far more than an expensive ad placed by a faceless company.

Businesses and individuals would be wise to adopt to this fast changing world before they are forced to accept it and are left forever behind.