I’ve been getting frustrated the past few weeks after hearing stories of people and organizations launching a new Facebook group or adding a blog to their website and claiming to be taking part in the new world of social media. The problem isn’t the fact that they are making an effort or getting involved, it’s that they are taking these actions in isolation without considering how the actions fit into their organizations broader strategic goals and objectives and creates member value.

In order for social media, or any other tool, technology, program, etc., to be successful it needs to be part of a larger plan or strategy. So what is social media? To me, it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself. I found this recent quote from Valeria Maltoni’s Blog: Conversation Agent to be extremely relevant, timely and similar in sentiment:

“Social media is a tool, just like the telephone is. It’s not even marketing — in the traditional sense, marketing is dead.

What social media does is simply allow you to do one thing: communicate. That’s it. Social media is not the conversation. It’s the room in which you hold the conversation. It still comes down to saying, doing, or producing something valuable for your customer. Companies which forget this will simply throw money down the social media hole. Companies that get it will find social media a valuable tool — if they they are prepared to stick it out and learn how it works.”

The first sentence warrants repeating: “social media is a tool.” Of the many definitions that exist for the term “tool” one of them is: “the means whereby some act is accomplished”. The challenge with having a variety of tools at your disposal is knowing how to chose the right tool for the task. More literally, you can hammer a nail into a wall with a screwdriver, but wouldn’t it be a lot more efficient and effective if you used a hammer instead. If you subscribe to Valeria’s thinking, which I do, social media is simply a tool that enables a conversation to take place. To take this a step further, conversations are the fundamental building blocks of community, because it having a conversation implies having something to talk about like a shared interest.

While I am not trying to downplay the impact or criticize social media in general, I do want to call into question the way people and organizations are leaping into the use of it without considering the implications and obligations of doing so. The broad availability of these tools and lack of the typical barriers to entry further exacerbate the temptation to leap before you look. There are short and long term considerations that need to be weighed and balanced related not only to the what, but also the why and how. There is definitely room for experimentation, trial and failure, and doing things differently, but I think the fundamental rules of business still apply - know your market, provide value to your stakeholders, make your service/product easy to use, focus on the benefits - however, if you fail to plan, plan to fail.

You don’t have to have a perfect vision of the future in mind to be successful but you have to have a general idea of where you want to go or you’ll never be sure that you have gotten there. Let’s start thinking deliberately about what we are trying to accomplish and how we are trying to do accomplish it instead of throwing ideas out with no expectations or criteria for success. Anybody can launch initiatives that attract a large percentage of their member-bases, but it takes real strategy, focus and commitment to create viable communities that are sustainable and create value for the member and the organization alike.

I had planned to use Thursdays to cover new and emerging tools and technologies that I thought others in the association world would find useful in their personal and professional lives. Today would have marked the first day of that theme, but unfortunately the day got away from me. I’ll kick off the Thursday Tools and Technology theme next week.

With that said, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to share something useful. I’ve posted before on the work of Common Craft (Lee and Sachi Lefever) and how much of a fan I am. The just released a new video on online photo sharing.

Short, clear and to the point. Another great video from Common Craft!

What do we have to look forward to in 2008? As those responsible for the growth and success of our associations, being able to scan the environment to have an idea of what is/isn’t important is a key skill, albeit a very time consuming one.

That is why I have decided to dedicate Tueday’s in 2008 to trendspotting and attempting to identify existing and emerging technology and social media trends that may have an impact on associations, large and small. To initiate this series, I thought I’d take a look at some predictions / macro-trends from a few of the better known experts in technology and social media have offered as influential or important in 2008 and aggregate their findings. Next week, I’ll compile my own synthesis of the trends and potential implications on associations.

Smart Mobs :: Marius Chitosca

Marius offers his summary of a few findings of a few findings that he has come across; most notably from Leverage Social Media and Social Media Method. From Rod Amis at Leverage Social Media he noted the following social media trends:

1. The rise of the first pioneers in Internet 3.0 aka the semantic web.
2. Mobile phone wars ala Google and Apple.
3. The legal battle between Microsoft and Open Source Software rages on specifically around the patent domain.
4. User generated media; specifically broadcasting continues to grow as does it audience.
5. With the upcoming presidential election the online political machine kicks into high gear but its efficacy is still in question.

He continued on to the social networking trends by offering a synthesis of Gary Hall’s, the president of Pringo (a social networking platform) trends by Erick B. from Social Media Method.

1. In order to maintain stickiness in 2008, brands will need to employ social media tools and user-generated content (UGC).
2. The greatest growth in social media will be in affinity groups and niches.
3. Social media sites will reap the benefits from an increase in advertising dollars being spent, but consumers will reject advertising that is not tailored for their specific needs.
4. Customer-facing companies that do not employ social media tools in their external communications and customer relationship management strategies will lose to competitors who actively adopt these.
5. People will continue to spend more time on the Internet; however, they will hop from one web site to another less frequently, only spending time on social media sites and networks that fully engage their interests and values.
6. In 2008, a more mature audience will embrace online communities, even though the young early adopters acted as the initial catalyst for social media.
7. Major corporations will use social media tools for building better communication with employees, replacing outdated intranet systems.
8. Mobile social media will take off in 2008.
9. We will start to see market consolidation. Larger social media players will acquire smaller, common interest sites so that the established portals remain competitive, attractive and relevant.

Marshall Kirkpatrick :: ReadWriteWeb

ReadWriteWeb never fails to create outstanding content. Their trends for 2008 are no exception. Not only do they offer a number of great thoughts on what the year ahead may bring, but they also offer a myriad of great resources to help their readers stay on top of the trends including a lot of links, OPML files for their feed favorites on the topics and specific recommendations. Their trends include:

1. Open Data: Data silos and walled gardens are a huge loss of opportunity and more people are figuring that out every day. Some of the subthemes include the following.
   1. Data portability
   2. Open Id
   3. Google’s Open Social and Android mobile operating system
   4. The rise of data-centric start-ups
   5. The personal data aggregation and publishing tools called Lifestreaming apps like Tumblr, named one of Time’s Top 50 Websites of the Year, or the bleeding edge Onaswarm, Lifestrea.ms and Soup.
   6. APML
2. Semantic Web - A Semantic Web has been in the works for a long time but is just starting to hit the scene for real. The idea is that semantic web technologies are able to derive meaning from online content and determine connections where none have been made explicitly.
3. Mobile - Most of the people online in this world access the web through a tiny little computer they carry in their pocket and also use as a phone. Mobile means more than just small, though. It also means portable, fast, location-aware and tied to voice, and media.
4. Visualization - The future of OpenID and many other key technical innovations, lies in communicating with people about what they can do with the tools. That is not easy to do with things that are complicated or new. Just as video has changed the web forever because visual communication is infinitely more evocative than text - so too do I expect the perceived value of visualization to grow by leaps and bounds in 2008.

Will Beresford :: beyond analysis

Finally, from Will Beresford, Strategy Director at beyond analysis, a UK-based data and customer strategy business comprised of individuals with backgrounds from across a diverse group of blue chip organisations such as McKinsey, Cap Gemini, EMAP, BBC, Thames Water, Leo Burnett, M&C Saatchi, dunnhumby and Vodafone, suggests the following trends in Social Media and Business for 2008:

1. Traditional models for consumers to research a product or service will begin to be fundamentally changed by Social Media.
2. The growth in data and content created by the social media will also bring change to the traditional search models.
3. Likewise traditional models for businesses to research their consumers will fundamentally change.
4. Customer feedback and the social network will overtake price, and in some cases brand as a major factor in online purchase decisions.
5. The data generated from Web 2.0 will be increasingly important to all organisations, not just to web based businesses.
6. The interest in large social networking sites as the next best thing in advertising will fall away as quickly as it has arrived.
7. Many agent-based, or middle- man, businesses will find it increasingly hard to justify their existence.
8. Official news will be increasingly contextualised by consumer opinion and it will become harder to discern the difference between real news and opinion.

What does it all mean? I’ll save the more thorough analysis and synthesis from last week but will quote Mitch Joel from Twist Image in a comment he left on the Future Now’s blog: “Bottom line, there is no silver bullet or secret formula. To be successful in social media is much harder than “starting to Blog.” It’s about building a real relationship.

Obviously my aggregation is far from comprehensive, so what am I missing? What technology and social media trends are you contending with that you think extend beyond your own association? What do you think we should be keeping an eye on that could impact associations? As always, your feedback is more than welcome.

Update: I was a bit quick on the trigger as I omitted a number of other individuals that I had referenced but did not include here. For the sake of offering a number of other perspectives I want to include the following additional resources:

• Lauren Cooney, Program Director, Community, IBM CTO Office for Information Management :: Web 2.0 in 2008 My Predictions
• Charles Armstrong, CEO of Trampoline Systems, an enterprise social computing business in London (UK) on the FASTForward Blog :: Enterprise Social Computing: What will happen in 2008?