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?

How many times do you encounter a problem or challenging situation but get stymied in your search for a workable solution? If you are like most of us, it happens all of the time. I am one of those who are truly amazed by the true innovators among us and and during the Great Ideas Conference back in December, I posted a tweet where I pondered: “Where do great ideas really come from?” Needless to say it’s an area that I am extremely interested in because it is as much art as it is science and requires the ability to be in the moment and keeping an eye on the future.

In a recent Economist article: The accidental innovator, Evan Williams, founder of Obvious and creator of Blogger and more recently Twitter, was profiled and he shared some of his thoughts about innovation.

What I found most interesting and useful about the article was Evan’s pragmatic approach to innovation. He cites three primary insights gained during his time creating Blogger, working at Google and as he has further developed Twitter and ramped-up his work at Obvious:

1. Genuinely new ideas are stumbled upon rather than sought out.
2. New ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known.
3. Good ideas seem obvious in retrospect.

Great thoughts and something to really consider in our everyday lives. I really appreciate his commitment to making stumbling on accidents a core competency. My key take away from the article and from Evan, himself, is his willingness to embrace mistakes and use them to his advantage. Blogger was created out of frustration with collaboration software and Twitter was created by asking the simple question: “What can we take away to make something new.”

What frustrates you or your members? What can you take away from one (or more) of your processes, programs, services, etc. to make something new and potentially more valuable? It may not be the only or best approach to innovation or problem solving but it does give you a great starting point.

I came across a post recently on TechCrunch that really appealed to me because I saw it as especially useful for association folks, especially those that are involved in new product development, technology, process improvement, member services, or really any role that is involved in creating any type of member value. The article was a summary of advice for start-ups given by Loic Le Meur, a pretty successful businessman in his own right. Le Meur shares a wisdom-packed ten-point list of advice that he has acquired while starting his own companies (uBlog and more recently Seemisc). Granted it is written from the perspective a start-up business venture, but the message seems especially relevant and more broadly applicable to the association community as well.

1. Don’t wait for a revolutionary idea. It will never happen. Just focus on a simple, exciting, empty space and execute as fast as possible.
2. Share your idea. The more you share, the more you get advice and the more you learn. Meet and talk to your competitors.
3. Build a community. Use blogging and social software to make sure people hear about you.
4. Listen to your community. Answer questions and build your product with their feedback.
5. Gather a great team. Select those with very different skills from you. Look for people who are better than you.
6. Be the first to recognise a problem. Everyone makes mistakes. Address the issue in public, learn about and correct it.
7. Don’t spend time on market research. Launch test versions as early as possible. Keep improving the product in the open.
8. Don’t obsess over spreadsheet business plans. They are not going to turn out as you predict, in any case.
9. Don’t plan a big marketing effort. It’s much more important and powerful that your community loves the product.
10. Don’t focus on getting rich. Focus on your users. Money is a consequence of success, not a goal.

As I think through each item on the list I can see examples within my own association where the advice could/would be extremely valuable in making the shift from Association 1.0 to Association 2.0. Let’s take a look at each suggestion in greater detail:

1. How often do we waste valuable time looking for the “next big thing” when our time would be better spent looking at how to improve existing programs, products, processes or services? What if we were to shift our attention to incremental change instead of using our most valuable asset: our time, trying to create new products or services that may or may not meet our members needs?
2. Are you sharing ideas with those who could help you the most or are you stuck in the Web 1.0 paradigm of hoarding information thinking that secrecy provides you with some type of strategic or competitive advantage? If you haven’t taken the time to expose new ideas to your stakeholders, customers and those who have a vested interest in the idea’s (or your organizations) success how can you be sure that it is going to actualize it’s true potential?
3. First and foremost, see point 2 above. Points 3 & 4 can be grouped together and are part and parcel of any association or organization’s success. If the true potential of crowdsourcing and tapping the wisdom of the crowds are lost on you, I suggest spending some time reading (or re-reading) Wikinomics, Smart Mobs, The Wisdom of Crowds and more recently We Are Smarter Than Me (more on this book/concept in a future post) to gain a better understanding of how organizations are fostering and tapping into communities to create and sustain competitive advantage. I think it’s safe to say that this idea has moved beyond novelty and into the realm of an essential business practice. If you aren’t doing it it’s likely that your competitors are.
4. As someone responsible for your associations success it’s essential to reflect on your hiring practices and selection criteria. Are you putting the right people into the key roles within your organization or on project teams? Are you really hiring or selecting those that your organization or initiative could benefit most from. I’ve seen too many instances in my career where a truly effective hiring/selection process is obscured by self-preservation (e.g. fear of being replaced by a hiring a person smarter than you) and those responible for hiring default to selecting the “safe” hire, as opposed to the individual who really help lead/take the organization to the next level. See point 3 above as well. Are you making members/customers part of the team? If your mission is to serve them or create value you should be.
5. All too often pride gets in the way of admitting when we are right or wrong. This is as true for organizations as it is for individuals. Are you sharing your successes and failures? If not you may be missing a great opportunity. If your true intention is improvement and innovation then mistakes are going to be an inevitable part of the process. Getting it wrong isn’t a problem but not communicating and taking accountability for the mistake and furthermore learning from it is. As a society we need to reconsider how we perceive success and failure. Perfection is a myth, but the pursuit of success should be our goal even if it leads to some mistakes.
6. I don’t necessarily agree with Le Muir on points 7, 8 or 9, but that doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant or we can’t benefit from the concepts he espouses in the ideas. I believe that knowing your market and customer is essential to success, with that said however, I also believe that the pace of change and dynamics associated with each of our markets and associated membership make it extremely difficult to capture each and every finite detail. I think the key point on research is to not only know when enough is enough but also when and how to use your communities as a source for that research.
   
   With regard to business planning (the spreadsheet comment), I also disagree. I hate to use a cliche, but “fail to plan, plan to fail”. However, I also think planning only gets you so far. You only have access to so many details and given that details change regularly and rapidly, it’s all too easy to become so consumed by the process of planning that it becomes a full time job itself. Personally, being involved in the project management profession I much prefer the idea of “progressive elaboration” or the concept of creating, modifying, and building upon the raw ingredients of your project, in an organized way, as you go in order to achieve the project’s specific goal. This allows your initial thinking to be modified in a manner that is consistent with reality.
   
   And on the topic of marketing, I do agree with his thoughts to some extent but also feel that especially in the early days of a company, initiative or product launch, a coordinated/unified marketing effort is essential. That’s not to say that it has to be completely disingenuous or scripted, but rather it should be organized and cohesive to ensure that you are communicating your core message to your intended audience.
7. Finally, his last point is totally spot-on. Obviously the purpose and objectives of a not-for-profit association differs pretty greatly from that of a for profit corporation, but the idea of focusing on users, or in our case members, seems to be rock solid advice.

There are some really solid ideas contained within the advice and the bottom line is pretty simple. You can be proactive and be an agent of change or you can be reactive and respond to the change negatively. Regardless of your position or perspective you can’t control the fact that change happens, you can control the way you perceive and respond to it.