5 Social Media Trends Today.

With the undeniable beast that is Social Media continuously gaining strength, momentum and fond buy-in, it is clear that Social Media is a part of our everyday life - and here to stay. With fast growth comes even faster evolution and sometimes it is tricky to know where to invest those ever scarcer dollars, especially when there is any lack of clarity over ‘best practice.' This blog post nails down 5 of the biggest Social Media trends of today. Take note and act quick as opportunity is now and these can change even quicker.

However right now a few things are clearly evident. In New Zealand one of these in particular is taking off. Group buying aka consortium buying.

1. Group Buying. 
We see these deal websites everywhere. On some level we don’t want to miss out on a deal but then the moment we register we open the doorway to a bombardment of daily deal emails... and we love it! The deals are just too good, aren’t they?

This group buying of coupons was made famous by Chicago based startup Groupon. It is also a variation on ‘flash sale’ sites such as internationally famous 'Woot' and 'Amazon Property' which hit their peak in early 2000’s. The founder and main driving force to create Groupon was Andrew Mason who formerly had another group-focused site called ‘The Point’ in 2007. This was heavily targeting group action around causes and for the many that participated power in numbers became power to the people. But it evolved into a daily deal platform which in 2008 he launched under the name ‘Groupon.’

Today Groupon deals are available in cities across the world largely due to Groupons recent acquisition of international clone and competitor ‘Citydeal.’ They also recently received a US$1 billion valuation  which led Forbes magazine to describe it as ‘the fastest growing company ever.’ They have been very clever in integrating a very powerful partnership with twitter (@EarlyBird deals) and also in acquiring effective alternative distribution in newspapers and other well suited offline media. They also win out by personalising deals to their subscribers in selected cities through a very clever CRM.

In early September they went to market with their first US nationwide deal... 50% off at the Gap. This approximately attracted a whopping 10 Groupon purchases every 10 seconds!

And like all good worldwide trends New Zealand is by no means a hot spot they have in their corporation sights to target. With small population the numbers are substantially too small for them to warrant playing their numbers game on our turf. This has meant the market has been somewhat wide open. In a hope to be the next Sam Morgan entrepreneurs in Godzone have sported many a copycat in the race for market traction. Early player 1-day.co.nz still has a big piece of the pie however in this game (unlike auction sites) consumers like to have their fingers in multiple pies. Sites such as Grabone.co.nz, dailydo.co.nz, snatchadeal.co.nz, torpedo7.co.nz, 3deals.co.nz, thedeal.co.nz, Groupy.co.nz, and my personal favourite ilovedeals.co.nz (favourite because offers have a longer life and site looks good!!) have all grabbed a portion of our over shopped consumer market.

All statistics and research point to Group buying only getting bigger. Advertisers are finding it an incredible way of supplementing their standard trade and tend to claim that repeat trade is high. In NZ Grabone claims that a massive 84% of advertisers featured on their medium want to be featured again.

2. Social Scanning. 
Internationally the number one trend seems be Social Scanning. There is a battle being fought in the smartphone sector with young princes Android, Symbian and Windows7 all trying to eliminate king iphoneOS. With so much power and technology at consumers fingertips it was only a matter of time before social scanning became something more than an 80’s Sci-fi fantasy. These devices have given rise to applications that allow for comparison shopping, QR code place checkins and ultimately deliver a social/brand experience around product barcodes.

Mashable.com reported “What this means is that at any given moment, any smartphone owner can pull out their device, fire up a barcode scanning application, scan a code and complete activities or gain access to a wealth of immediately relevant information. Really, what we’re seeing is the convergence of social media and barcode scanning to create “social scanning.”

The consumer’s scanning behavior is so significant that location-sharing checkin services such as SCVNGR are giving away QR code decals to retailers free of charge. Even Google is sending their own QR code decals out to small businesses with popular Place Pages. What makes the scan so significant? It is a tangible connection between the physical and digital world. For Google, SCVNGR, and the businesses they serve, it’s about access to measurable offline behavior.

These scans aren’t inherently social in nature, but because they can double as verifiable place checkins, they can also possess the social properties of a checkin: location-sharing with friends on the same service or via social network distribution.

Services such as Stickybits and Bakodo are taking the social scanning experience beyond the checkin and creating product-driven communities around brands and items via barcodes.

Stickybits lets users add video, text, photos and audio to the barcodes they scan in the physical world via iPhone and Andriod apps. It’s a clever way to use barcodes to help people tag, share and connect around items. It has also recently become more brand-friendly. “Official bits” are barcodes that brands can claim in order to highlight their own content. New social features allow for user response in the form of threaded conversations, and voting to ensure that the best content attached to the code rises to the top.

Bakodo’s iPhone app began as a barcode scanner primarily for comparison shopping, but it’s evolving to add social scanning functions as well. App users can scan barcodes of all varieties to review items and check out recommendations from friends. The barcode intelligence search engine combines a wealth of product-related data and socializes the process for a comprehensive product-driven experience.

As scanning becomes a more socially acceptable practice, the barcode scan will only become more social in nature. Expect future QR code marketing efforts to tap into the social opportunities, and for brands to explore ways to engage with consumers at the scan touch point.” 

3. Intelligent Information Discovery.
Erik Qualman, author of bestselling Socialnomics claimed that we will no longer find information, the information will find us. And the first mainstream effects of this statement can be seen in Intelligent Information Discovery through Q&A. It is not new. Online Q&A services have been around for years. Interestingly this rather dormant web space has had a stimulating shot of caffeine as this time around the way we find information is redefined. Search is no longer a straight search but more Intelligent Information Discovery. A simple search with a billion+ results doesn’t cut the mustard anymore. 

“The most buzzy of the bunch right now is Quora, an intuitive and relatively straightforward Q&A site whose co-founder, Adam D’Angelo, is most known for his past role as Facebook’s CTO. Quora was founded in June 2009, released into private beta in January 2010, and immediately became a hit Q&A site with the technorati crowd. In fact, web celebrities have been known to use the site to answer questions about themselves.

There are few Q&A services that have received the same type of attention as Quora, but the just-launched Facebook Questions project — which mirrors Quora in purpose and function — was released before Quora ever achieved mainstream recognition. Now the two products are essentially going head-to-head, competing for the same audience.

Facebook has the clear edge when it comes to its built-in user base, but we’ve repeatedly seen bigger companies fail at side projects — just look at Google Wave — simply because smaller startups can innovate faster and have the benefit of progressively scaling over time. Quora’s opportunity lies in Facebook’s somewhat bungled launch of Questions, and its smart exposure through search results.

Another notable Q&A site that contributes to the intelligent information discovery trend is Google’s Aardvark

Aardvark approaches the space with a model that helps users surface answers through friends of friends. It’s an algorithmic social system that should help Google improve its search algorithms. In fact, Google should be able to use the technology to provide socially-relevant answers in search queries.

Google does have a reputation for letting purchased startups wilt after their pre-acquisition bloom, but given how closely aligned Aardvark is with Google’s core search product, that likely won’t be the case here.

There’s also the freshly enhanced Ask.com, which is seeking to join the “people plus search results” party with its new beta Q&A offering.

Most of the key players in the space believe in the power of intelligent information discovery and define it as the intersection of people and their social circles, with scientific methodologies for surfacing the best possible answers in the shortest amount of time.

Apple-owned artificial intelligence app Siri, however, eliminates the social and instead focuses on the science of finding the right answer.

Right now the overlap between services such as Aardvark and Siri is minimal, primarily because Siri focuses on solving immediate problems of convenience — finding food, calling a taxi or making a reservation — and not on long-term, more conceptual problems. Still, Siri is unquestionably a mobile search engine keen on intelligent information discovery, which means the technologies could become more competitive in the months ahead.

Another startup to watch for in this space is Swingly. The private beta service describes itself as a “Web-scale answer engine designed to find exact answers to factual questions.” Humans are largely eliminated in Swingly’s machine-driven Q&A formula, so it too challenges the notion that social integration enhances the Q&A experience. "

4. Loyalty in the palm of your hand. 
As smartphones continue to heavily increase as a percentage of mobile devices sold and the technology becomes ever more powerful it is an obvious conclusion that loyalty rewards and club cards extend into the mobile realm. With all the technology in the palm of our hands and the ever connected social state we seem to be making our recommendations through, traditional loyalty programmes almost feel out dated and of a different era ~ as I write this on my iPad. There are 2 powerful applications to look for as pace setters in this sector KeyRing and CardStar. This is the inevitable loyalty programme future.

These applications exist to unclutter the loyalty in your life. They have been designed to completely eliminate plastic loyalty card buildup in your actual wallet with a single virtual wallet of unlimited space much like a tardis. Scanning is key for these also as the apps do make the most of barcode scanning technology so users can save video store cards, gym entry swippers, grocery store cards, bookstore cards, coffee club cards and more right to their mobile device. 

“This trend is just beginning to take shape as smartphones become more commonplace, scanners become more sophisticated and retailers become digitally savvy. In the future, we can expect integration with merchant loyalty programs, as well as integration with checkin services like Foursquare. The latter also demonstrates the inevitable convergence of social media with traditional loyalty programs, which we’re already seeing from Tasti-d-Lite’s innovative approach to automatic, POS-integrated social media rewards system.

Shopkick’s retailer-friendly automatic checkin service is currently being tested by Best Buy, Macy’s, Sports Authority and Simon Property Group. This early interest in Shopkick points to retailer interest in verifiable, checkin-driven rewards. There’s also private beta mobile app Pushpins, which seeks to leverage QR codes to further enmesh the in-store shopping experience with digital retailer rewards, the likes of which resemble the sophistication of SCVNGR’s recently released rewards program.”

Internationally this trend has a fair amount of traction and is growing fast while right here in New Zealand our tattered, dog eared coffee cards slowly build up smiley face stamps. For an emerging technology the global trend here is worthy of notation however this still has a little way to go before we all bin our deck of loyalty cards. 

5. Entertainment Check-in. 
Book marked anything to watch on TV tonight? Whether it’s re-runs of Spencer and Heidi on ‘The Hills’ or some Outrageous Fortune double crossing, there is a high probablility you are sharing these with peers and family face to face or over Social Media. The consumption of entertainment is an inherently social experience. So why would Social Media not embrace this widely practiced past time? We can check in and out of locations and many seem to be making the most of that so why not check in and out of the entertainment landscape?

“There are a few other services in the same mix that are certainly worth watching. CBS recently released their entertainment checkin service, TV.com Relay. It’s a browser-based mobile app for most smartphones that allows users to checkin to live television shows and follows the same TV guide-style format that Philo employs.

The CBS offering is nice to look at, and offers content-driven badges like the other guys. It also excels in the real-time comment department. In talking with the Senior Vice President and General Manager of CBS Interactive’s Entertainment and Lifestyle Division, Anthony Soohoo, it became clear that the vision behind TV.com Relay extends far beyond entertainment checkins. Soohoo also iterated that the application, which is just a few weeks old, already has 100,000 users thanks to TV.com’s built-in audience.

Tunerfish is another mobile and web television checkin service. It’s backed by Comcast and boasts partnerships with networks including HBO, Showtime and NBC. App users answer the question, “What are you watching?” by typing in the name of a show or movie and clicking the “I’m watching” button. The service also provides behavioral incentives in the form of awards, and has been actively working to bring network-sponsored, show-themed awards into the mix.

There’s also Clicker Social, a relatively new addition from Clicker that turns the television search engine and web TV guide into an entertainment checkin service as well.

The re-purposed entertainment version of the checkin is a smart way to link entertainment consumers with content they love, enhance the social experiences around television, and potentially inspire new audiences to tune into trending or friend-approved television shows. The enormous amount of competition in such a brand new space means that things are just starting to get interesting.

All of the services need to evolve to attach real value to the checkin. They each recognize that awards, badges and stickers are easy ways to encourage new user participation, but these existing game mechanics merely scratch the surface in terms of user engagement. In the coming months, look for constant iteration on this front. For example, we can expect Miso to introduce even more show-specific content exclusives via its show fan clubs and for GetGlue to experiment with offering discounts and coupons that users can redeem for their Glue points.” 

With Apple’s iTunes store also releasing Ping one can’t help but wonder if this is in preparation for a live, scheduled entertainment service in the distant future as opposed to on demand purchasing. Ridiculous? Your thoughts.

Watch this Space.