Last night, Salesforce.com took its SocialSuccess Mic-up event series to the second round, and what a round it was.
If you haven’t heard about these fantastic events, they’re based on a simple idea: Five people get five minutes to talk about a theme chosen by Salesforce.com. This time it was all about social media predictions. The Salesforce team first asked people on Twitter to share their predictions. This time, they then chose six (plus one) and asked them to present at the live event, hosted by Madlen Nicolaus, Salesforce’s Marketing & Community Manager EMEA, at the Hospital Club in London.
Here are the highlights:
Delphine Remy-Boutang @DelphineRB – Previously IBM’s WW Social Media Director and founder of The Social Bureau (and the bonus speaker of the night), Delphine kicked off by predicting that the future will be a more visual one. Taking blogging to another level, we’ll use more images (take Instagram or Pinterest) to share our experiences; and Vine, Twitter’s latest 6-second-video acquisition, may be the next big thing. Watch this space.
Luke Williams @alukeonlife – The Social Media Coordinator at the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) predicted that this year will be all about the normalisation of the social networks. As the social giants are changing their business models (making the compatibility of different networks increasingly more difficult), more and more people will leave some of the social networks. They’ll cut back their network profiles to the few that are really relevant to them. What we’ll see is a reduction of usage, reduction of friends and more hesitation about what we say out there in the social space. The social world will be a simpler place.
Hera Hussain @herahussain – took the Egyptian Revolution as an example to demonstrate what makes a tweeter influential (and she has all the scientific facts to back it up, too). What we learned is that an influential tweeter is one that
- doesn’t retweet a hell lot of stuff
- uses a range of media to get his or her point across (video, images, etc)
- puts his message into current context and doesn’t dwell on the past
- doesn’t shy away to express his opinion – quite drastically if needs be
- is more altruistic. Yes. Focusing on the “we” instead of the “I”. Showing commitment to the community.
Bernie Mitchell @BernieJMitchell – the biggest podcast fan I have ever met predicts that podcasts will have a massive comeback. Why? Because they’re super easy and safe to produce, they’re a credible tool that helps you build up a personal relationship with your audience AND they reduce the spam factor, as people make the conscious choice to listen to them (and to you).
James Whatley @Whatleydude – calls Social@Ogilvy his home and talked about three imminent developments: 1) Social media jobs will move up the career ladder – from a company’s basement all the way up to the roof-top suite; 2) money will go overseas – with all the stuff we now need to manage, we’ll outsource more and more; and 3) our eyes will be moving to second screens, which will ultimately lead companies to invest in commercial slots on Twitter, Facebook & friends, instead of the television.
Karen Fewell @DigitalBlonde & Mervyn Dinnen @MervynDinnen – this double act said goodbye to all the wizards, ninjas and gurus. Taking the Gotta love cake recruitment campaign as an example the two proved that the future will belong to communities instead of personal brands (“all hat, no cattle”).
All that in less than thirty minutes. Pretty fantastic. Thanks to Salesforce.com for making it happen – can’t wait for the next #SocialSuccess #Micup!
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Comments
Carl Henderson January 25th, 2013
Great summary, thanks for taking the time to write it up. Look out for all the video footage coming to a #socialsuccess website near you soon 🙂
Martha Rzeppa January 25th, 2013
Thanks Carl. Really enjoyed the event last night! Let us know when the footage is live so that we can link to it from this post, too.