Clearing up the Clutter

A couple of weeks back I polled the Fanscape staff and asked them for predictions for advancements in social media in 2010.  There were some great ones.  I'll talk about some of them in the coming days but first let's look at what emerged in 2009.

Top Social Media Trends of 2009

• Growth of use of social media - especially Twitter
• Alternative monetization of social platforms (non advertising) - aka "Freemium"
  
• Brands and businesses going social
• Emergence of personal branding
• Apps & Widgets

Those are the topline concepts.  I could go into them in great detail but I'd prefer to look forward rather than backwards.  The basic summary is that in 2009 brands began adopting social media strategies, there were some huge standouts such as Starbucks (my personal choice for social media company of the year), and we started to see mobile emerge and new revenue streams begin to gain traction.

For 2010 my team sees the following:

1. Clearing up the clutter
2. Creation of social media policies
3. Location-based apps / geolocation
4. Major mobile acceptance and usage
5. Real-time data integration
6. Emergence of social search
7. Premium and subscription models
8. Integration of hardware with software and web platforms
9. Shift from micro-sites to improved websites
10. Greater standardization of metrics and measurements
    

My favorite and the one I'm personally engaged in is the first one.  We call it "Clearing up the Clutter" but in simplified social networking terms, it can also be called, "Unfriending and Unfollowing."

If 2009 was the year that Facebook hit 300 Million users and Twitter became the world's biggest news feed, then 2010 will be the year we decide that following 500 people is not nearly as impactful as following 50 trusted sources.

It has been fun watching my Facebook friends grow towards 1,000 people.  I had no idea I had so many friends.  And I'll admit, when I first got into Twitter I loved hearing what Rainn Wilson and Trent Reznor had to say.  So I started adding more people.  I found the big voices like Guy Kawasaki and Tony Robbins.  And that's where it went off the rails.  In the past 12 hours Guy Kawasaki has tweeted 40 times.  No disrespect to Guy and his team of Tweeters, what he's saying is actually interesting.  But because he tweets so much the tweets of other people I follow get buried.  And thus my Twitter account is cluttered and if I want to get the most out of my Twitter then I have to unfollow people that either Tweet too much or make uninteresting Tweets.

The same is true with Facebook.  When you have 700 people updating their status, uploading photos, commenting on walls, adding widgets, and attacking your zombies, it gets to be information overload.  And the worst, the people who use Facebook to tell me about their friend's band.  Look, I respect that you love that band.  Please blog about it and talk about it all day long.  Just don't invite me to see them.  If I'm intrigued, I'll find them.  I know you are involved with them, if I want to see them, I'll contact you.  I have a rule that I follow.  If you are my Facebook friend but I don't really know you and you invite me to something once, I'll look the other way.  If you invite me twice, then I unfriend you.  Sorry about that.  It's not personal, I'm just trying to clear up some of the clutter so that I can see what is happening with the people that I actually care about.

I don't believe I'm alone.  I predict that in 2010 the number of people we folllow on Twitter and friend on Facebook will decline.  We'll still use those platforms and most likely new ones that haven't emerged yet, but we'll zero in on people who actually enrich our lives on a daily basis.

If you have an opinion on this, please let me know.  I'm very confident in this particular prediction, but I'm always open to opposing points of view.