MSLGROUP's 2011 predictions for social media, including social shopping, transmedia, data visualization and internet privacy.

1. Social Predictions
for the
Conversation Age:
2011

2. Welcome!
And thank you for clicking to MSLGROUP’s Social
Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011.
We have aimed to create a list of trends based on
ideas and technologies that have been around for
a short while, those becoming ripe for adoption by
our clients and other brands. What you won’t get
here is a list of the technologies that will become
massively popular three years from now. Instead, you
will get ideas, and hopefully inspiration, that you can
immediately put to the test.
Specialty communications agencies, like ours, have a
major role in pushing new marketing technologies—
We bridge the gap between what is technologically
possible and what is right for the given brand. At
MSLGROUP, we have an analogy that gets back to
nature: whereas new technologies are like pollen,
communicators and social media specialists are the
bees. The results are sweet like honey.
We hope you enjoy the read.

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5. Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011
Going Shopping,
Going Local

6. Going
Shopping,
Going Local

7. Deals
Retail brands will increasingly combine the power of discount with the
power of social shopping by offering special promotions. Facebook
launched Places to let people share their whereabouts with friends
and see who’s nearby. With Facebook Deals, available only in the
US, people can see what offers are nearby and share those deals
with their connections. Following GAP’s example, companies will
market promotions to people who check in at their stores via the
social network. In the immediate future, retail brands will run deals
on a variety of platforms to stay relevant and top of mind. The face-
off between Facebook, Twitter Places/advertising, and apps such as
Foursquare should be interesting.
Your smartphone as your personal shopper
Mobile screens will become the new face of in-store display
advertising. Retail brands will take further advantage of increasingly
popular smartphones through geo-located pings, alignment with
reward cards and mobile websites that allow users to do research and
find products on the fly.
Care for people
This heightened proximity means brands need to show that they
care about the people checking in to their stores. As such, our
paper ends with commentary on the Value for All approach to
business—de rigueur for 2011.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

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9. Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011
Getting Personal

10. Getting
Personal

11. Curated, social news
Paper.li, which earned First Prize for Virality at LeWeb’s Startup
Competition and which we have featured in the MSLGROUP
Critical Conversations blog, was the alpha version of this trend. The
service lets you create a personal, web-based newspaper based
on Twitter activity concerning anything from the U.S. Congress
to prestigious events. Flipboard rode the tablet wave and is now
inspiring me-too products. Launched in July, this e-magazine is
only available as an iPad app. Now that social activity is becoming
increasingly organized, it becomes even more clear what the rage
is all about. Will brands take note? You bet.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

12. Getting
Personal

13. Quality over quantity
Social networkers will realize they have friended too many
acquaintances and co-workers with whom they would prefer not
to share personal information, thank you very much. They might
do some de-friending on Facebook or choose to live their lives
on more private sites such as Path. At the same time, brands will
be less interested in seeing how many fans they can acquire and
instead focus on the quality of fans—people who are truly engaged
and positive. Likewise, agencies will reset client expectations,
clearly defining the unique value of meaningful interactions vs.
broad reach.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

14. Getting
Personal

15. Dusting off the corporate website
Brands, having spent considerable sums of money and countless
hours on their corporate websites, will make their corporate sites a
more social experience instead of advertising their Facebook page.
Another factor driving this renewed emphasis on the corporate site
is the increasingly social nature of search: Bing and Google, for
example, index Twitter and Facebook links in their results. Brands
that are fully present on social networks and, conversely, aggregate
social activity on their own site are likely to fare better in social
searches and improve customer experience at the same time.
People will come to a branded site and see which friends bought
a product. This year and in the years ahead, the experience on a
corporate site and a social network will start to look the same.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

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17. Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011
Drawing a Good Story

18. Drawing a
Good Story

19. Data journalism and visualization
The Guardian newspaper in the UK is a terrific example of
journalists using data in visual ways to tell a story. And perhaps
you’ve seen this Hans Rosling video, which uses “dataviz” to
describe health and wealth trends around the world for the last
200 years. New technologies make it easy to tell a story through
not only pictures but also animated graphics that seem to come out
of nowhere. What we like about this development is the impact it
is going to have on the communications profession, especially as
social norms drive the need for more corporate transparency. Take
for instance this interactive timeline about the BP oil spill produced
by the Financial Times, using data from Thompson Reuters, BP and
the U.S. Government. Or a graphic that helps you understand the
spill’s impact in the context of where you live. Begs the question:
Shouldn’t marketing and PR departments be as tech-savvy as the
news media and other info providers?
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

20. Drawing a
Good Story

21. Transmedia
Transmedia is franchising to the nth power. Whereas film studios
have for decades transformed movies into games and pajamas,
social technology takes the idea so much further. We will start
to see the studios and TV networks build multiplatform story
worlds from the ground up. A movie with lots of thinly developed
characters (i.e. multiple stars appealing to a broad cross-section
of people) could take on another life as fans get the chance to
invent each character’s back story or future. (Think: Love Actually,
Valentine’s Day or He’s Just Not That into You.) The more content
in the story world, the more media buys and chances for brands to
participate. In a world where “What is a Justin Bieber?” has become
a somewhat-normal question, Transmedia goes beyond storytelling
to multimedia fame building and three-year-olds crying over their
favorite pop star.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

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23. Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011
Watching Out

24. Watching
Out

25. Taken separately, there isn’t anything new about censorship, power or
money. Link them all together and we have a whopping cascade of tech-
induced conundrums.
• Internet privacy vs. monetization. Mainstream social networks like
Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will struggle to balance user experience
and privacy on one hand, and monetization priorities on the other hand.
Almost always, monetization pressures will prevail and all three social
networks will become (much) more commercial.
• The government vs. WikiLeaks. The issue of privacy carries over to
the public sphere in the wake of the WikiLeaks scandal. Several open
democracies such as the U.S., the U.K., Australia and India will pass
regressive cyber-security laws to limit online freedom of expression
and online anonymity (even as the Wikileaks saga continues). By the
end of 2011, government censorship and surveillance of the internet
will become the accepted norm, in both “open democracies” and
“authoritarian regimes.”
Ergo, we start to see some existential questions arise. (We can’t help it.
We’re based in Paris.) If he were alive today, Descartes might very well
pronounce, “I share what I think, therefore I am.” Bingo—those silly kids
might never be able to erase those drunken photos. It’s who they are.
As Google CEO Eric Schmidt said—later he said he was joking—if you
don’t want something found on the Internet, don’t do it in the first place.
But in all honesty, we won’t find internet life so black and white.
While most of us want, in varying degrees, to protect our personal
reputations and identities online, we don’t seem as a collectivity any less
interested in other people’s lives—and certainly not less interested in what
our governments do. Only time will tell if we arrive at a happy medium.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

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27. Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011
Reaching for a Higher
Plateau through Deeper
Collaboration

28. Reaching for a
Higher Plateau
through Deeper
Collaboration

29. Social CRM
Brands are going to shift increasingly from their B2C mindset to
a C2C2B mindset as their customer-relationship-management
systems become increasingly socialized. Companies this year
will become more educated on how to use social networks to
provide customer service—this is where “joining the conversation”
really gets down to business. Using their own proprietary systems
(some companies model their private networks after Facebook
or Twitter) more marketers will use networks of employees,
customers, partners, vendors and developers to make decisions
affecting everything from product development to marketing,
sales and customer service. That said, we don’t see the acronym of
E2C2C2P2V2D2B taking off anytime soon.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

30. Reaching for a
Higher Plateau
through Deeper
Collaboration

31. Mix-and-Match Platforms
People will continue to ask the ubiquitous question, “What’s the
next Twitter?” Seriously, how many conferences did you attend
last year where that question was uttered? Whatever emerges will
have to play nice in the sandbox with the existing social networks.
Indeed, the “next” Twitter could simply include—in addition to
startups on the horizon—the convergence of what we have now.
Social networks cannot be exclusive or siloed from other networks
and expect to survive. Brands that create niche networks for their
consumers will nevertheless need to integrate that activity into
other platforms to provide a broader picture and context.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

32. Reaching for a
Higher Plateau
through Deeper
Collaboration

33. Social good
Social media gives everyone the powers of Santa Claus: you can
see which companies have been naughty and which have been nice.
What’s more, as clean-up from the BP oil spill and financial crisis
continue, people are craving good news. They want to believe that
brands stand for something positive, tangible and real— the allure
of advertising is not enough. We call it Value for All. Companies
can no longer put their shareholders ahead of all the other
stakeholders.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

34. A company with a Value for All approach adheres to the
following tenets:
» Transparency. Be genuine and trustworthy. Work in the
public’s best interest and you’ll be rewarded. Fail to do so,
and the public will get angry. (Think how banks’ quick return
to profits and bonuses caused an uproar and continued the
erosion of trust.)
» Sustainability. Show a responsible attitude regarding the
environment and people, starting with your employees first.
Short-term business tactics don’t work anymore. Performance
without purpose has no future.
» Accountability. Make sure that your products, services,
policies and corporate governance are clean and reliable. This
is true whether you’re a government, company, or non-profit
organization.
» Proximity. Be close to the communities you touch; show them
your commitment and concern.

35. The Value for All approach to business turns organizations
upside down and inside out. They become less hierarchical and
more driven by flexible networks. They become increasingly
open and transparent to the outside world while bringing
society and its needs inside the company. As an ideal and an
aspiration, this model attempts to reconcile contradictions:
• be big yet human
• be efficient yet innovative
• respect individual differences while seeking common ground
• think globally and act locally
In 2011, such companies will have the best stories to tell. In the
conversation age, that’s what it is all about.
Social Predictions for the Conversation Age: 2011

36. Enjoy a safe, healthy and social year.
And send us a note if you’d like.
gaurav.mishra@mslgroup.com
Director of Digital & Social Media, Asia
stanislas.magniant@consultants.publicis.fr
Digital Practice Leader, EMEA
stephen.marino@mslgroup.com
Director of Digital & Social Media, Americas
pascal.beucler@mslgroup.com
Chief Strategy Officer (Global)
www.mslgroup.com
http://blog.mslgroup.com
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