Social Media Outlook - The Wrap-up

I attended the Potomac Tech Wire Social Media Outlook 2009 last week. It was an interesting panel that skipped over the typical and tired social media 101 questions and jumped into advice to overcome misconceptions, use cases, and prognostication.

In answer to the “common misconceptions about social media” question, the fear of the time commitment was quickly addressed. Rohit Bhargava told the audience to lower their expectations and start small. Begin blogging to promote an upcoming event so you have an end date. Use that short time frame as a test run to see there is the commitment to take on a longer term effort. In this spirit of short-lived campaigns, he said it’s time to agree that “archive” should not be a dirty word.

In terms of what is working today, Geoff Livingston pointed out how social media content, by its nature of links and activity level, is highly optimized for search (Search your name, your Linkedin profile will likely be one of the top results). That attribute of social content will continue to drive the development of more and more social content.

The panel had an interesting discussion about the viability of Twitter in the future and somewhat surprisingly most agreed that Twitter as a company will not (or should not) be around in five years. Livingston shared statistics that show even though the number of Twitter users is up, the interaction on the platform has been dropping. The entire panel did agree that whether Twitter remains a viable company, the mentality of immediate, micro-blogging will live on within the user community and should fuel the innovation of bigger and better technology solutions that they’ll discuss at Social Media Outlook 2010 and beyond.

-Piper Conrad