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Last week was the first monthly meetup of Facebook Developers Garage London for 2010. The session looked into the future and the year ahead in areas such as monetisation, mobile, open source and relevant topics when developing for the Facebook platform. Our Newspepper.com crew were there capturing all the speakers and the thoughts of those who attended, from techy developers to branding marketers.

One of the speakers, Adam Graham from Saint London spoke about the future of brands in Facebook and social media. Looking into his ‘social networking crystal ball’, he predicted the top 10 trends that we might see explode in the social media arena this year. Below I have summarised a few of his points and pulled out a few of his predictions, which I thought I would share with you Techfluff.tv readers.

In short, Adam states that the old-school marketing rules are changing and that through the medium of social media, ‘brand intimacy’ is the way forward for companies to engage with their consumers. He said brands need to behave like real people i.e. act like one of your peers. In other words, if you relate to a brand, then you are more likely to become an advocate for the brand itself.

He also made the point that ‘socialness’ is a essentially a human trait and it’s not a digtital entity. So through social media, we see the internet facilitating the act of human socialness.

This point rings true when I recently took part in Adam Vincenzini‘s #140from140 project. My definition was:  ‘Social media is a way to connect with people around the world & use these thoughts, experiences & conversations within real-life situations.”

Social networking enriches our offline lives. I don’t want to sit on my mac all day. I want to experience life and use social networking to find out what is going on around me, what are my friends are doing, who shares the same interests – bands, films, travel and the like.

And here are just a few of the predictions he made:

1. More mobility – applications based on GPS on your mobile

Sure, you can have all your friends on Facebook, but this technology means you can log on to an app like foursquare and see you have a friend ‘checked-in’ to a bookstore near you and you can instantly meet-up for coffee. This connects the offline and online experience, which brings it back to Adam’s first point, that social networking is a way of facilitating the human trait of socialness.

2. Connecting online while consuming content

This is going to get more and more popular as people use social networking to find out the latest information relevant to them. For example, live streaming within Facebook pages so people can have a conversation within their social networking platform while watching a global news event live. Even TV is getting social, by connecting to various interactive widgets to enhance the viewer’s experience. i.e. friends can watching a football game from all corners of the world and still have a meaningful experience in their living room.

3. Smart recommendations

A great example, is the potential of Amazon integrating social networking profiles, i.e. Facebook, into their recommendations function at the end of their reviews. Adam makes the point that a recommendation by your friend who bought the same book you were interested in buying, instantly adds value to sales channels and for consumers because they are more likely to trust a recommendation by someone they know than an unknown user.

4. Social commerce

Whether it be bulk-buying websites as wowcher or retailers integrating their products into the Facebook interface – so their ‘fans’ can directly buy that Little Black Dress using their ‘Facebook Currency’ – Adam suggests eCommerce combined with social media can have a powerful affect on shifting products – not just from the shopfloor, but via online methods, too.

And I’m going to lay a couple of my predictions on the line:

1. Personal branding will boom via social media

People will start to use Facebook Fan pages as their own professional public profile (similar to Linkedin), and will seriously ‘brand’ themselves across all social media platforms to help them stand out from the crowd – even those that don’t consider themselves ‘social media geeks’.

2. Everyone is essentially their own PR (and for their company)

As companies encourage their employees to Facebook, Tweet and network through Linkedin, I think we’ll see that everyone has essentially become their own public relations outlet via their personal news feeds. In other words, the corporate-face vs the personal will merge and you can’t escape it! So think, before you tweet.

3. Digital identities (i.e. twitter accounts) will compliment our real-world identities

One day, I might just be known as ThatGirl_Chloe (or some variation) and using my digital identity I can buy flights, books, accommodation, tickets to gigs etc by verifying
my online account. Maybe, one day…

So, as we continue to use social networking as a way to document our lives, these platforms have valuable information and insights into our personal lives. Do we really want all this information to go public and only in the hands of a few corporations (after all, knowledge is power)? Once you hit the send button, then you have agreed to let your ‘private’ thoughts potentially go public. And living these semi-public lives, how do we differentiate between our private profiles with our ‘real friends’ vs our professional contacts and others on the internet?

The private vs public debate is very topical at the moment because the social media train is full steam ahead and it’s not slowing down and whether you like or not – social media is becoming apart of lives – and as Adam said it’s no longer a destination but an extension of our human socialness.

If anyone has any of the answers let me know. I will be attending the Social Media World Forum from 15 – 16 March 2010, at Olympia, London. You can register now for an exhibition pass and for the conferences streams which include; Enterprise Social Media, Social TV, Mobile Social Media and Cloud Computing Congress.

I’ll be vlogging, blogging and logging all the happenings during the forum so feel free to tweet me @ThatGirl_Chloe and let’s shoot the wind and chat about social med-dia, darlin’ or anything else of interest to be honest

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