The quote:
“I’m learning to love my new äppärät’s screen, the colorful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows ever last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.”
–
From the book Super Sad True Love Story, by Gary Shteyngart, are the words with which I started my five minute talk at the social success mic up last week.
[image via Salesforce Marketing Cloud]
The theme for the night? Social Media Predictions for 2013.
Five sets of speakers, five different angles, five minutes each – simple. My pitch?
“Things are moving in 2013, you should know what and you should know where: eyes are moving to second screens, money is moving overseas, social media penetration is moving up the corporate ladder.”
Social media jobs, once banished to the basement of the marketing dept (under  digital lead, under a marketing lead, under a brand lead) are now seated in director postions and even sitting on the board. 2013 will only see this situation improve further.
If the noughties will be remembered for anything, it’ll be for service providers outsourcing customer care to the emerging (read: cheaper) markets. With social as a care channel becoming more and more commonplace, 2013 will see the out-sourcing of this work to those very same markets. After all, what is easier to script: an unknown call with someone who just wants to scream and shout, or a 140 character response?
Finally, eyes are moving in their droves to the second screen. This is not news. And I’ve said as much before. However, when advertisers and media planners realise that people aren’t watching their ads anymore the cry of ‘JUST MAKE BETTER CONTENT’ will soon grow tiresome, and those keen eyes will want to spend their ad money on those very screens that have stolen their eyeballs. Yes of course, that implies an increase in social media ad spend, but that also means a demand for better and more dynamic media opportunities across those platforms.
And that was me, in five minutes.
Other highlights were Bernie Mitchell reminded us all why Podcasting is utterly brilliant; and the really rather infectious Hera Hussain, who spoke quite brilliantly about how her thesis and analyses on the Egyptian revolution provided insights on what actually makes someone influential.
