5 Social Media Trends for 2011

I’m excited to be on a panel Tuesday night in San Francisco, led by Social Media Club founder Chris Heur and also featuring Forrester Analyst Auggie Ray, AOL Mobile Director Sol Lipman and tech writer Harry McCracken.

We’ve been asked to take a look back at last year’s trends and a look forward at emerging trends in 2011.

I’m sure looking back will find us talking about Apple, Facebook, mobile and social networks and we probably won’t disagree much on any of these.

But the looking forward part can be interesting. Each panel members comes at this issue from different perspectives and I’m sure that each panel member–like me–gives a lot of thought to emerging trends.

I see five major trends, each of which have significant subtrends which I’ll touch on:

1. Social media will end it’s trend of disrupting all institutions. It will enter into an era of normalization. People will talk, write, meet and argue less over the topic and simply treat social media as a very valuable communications toolset.

This normalization will lead to significant growth and improvement in best of breet social analytics tools. Likewise large organizations will stop treating social media as a skunkworks project and it will be allowed to take it’s rightful place on the org chart. Citizen-generated content will continue to refine its quality and adopt ad hoc standards of professionalism.

2. The business value of small and focused will start to eclipse large and general.Twitter and Facebook will continue to grow but at significantly less astounding rates and the passionate conversation about them will taper. Instead, focus will fall upon “Social NicheNets where smaller numbers of people assemble to discuss a single topic with greater depth. In the enterprise, the value of online communities will become more extensively understood and companies will serve as hosts to customers and partners who will discuss everything from documentation to future product features.

3. We will inch forward toward the Holy Grail of universal translation. Someday, I will be able to talk or write on my computer in my language and people all over the world will see or hear it in theirs. Then they can respond in their own language and I will receive it in mine. In 2011, we will see other amazing innovations such as WordLens, which will expand capability itself. Google Translate will continue to improve and perhaps allow users to translate inside their documents, rather than have to cut and paste.

4. Current hot topics will be folded into the larger category of  ubiquitous computing. Cloud computing and mobile computing are currently hot topics, but it seems to me they are among several slivers of a bigger picture, one that allows us to be connected to our own data, wherever we are and whatever we are doing. Ubiquitous computing goes from the boardroom to the bathroom. In 2011, we will stop mentally separating our handheld devices from our lap tops, desk tops, digital TVs or whatever. They are all touchstones to the internet where almost all data is destined to reside.

5. The world will continue to get hillier. It remains so very far from flat. And the very long tail of adoption is not getting bobbed in the near future. Of course India and China will continue their great leaps forward in social media. But look also for growth in parts of Africa, the middle East and South Asia where economies are healthy, broadband access is getting cheaper and easier and education continues to improve.

6. Something will surprise us. I’m willing to bet that not one of us panelists would have predicted the iPad or the success of Android last January. We would not have forecast the executive changes at Apple, Google and HP.

Moral of this story is don’t get fixated on anyone’s crystal ball forecasts. The really neat thing about the future is that it almost always surprises us.

I hope to see you at this Social Media Club event. It promises to be a pretty good event.