Ten Ideas for the New Decade - An Edelman Digital White Paper

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One of the best parts of my job is that I get to every day work with and learn from some of the smartest minds in the business - the Edelman Digital team. Today we published a brand new white paper with 10 ideas for the new decade. You can download the white paper here (PDF) or view it below.

In the video below I outline the big themes in the paper. My full introduction follows.

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During the last decade, we’ve seen social and digital media move from being purely the domain of tech-savvy types into a mainstream phenomenon. All you need to do is consider one statistic: Twitter was mentioned on television nearly 20,000 times in 2009, according to SnapStream. As a result, companies are investing in it and – slowly – seeing results.

Given the hype, much attention has turned to guessing what will become “the next Twitter.” It’s ample fodder for tech and marketing pundits, the media and clients - especially at the beginning of a new year and a new decade.

However, in many ways this is the wrong question to ask. Where once it was hard to sleuth out emerging platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook before they grew, now they just seem to surface out of nowhere. You’ll know the next Twitter when you see it.

The bigger opportunity for clients, we believe, is to identify the global societal and technological trends that are reshaping how we think, act and buy - and to pivot into them early. Trends today tend to develop more slowly and are harder to see, allowing clients to take a more thoughtful, thorough and systematic approach.

In the following pages you will find 10 essays on such trends written by some of the smartest thinkers in digital marketing. These ideas, when looked at together, reveal four key themes:

• The shift to digital technologies by both consumers and marketers is now global and pervasive across all aspects of our life and growing daily.
• Our engagement with each other is migrating rapidly from computer to handset.
• Companies (and organized interests) are just beginning to wake up to the engagement imperative - and how to fund and develop it over time.
• And finally, the future is about carefully using the data people generate to make smarter decisions, while adhering to concerns over privacy.

We hope you enjoy our 10 ideas for the new decade. We welcome you to challenge us on our thinking. After all, that’s the only way we can grow.

Video: The Future of Social Media

via vimeo.com

Late last year I was interviewed by The Social Media Examiner on the future of the medium. In this nine-minute interview we discuss: why you need to have a presence on all social networks where your customers are spending time, how to use mixed messages to tailor your stories to different venues,how to measure social media metrics, why the different vectors of reach, engagement and reputation lead to trust and why it’s important to understand people & understand business.

The Age of Media Agnosticism

According to Nielsen, the average American visited 87 domains and 2,600 Web pages in September. Outside the U.S., those numbers tend to be smaller, and fresh data indicates that just a few sites dominate the mix. Many rely on the news to find them rather than seeking it out - and those who do hunt for news are likely to do so via a single outlet of their choosing and/or via a search engine or even YouTube. It seems that, curiously, the diversity of the sites Americans frequent remains small even though their choices have grown infinitely. 

In this essay I touch on why - faced with infinite choices, powerful search tools and equally helpful friends - Americans are adapting their habits and becoming less loyal to general sources than ever before, and why engaged companies can still find relevance in social spaces and influence their stakeholders in this Age of Media Agnosticism.

You can find the full article here (PDF) or below. For more visit, our insights web site.

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Tip: Get the Weather Instantly in Gmail

As I have shared, Gmail is my Ginsu Knife. As they roll out features, I keep finding new uses for them - sometimes inadvertently. 

Gmail has a cool Labs feature that puts a little search box in your sidebar. I use it all the time to pull up information for lifestream posts since I publish to my Posterous-powered site via email. This little box is already capable of quite a lot but it also can pull up the latest weather. 

All you need to do is enter in a city name and weather and you get the current conditions as well as the forecast. You can access the search box with a keyboard command too - just type in g then / - and enter your query.

Sooner or Later, Facebook Will Launch Its Own Phone

Adapted from photo by Mat Honan

Change happens slowly.

It took us years before we noticed that Microsoft was upending a tech industry that, until the 1990s, IBM dominated. However, if you squinted you saw this starting in the 1980s once the mainframe era was ending. 

Then Google changed the game for Microsoft (a client) in the 2000s when the desktop lost some of its dominance to the broadband-enabled web - but like with IBM this shift started earlier, back in the 1990s. 

Now, it could happen again.

Just as everyone thinks Google is unstoppable comes Facebook. Over time we may soon witness another shift as the web evolves from an intent-driven medium where you need tell it what you want to one where content and ads finds you through the lens of your friends and their digital footprints. However, if the desktop was the battleground in the 1990s and the web was in the 2000s then mobile is where the battle for dominance will take place next. 

Consider these three data points, all of which are fresh...

• According to Mary Meeker, more people will connect to the Internet via mobile devices than PCs in five years


• Forrester reports that 17% of US consumers have smartphones. (That means that 83% don't.)


• And Pew says that 55% of Americans connect wirelessly (And 45% therefore don't)

And that's just the US. Combine these three trends on a global level and it's obvious that mobile is the future. Mobile is a far far larger market than mainframes, PCs or even the web. It will have lots and lots of winners in hardware, software and services. This is why I believe Facebook can't sit on the sidelines anymore. They will be on every device, but they eventually will try to launch their own hardware too.

Consider this: Facebook is competing with Google for time, attention and ad dollars. With Google clearly serious about phones. And Apple buying up mobile ad companies. Facebook can't solely rely just on others to carry their application if they want to dominate what will increasingly be a mobile market for content and ads. They will want to have a deeper relationship with their users. Deeper relationships means more data and more data means more moolah.

Facebook easily has the brand equity to launch their own phone (most likely with a partner at first) and marry it to your address book, photos, videos and events in ways that Google can never match because they are more social. Facebook gets connections and how to use the data to make your life better.

Scoble talks about the Google Reef. Sure it's big. But in many ways it's the Facebook reef that could be far larger. 

How large? Consider these stats. A lot of people wouldn't know Picasa from Picasso. But Facebook sees more than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month. A lot of people don't know Yelp (a rumored Google acquisition) from Yodels, but Facebook has 700,000 local businesses that are a click away from 350M people - who oh yeah on average have 130 friends on the site and spend hours there, often from phones.

See the pattern? All of these are mobile experiences: your friends, your events, your photos and local businesses. They're made for mobile phones. Mark my words. Facebook will launch a mobile phone. But this isn't zero sum. There will be lots of winners.