Welcome to 2010. Like Y2K before it, nothing especially huge went down last night (except that Dick Clark was once again replaced by Ryan Seacrest, and I think we’re all a little worse off because of it.) I’m not a huge fan of recaps, which is why you didn’t see any here in the last weeks. However, I am all about predictions, and I have one to make about our newest new year based on what I saw in the last few weeks of 2009. 2010 will be the year of sharing Yeah, I know, shocking right? But we actually have evidence to back this one up now, and it’s not just X million Facebook users now and Brand Y has 15 fanpages and 22 twitter accounts. Yes, the number of people using the most popular social media services are up, as are the number of big companies paying attention now. But more importantly, the number of social media services is growing. The number of people with “smart” phones is growing aka mobile internet usage is growing. Notice how I haven’t talked about businesses using social media? It doesn’t matter if they’re using it, or have plans to use it right now, because the important thing that’s happening is their audiences are moving into the world of online sharing. (The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is boomers, so it’s not just us damn kids leading this charge.) And they’re not just sharing opinions, they’re sharing art and culture from across the globe. This is going to be where marketers are going to have to go, and the smart ones will not just take their messages to these new services and communities, they’ll participate in them, they’ll listen to them and they’ll learn from them. Pepsi’s big announcement a couple weeks ago helps validate this idea and show that conventional one-way advertising is loosing some of it’s shine. And while they’re not specifically investing in social media, the shift shows that the way budgets, big budgets, are allocated is in flux. Like everything it’s only a matter of time, but mark my blog post, sharing is going to be the in thing for 2010.
