Cision Experts Look to the Year Ahead
1/20/2011
Our friends over at CisionBlog compiled their predictions for the media landscape in 2011. From social media to broadcast content, here are the top media trends coming our way this year.
By Brandon Andersen, Jay Krall, Heidi Sullivan and Andrea Weinfurt
Data visualizations
Some people can look at a chunk of numbers and know exactly what they mean and are able to derive meaning from those alone. For others like myself, trends and insights are much easier to understand when they’re packaged into a visual. In 2011, expect to see more and more and more social media data being condensed into imagery that can help determine trends, pinpoint influencers and direct strategy for the coming months. Jeff Cohen at the Social Media B2B blog outlined some examples of how companies are creating images of metrics and you have to admit, they’re pretty cool.
Facebook delving into location-based services
While some might disagree, location-based networking services could emerge as a more viable tool for brands and businesses. Foursquare is the granddaddy of these sorts of networks, but expect Facebook to dive deeper into its location-based initiatives. With $450 million from Goldman Sachs sitting in its back pocket, you have to think Facebook will bolster its location-based offerings to compete with Foursquare and Gowalla.
Quora
OK, I admit it – I wrote this post after the recent Quora explosion. However, in the days since Quora emerged as the hot, new popular girl at school, it’s become clear it could have some staying power past the initial buzz. It’s a place to connect with experts and ask and answer questions answered relevant to your industry. You can both establish yourself as an expert in your field or connect with people who already are. Quora’s website described its goal to “the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.” It will undoubtedly evolve during 2011 but could become another invaluable social media network by the end of the year.
SMO – The rise of Social Media Optimization
Early in 2010 we asked, “Is ‘social authority’ the next PageRank?” With the introduction of Google’s social media search results “Results from people in your social circle” and in integration of Twitter and Facebook content into the big 3 search engines, it now seems that social authority and social media optimization are indeed becoming a major factor in search engine optimization. Look for this to continue in 2011 as search engines begin creating even more customized search results based on your circle of social media influencers.
Creating optimized videos
How do you optimize a video for search engines to find it easier? Sure, you can use a lot of your keywords in the description of the video, but did you know that YouTube actually uses voice recognition to index what your video actually says? It’s been doing this for a while, but as video continues its surge in popularity, creating videos with optimized scripts will become more and more important.
Optimizing for mobile search
Did you know that when you search for a topic on your mobile phone search engines will rank mobile-friendly sites higher than regular sites? In 2011 we will see more websites become mobile friendly. Is your blog/website mobile ready?
PR pros will tailor their pitches to new digital platforms. The devices on which we consume news changed faster in 2010 than ever before. With 13 million iPads sold over the past 9 months and Android devices eclipsing the iPhone on a meteoric rise to a 26 percent share of the smartphone market, publishers are faced with an unprecedented challenge: constantly adapting their content to a growing variety of platforms in the fiercely competitive mobile device market. And the target keeps moving, with a leak from Google this week that it intends to launch a digital newsstand to streamline the experience of reading digital magazines on Android devices.
For publishers, making all this innovation worthwhile means ensuring that if they build it (say, an iPad or Android app), the readers will come. Exclusive content is the carrot that some publications are dangling to get readers to pay for these apps, including Wired and Nylon (Gourmet was even relaunched as an iPad-only publication following the shuttering of its print edition). That means savvy PR pros will increasingly look to pitch story ideas with these platform-specific, premium editions in mind, and adapt their pitches to a section or recurring feature exclusive to the digital edition.
With 18 percent of Internet users now reporting they have paid for news content, according to a new Pew study, premium editions on new platforms will become more attractive for publishers and PR pros alike. Meanwhile, our measurement strategies will continue to adapt too, as evidenced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ recent move to incorporate subscriber counts from iPad and mobile editions into its reporting.
New indicators of engagement will evolve our approach to PR measurement. In 2010, Facebook’s Open Graph initiative allowed Web publishers everywhere to integrate the Facebook “Like” button on their pages. Almost overnight, this turned Facebook into a powerful source of referral traffic for more than 2 million sites that now allow visitors to push a mention of a Web page into their stream of updates with a single click. Just as quickly, the move helped reshape the Web as we know it, contributing to Facebook’s acquisition of every fourth page view by U.S. Internet users before year’s end. After all, with friends pointing you to all the most important news of the day right from your Facebook news feed, who needs RSS readers?
Fortunately for PR, the Open Graph project also had the effect of serving as a massive feedback system, providing indicators of the level of interest in the articles, blog posts and videos where there brands are discussed. Despite the regrettable nounification of a verb, the availability of Facebook “Likes” as an engagement metric has come to augment signals like comments, inbound links and votes on social news sites as indicators of interest in a particular piece of content. In 2011, this and other new traces of engagement will increasingly be used to tell us whether anyone cared about that blog post review of a new product.
Growth of Hyperlocal: The Internet allowed us to communicate globally and now, partially fueled by the growth of geo-based programs like Foursquare, social media is taking some of us in the other direction: hyperlocal. Traditional media has taken notice and launched some of the most popular hyperlocal sites on the web. Check out Patch (from AOL Inc.), TribLocal (from Tribune Company/Chicago Tribune), EveryBlock (from Microsoft Corp. and NBC) and examiner.com to see how some of the most popular hyperlocal sites are growing – and fast (according to Compete.com, Patch alone has grown month-over-month from just over 50,000 unique visitors per month in January 2010 to over 1.2 million in November.)
Broadcast, both Big and Small: Video has become a more important content format for communicators than ever… and we’re in quite the pickle over how to produce our content: While televisions are getting bigger with HD as practically standard, content is being consumed on our smart phones and iPads on small screens with consumers impatient with long download times. We need to produce video that looks great big and can be comprehended small – and downloaded quickly when requested. Not an easy job, but somebody’s got to do it.
You CAN Learn Social Media: Social media classes and programs are springing up all over universities… from media programs to communications to marketing. Some are incorporating it into current curriculums, others have created entire degreed programs. (UC, Irvine Extension just launched 3 new online courses in social media for professionals, Birmingham City University in the UK offers a Master’s Degree in social media.) More and more students will have the opportunity to enter the workforce with knowledge of Internet marketing, web analytics and social media.