Categories: Articles

The Changing Face Of Social Media Marketing

2009 was a big year for Social Media Marketing. 2010 is going to be a bigger year for Social Media Marketing. It’s also going to be a very different year.

That was the overall theme of the news item, Social Network Spending Shifts, from eMarketer yesterday:

"Overall, eMarketer predicts US online social network ad spending will reach more than $1.21 billion in 2009, an increase of 3.9% over last year. 2010 will see stronger growth of 7.1%. With total US online ad spending falling this year, the increase in social network spending also means the sites will account for a greater share of the total, at 5.4%. However, those figures only include paid advertising efforts, which represent just a fraction of all spending."

Breaking that down further, eMarketer is not talking about development, Blogger outreach, community engagement/management, fan pages, online promotions, etc… it’s simply talking about those who will spend money advertising in online social networking environments. Rest assured that the dollar amount invested in everything but the advertising spend is going to be quite significant as well.

And then, there’s the changing face of the landscape…

"2009 will end with major shifts in social network advertising spending. Facebook, at 350 million users worldwide, is the premier destination for marketers in the US and many worldwide markets. It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace."

There’s the rise of Twitter and Foursquare this past year and we’ll see a lot more in terms of new platforms and applications as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Google‘s Android devices become ever-more social as well. The evolution of video and audio will continue and more Blogs (or Social Media-driven content publishers) will play an increasingly important role in the development of New Media.

It all brings us back to that great quote from General Eric Shinseki (via Tom Peters‘ excellent business book, Re-Imagine): "If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less."

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.