Can Facebook Take Us To The Future

Last year, Forrester published an interesting report called “The Future of the Social Web”. In it, they talk about how social interactions on the web have changed since it first reached maturity (around 2003) and where social interactions are going through 2013. When I first read the report last year, Facebook Connect was all the rage and the predictions that were made seemed like on the glimmer of the future. But when I pulled out the report again late last week and realized that in less than a year, many of Forrester’s predictions had become a reality and that their predictions for 2013 were really only just around the corner, my jaw dropped.

It’s easy when you work in this business every day to take for granted the speed of innovation. When each day’s RSS feed bring something new, you can lose sight of the bigger picture. This is a dangerous position because as technology accelerates us ever faster toward “the future”, brands run the distinct risk of being left behind.

Forrester’s report described the era of social colonization which turned out to be a brief blip on the Internet’s timeline. In this stage, Facebook Connect allowed people to traverse the web, taking their Facebook friends with them. The boundaries between social networks and websites started to receed and the response was huge. Websites loved how Facebook Connect so simply made relevancy and sharability possible on their sites. Users loved the novelty of hanging around with their friends on little social colonies outside of Facebook.

Next comes the era of social context. This is the era we are in now, with all of it’s privacy pain and misfortune. The concept is that sites will recognize people’s personal identity and social graph and personalize their experience based on it. So when you arrive at Pandora.com, the site is personalized with your Facebook friends playlists and favorites, allowing you to browse their selections and work them into your own.  Mark Zukerberg has really taken a beating for being the company that ushered in this era. But you can’t blame the kid. He has build a company with an extreme and successful approach to innovation. I think his problem is that he built a site based on the concept that you have a safe place to go and share things with people you know. But now, in the Twitter and Flickr era, open sharing has become a more important trend and Mark & Co are determined not to miss the boat. For the average Joe, this trend shift is not even a part of their consciousness so for the largest and most popular social network to thrust it upon them is going to be painful. But, I have no doubt that users will come around to the idea of a social context web and in many ways, they already have. But can Mark take us to the next level of Forrester’s prediction?

The next era is that of social commerce. Forrester predicts that by 2013 (and perhaps before), communities will become much more powerful. Versatile, open IDs will merge social sites and the larger web into a common experience. Users will have complete control over their identities and will choose what of their personal data they want to expose to brands. Brands that have gained users trust will be able to offer more personalized experiences on a larger scale and sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter will become the intermediaries between consumers and brands in the information-sharing dance. Since consumers will at that point be harnessing their collective buying power through communities, this intermediary role becomes critical and powerful as does the brand’s ability to solicit that user’s data. Trust in a brand’s ability to do cool (not creepy) stuff with your personal information will elicit community purchases and become a true competitive advantage.

Facebook is clearly on the forefront of this movement today. My question is for how long? There are so many utilities out there for sharing, rating/liking, reviewing, acknowledging, etc. Will something like OpenID bring the robust unification of utilities that will make life easier on consumers and data more robust for marketers? Or do these folks at the OExchange have the solution, with their quest for standardizing the link and information sharing process across the web? Or will Facebook themselves deliver an interoperable standard for these items? And as more and more of these utilities move to open source solutions, how will your own brand be positioned to take advantage of a future that looks very different than today and yet is only a couple of years away.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

posted by julia in Just Plain Interesting | 1 Comment »
tags: Tags: digital trends, facebook, marketing strategy, open source