Artesia Spotlight: December 2009

Artesia Spotlight is a monthly review of key news in the fields of social media, user communities and virtual worlds. If you want to be the first to read the news, you can subscribe to receive Artesia Spotlight by e-mail on this page.

2010 Predictions Spotlight

Pete Cashmore, founder of social media blog Mashable, wrote a list of 10 Web trends that will define the Web in the upcoming year. Cashmore predicts that the real-time communications trend will continue to grow and location (powered by GPS in smartphones) will provide another layer of information to existing Web content. Mobile phones will also help to increase the popularity of augmented reality and mobile payments. In the field of entertainment, Internet TV, movies, and social gaming with virtual currencies will continue to increase in popularity among consumers. Also, the transition to cloud computing will continue in the next year.

Research Spotlight

Marketing company Razorfish released the data from their annual Digital Brand Experience Study, which surveyed 1000 US "connected consumers". The data shows that 40% of respondents friended brands on Facebook, while 25% followed brands on Twitter. Consumers mainly like to friend/follow brands on Facebook and Twitter for exclusive deals and promotions. Other reasons for friending/following are being a current customer (more popular on Facebook) and access to interesting or entertaining content. Interestingly, 65% of consumers also reported that an online experience with the brand changed their opinion about the brand or the products it offers, and 97% reported that online experiences influence whether or not they purchased something from the brand.

Post Spotlight

In his post The Eight Stages Of Listening, Jeremiah Owyang presents a matrix of listening strategies related to social media. The matrix provides a short description, needed resources and impacts of each stage. The matrix can be used as a tool to start a discussion in your own company and to identify which is your company's current stage and what could be done to move to a higher stage of listening to customers through social media. 

Other news

• Salesforce.com has announced Salesforce Chatter, a platform that will allow companies to have their own private social networking site. The service will become generally available next year.
• Microsoft will offer an application marketplace within Sharepoint 2010.
• Linden Lab announced Second Life Enterprise, a solution that allows companies to host their own private virtual workplaces built on the Second Life platform.