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move rapidly towards the plateau of productivity. This makes it an exciting place to invest budgets, gain traction with consumers and achieve both business and marketing objectives.

THE RISE OF SOCIAL BUSINESS More companies will move beyond an experimental approach to social media.

PAID, OWNED AND EARNED

SOCIAL SOFTWARE

The challenge facing brands will be to successfully utilise the software to deliver real business benefit. In such a nascent industry, we can expect some trailblazers to drive competitive business advantage for their clients, while others will fail just as fast as they appeared. It will take canny observers to predict the winners and losers.

In such a nascent industry, we can expect some trailblazers to drive competitive business advantage for their clients, while others will fail just as fast as they appeared. It will take canny observers to predict the winners and losers.

The discussion about who "owns" social media will move to be focused on "how can we better colla-borate and become more open?". Human resources, customer service, insight and operations, as well as marketing, should all benefit.

The shift towards closer integration between paid, owned and earned media will accelerate in 2013. As social networks look for ways to monetise their audiences and brands search for more effective ways to engage consumers, there will be increased growth of paid-for social advertising. Facebook may see the lion’s share of advertising revenue but will need to tread a delicate balance between consumers’ and advertisers’ needs. Expect to see plenty of changes around the News Feed, ticker and notifications. Expect changes to the EdgeRank algorithm and key application programming interfaces. After all, if you are only "1 per cent done", there is plenty of change ahead.

SOCIAL MEDIA MEASUREMENT

THE RISE OF SOCIAL CRM

With the emergence of better-tracking and more useful social CRM platforms, brands can focus on finding and engaging valuable brand advocates. Turning these "superfans" into evangelists and rewarding them will move from being ad hoc to becoming part of a structured programme. In turn, consumers will become wiser about their importance to brands and look to demand a better deal in the value exchange. Expect some high-profile fallouts.  

BIG DATA

The promise of finding the needle in the haystack – the insight from the data puke – is an exciting one. The reality of looking at large volumes of social data in real time, understanding and responding to it is far more challenging. So, although 2013 won’t quite be "the year of big data", we’ll certainly see significant leaps forward.

Talent, expertise and creativity will be key components that will influence success.

the social media industry, and those brands willing to invest in it, will become stronger. Because data is accessible, points of view are shared and there is a cultural willingness to fail fast, learning from the randomness will be accelerated. In these fragile times, it’s comforting to know we may be able to rely on the antifragility of social media this year.

"You really have to cut through the clutter," and social media has raised the expectation that content will be focused on customers' interests.

Map the pieces: This is perhaps the most challenging step. The overarching goal is to create an “ecosystem,” or community, of some sort–in short, a company’s own network that includes customers, prospects, and partners. This enables increased engagement with existing members, while promoting growth by adding new members. A place to start is understanding where the company stands across three distinct digital approaches–search engine marketing based on static Web sites and perhaps email marketing systems; permission-based inbound marketing based on attracting opt-in members and then building engagement through customer relationship management systems and content nurture streams; and social marketing and social sales based on understanding and leveraging social networks. One key question to ask is, “What should be at the center?”

the CRM system may take the central position rather than the Web site.

the real benefits come from achieving local leverage by encouraging a wide range of employees and partners to develop their own social presence, as well.

executives need to understand and articulate how the structure reflects the approach to growing customer lifetime value.

Assemble the components: Once the pieces are mapped based on the shape of the customer opportunities, the next challenge is to assemble a specific set of components with an eye toward flexibility and cost effectiveness. Given the remarkably rapid rate of innovation, leaders need to avoid being locked into expensive commitments that won’t be easy to continue to change. A series of principles can really help here.

build, test, and monitor prototypes until they work perfectly. Investing extra time and effort at this stage can make the step of expanding the system much quicker and less expensive, as well as making broad implementation much smoother.

Engage the organization around content, and marshal the resources to make it successful. Once a system is developed, it has to be used to full effect to capture the available benefits. And in today’s world, that requires a large, steady stream of content. Types of content include articles, blogs, white papers, contests, games, webinars, videos, posts to discussion groups, tweets, and infographics (to name a few). Increasingly, content generation is evolving into a companywide responsibility, rather than simply a marketing responsibility. Senior executives need to embrace and then encourage this. Although this is a relatively undeveloped area, management processes that reward the generation and dissemination of great content will undoubtedly lead to great value. And social management platforms that enable rapid and easy sharing of existing content, along with monitoring for compliance purposes, are already enjoying rapid growth.

Constantly measure and monitor in order to learn and improve:

margins should improve, acquisition costs should drop, and churn rates should decline