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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.

In an essay about Internet addiction in The Dublin Review last year, the Irish novelist and short-story writer Kevin Barry wrote about how the rapid depletion of his powers of attention affected the way he composes a piece of writing: “Lately, I note, most of the essays and stories I write tend to be broken up into very short, numbered sections, because I can no longer replicate on the page the impression or sensation of consecutive, concentrated thought, because I don’t really do that anymore.”

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

Take Netflix's decision to release ALL of House of Cards at once. People were flabbergasted! How could they sacrifice the nowness?!  But they did and people loved it. In contrast to live "appointment viewing," of a weekly show, House of Cards felt different, substantial. It was a weighty object that could be watched however you wanted to. 

Or take Snapchat and the Snowden-NSA revelations. They highlight a pernicious aspect of this metaphor: while the stream flows quickly past you, it flows into the vast, searchable reservoirs of companies and intelligence agencies. This stream is archived and data mined! On the Internet stream, you cannot keep up with the stream, but the stream can keep up with you. The NSA took advantage of this. 

On the tiniest level, many people (myself included) have been launching little e-mail newsletters. I've been writing into the stream for seven years, and I haven't had this much fun in a long time. My newsletter is finite (always less than 600 words) and it comes once a day. It has edges. You can finish it. 

Snapchat says: If we can't disappear completely, let's leave as little of a trace as possible. Let's be water vapor, a passing fog, not the stream. 

Lastly, look at the huge viral successes of the year, Upworthy, ViralNova, TwentyTwoWords, FaithIt, and all the rest. They take advantage of the structure of the stream and the psychological problems it makes for people. These sites traffic in narrative porn. The whole point of their posts is that they are idealized stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They provide closure. They are rocks that you can stand on in the stream, just to catch your breath.

So the simple answer is that there's too much flow and not enough stock. The Internet could rebalance away from the flow (i.e. the stream) and start making more durable things.