Stowe Boyd, a senior consultant with Cutter Consortium, says social media trends for 2007 include learning from high-profile corporate missteps in the handling of conversational marketing. He says that in 2007, organizations are adopting social media as a cost-effective and productive mechanism for engaging with the marketplace. Boyd, who is keynoting on social media at the Cutter Consortium Summit taking place on April 29th through May 2nd in Cambridge, MA, sees an uptick this year in the number of companies adopting the technologies of social media -- particularly blogging, social networks, and wikis -- and actively embracing the social media principles that seem to work best.

"The explosion of social media has been truly global and has reached into many segments of society and business," said Boyd. "Blogs and other social media are being used by companies in all sorts of ways. Media companies are, of course, adopting blogs as fast as possible, but business in general is trying to figure out what is happening in the blogosphere and how they might be able to get involved if it will help to innovate faster, to market products more effectively, or simply to connect more directly with their markets," added Boyd.

According to Boyd, companies that increase the likelihood of having smarter conversations -- with current and potential clients, within the R&D staff, and with partners -- are simply more likely to succeed. Plus, the economies of scale that have led to the rapid adoption of social media in the media and personal realms are just as important in the business setting, as is the appeal of staying up with -- and exploiting -- the newest thing.

Perhaps the biggest impact that the social media has had on business to date has been in the area of corporate marketing and public relations. Businesses of all sorts are finding that the use of social media can be a low-cost and direct means to remain in contact with those interested in the company's products, goals, and announcements.

Boyd predicts the following Social Media trends for 2007:

• Grassroots politics will continue to mean, at least to a great extent, what people are writing about and responding to on the Web. The savvy politicians of the future will learn to use the blogosphere to their advantage, just as former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill used the radio and former US Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan used television.
• Corporations will learn from the missteps of Wal-Mart, Edelman, and Kryptonite and accept conversational marketing as a cost-effective and productive mechanism to remain closely engaged with the marketplace. This will rapidly become second nature, and the entire PR and marketing industry will be dramatically changed as a result -- for the better.
• Within corporate offices, social media applications will spread rapidly, as have e-mail and instant messaging, and those entering the workforce for the first time will simply expect those mechanisms for social interaction to be in place.
• Those companies that harness the potential that social media tools offer, internally and externally, may have an advantage over their competitors: a slight increase in innovation, a few percentage points better penetration in the market, a hair more efficiency in back-office operations. These could add up to something significant.
• The people formerly known as the audience are going to continue to experiment with new technologies, new approaches to social interaction, and new social tools.

About the market research event and advisory

Follow the link below for more information on the upcoming Cutter Consortium Summit. Contact Cutter for information on related published research, such as the Cutter Executive Report, "Social Media: A Revolutionn in the Making" (October 2006) by Stowe Boyd.

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