The Future of the Social Web as Seen by Jeremiah Owyang, Forrester

At an event that was jointly organized by the Third Thursday Meetup Group and the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR), Jeremiah presented his thoughts on the future of the social web. These are my notes from the talk and discussion that followed.

Jeremiah identified five eras that are somewhat overlapping: The era of social relationships (people start connecting online and form groups but the individual groups are not connected), of social functionality (applications and widgets appear that were designed with the social web in mind), of social colonization (to start later this year, your friends go with you everywhere, the idea of a shared ID will take hold in the open web), of social context (advertising will be personalized as envisioned in the movie Minority Report), and social commerce (starting in 2011, social network users will band together and actively work on filling a need they all experience. They won’t wait for a company to take the initiative. Obviously, this will work well for consumer technology, not so much for medical devices. Read up on TechCrunch and the CrunchPad for an idea of how it might work).

Other interesting comments were that website registration will go away as people log in into their Facebook page and never leave, even if they view a third-party website. While today, we see a picture of a book, tomorrow, the relevant pages of Amazon will be served up right there on Facebook. Further, more and more websites will allow you to sign in with your FB or LInkedIn ID; omitting the need to register. Facebook Connect is at the beginning of that trend.

Another important issue is privacy. The audience agreed that people will relinquish privacy rights if they get something in return that is valuable to them. That attitude changes depending on where you are in the world. Jeremiah remarked that France is apparently one of the places with the strongest privacy rules.

GM is dead. Long live GM.

Now that the old GM has filed for bankruptcy, the media started talking about the face of the new GM that will emerge from the procedure. The discussion is about which brands will survive, how many dealerships will have to be closed and so on. What not many people talk about is whether consumers will line up to buy GM-made cars in the future.

A big part of the buying decision will be the authenticity of the brand GM that stands behind the vehicle. Today, GM stands for big, traditional American cars. The government pushes a new agenda of higher fuel efficiency and smaller cars. Nobody knows whether the brand GM will be able to adapt, even if the factory floor will. Only if the new-GM brand is believable, then consumers will buy the cars that are being produced. Now would be the time to spend money on smart marketing initiatives to transition people's hearts and minds. Social media could play a critical part in engaging the public. In fact, GM could become the first case study of a major brand transformation using social media.