Ian Schafer CEO Deep Focus

Social media has become an integral part of the way people discover and consume content. Over the last few years, the continued rapid growth of social networks (Facebook), real-time information sharing and status updating (Twitter), blogging (professional and pro-am), and video sharing sites (YouTube) have provided more distribution and promotion opportunities than ever before – which means more opportunities for marketers to advertise their brands around, within, and via content.

While 2009 saw the continued growth of each of these types of social media, 2010 will be a year in which several burgeoning trends mature to the point that they will be ready to be taken advantage of by marketers looking to have their brands’ content discovered and shared by more consumers, more efficiently than they ever have been able to before.

Facilitating Active Content Discovery
Consumers are more connected to brands and each other than they ever have been before. The power of social networks (eg. Facebook) and microblogging (eg. Twitter) have revolutionized the way people consume content by making it incredibly easy to not only find that content, but share it as well. 2009 saw huge growth in the usage of link-shortening services (eg. Bit.ly, tinyurl) and link sharing services (eg. Digg, StumbleUpon). Lots of data point to Facebook being the most popular tool people use to share links, and Twitter is nearly as popular as email at the same task – and it’s all measurable. Content curation is becoming more democratized than ever, with more and more traffic being driven to content not just by promotion, but also by appeal. In 2010, brands are going to have to not only up the ante when it comes to content creation, but figure out efficient ways to get that content in front of the people most likely to share it with others. Ads that feature content targeted to people that have that kind of engagement will be more popular in the year to come. Which means that ads will need to be more optimized by engagement than ever.

Taking Advantage of Passive Content Sharing and Discovery
What do Boxee, Netflix, Xbox Live, Facebook, YouTube and Hulu have in common? They are all sharing the content you find interesting with your friends, without you even having to do it yourself. When you rate, watch, comment on, “like” or “favorite” content on those services, it is being shared with your network on those services. Whether those services have a “news feed”-like function, or are plugged into thirdparty services (like Twitter), they are turning content consumers into broadcast and promotional channels.

The more popular these services become in 2010, the more important it will be for marketers to have consumers be consuming them on those platforms. And while services like Boxee still have a long way to go before it gets called “mainstream,” mainstream services will continue to copy the best aspects of its service – or an existing company will simply buy a company like Boxee’s technology. As it becomes easier for platforms to plug into one another (eg. Facebook connect) the velocity of passive content sharing will increase. That means marketers should be paying more attention to platforms that can aid in content and link propagation.