Wednesday, I was fortunate enough to attend Steve Rubel’s social media presentation at the BMA breakfast roundtable. Steve hit on a number of interesting topics, but the majority of his presentation was focused on 8 key trends to watch in social media in 2008/2009:

• The Cut and Paste Web: Steve mentioned that mobile (both on mobile phones and mobile as in sharable) content and a new wave of information sharing was to going to be more and more ubiquitous in terms of social applications and services.
• Attention Crash (pictured above): The attention crash refers to the fact that “Human beings don’t scale“. Due to the abundance of information available to people today, the problem doesn’t become getting your message out there, it becomes breaking through and keeping the attention of your key audiences.
• Digital Curation: This feeds into the attention crash issue, in that you now have users manually selecting content to collect and cultivate around specific topic areas and communities. You can see this in both B2C and B2B communities across the web.
• The Numerati: This refers to the copious amounts of data now available on the social web and the opportunity for people to tap into it for marketing purposes. He specifically mentioned Wordle, which allows you to analyze text via a word map giving size preference to the number of times a word is mentioned in a block of text. I created the wordle below based on one of Gary’s Google B2B Summit posts (click for a larger version):
  
• Collaboration: This seems obvious in the offline world, but only now are the tools becoming available to be truly remote and completely collaborative in a real time basis. He emphasized that at no other time has it been more key for marketers to have real two way conversations with their customers via the web.
• Geek Marketers: This referred to the fact that if marketers are not going to become geek marketers (i.e. live, breathe, eat social media) than they need to hire someone who is going to do this for them. Perhaps it’s an intern at first until they can fully grasp the possibilities available, and then you can bring it the heavy hitters.
• Digital Nomads:This was referring to the concept of the “free agent world” in that organizations can capitalize on the fact that workers can work remotely and don’t necessarily need to be part of your organization or even in the same country. That you can tap resources when necessary in order to keep HR costs down, which is especially important in this economy.
• Data Leaking: This is the idea that if I can access LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. etc. at home, I’m going to expect to be able to view those at work if they help me do my job better. He said that organizations need to give up a little IT control in order to make people more productive and allow them to use any tools they want in order to do that.

I’m not sure when it will be, but I’m very much looking forward to hearing Steve speak again very soon.