Social Media Present and Future

Only hours after the NY:MIEG meeting (see below), the New York branch of the Social Media Club met for a similar discussion – “What worked and what didn’t in Social Media in 2007.”
On the panel:
Joel Smernoff, President and COO of Paltalk;
Jack Myers, Myers Publishing founder, CEO, and the journalist behind the Jack Myers Media Business Report;
and Peter Himler, founder and principal of Flatiron Communications LLC.
Social Media Club co-founder Howard Greenstein was the moderator.
It was a wide-ranging discussion, touching on some of the key developments over the past year and looking ahead to the next year.
There was a long discussion of Facebook’s Beacon conflict. Did Facebook hurt itself with Beacon? Possibly, although they do seem to be trying to fix it – the move from opt-out to opt-in, while perhaps not handled as smoothly as it should have been, is at least a move in the right direction. Jack Myers pointed out that while advertisers have been leery about social media, they did seem aware of robust opportunities in an industry that is showing it can police itself, as in the case of Beacon.
There was also a lot of focus on the need to come up with a sound financial underpinning for social media and for ways to educate advertisers and potential sponsors about the changing ways in which social media delivers the message. That includes an understanding of the change from a one-way delivery to a two (or more) sided conversation. Howard Greenstein offered the comment: smart people are making money by charging us to connect with people we already know.
There was debate over the need for transparency as a way to build and ensure credibility. There have been a number of painful examples of companies – and PR agencies – caught in incidents involving blogging without revealing that they were speaking for, or part of, the corporations being discussed. Peter Himler observed that there are a great many big companies that still want “control” over their messages, and their advisors need to warn them to tread carefully to ensure their plans don’t blow up in their faces.
And there was a lengthy discussion of the role that some virtual reality sites have played, and will play, in the ecosystem of Web 2.0 and beyond. There was some debate over the degree of success or lack thereof at Second Life, but general agreement that advertisers/sponsors are going to have to work harder to understand the different strategies needed to succeed. There was also wide agreement that virtual realities, including the reality of online games, will continue to grow in importance as we move forward.
As always at these events, the debate was lively – there is considerable reliance here on “the wisdom of crowds,” and the panelists were quite comfortable with the conversation.