The promise of true and deep social media integration is not new. In fact, many of our favorite social experts have been envisioning and forecasting this evolution for some time (see Five Themes for Succeeding in the Validation Era).
- For instance, Steve Rubel and David Armano from Edelmen have spoken at length about how there’s simply too much content and not enough time. New and innovative models for filtering and curation are mandatory for social integration to work in the age of hundreds of millions of social posts per day. They identify curation as a key trend.
- Shiv Singh from Pepsi explains how social media marketing fits into a broader view of real-time marketing and why he’s betting his career and his tenure at Pepsi on this emerging field.
- Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter reports that Social Integration into websites is CMO’s #1 priority.
- Brian Solis suggests 70% of the online audience is passive, and with so much content being created, 2011 is the “year of curation” to achieve relevance.
Eleven months ago, just before we formed Mass Relevance, I wrote a thesis on why there is massive growth in enterprise-level social curation (note: “social curation” is a fancy word for aggregating, filtering, moderating, and displaying social content). In simple terms, here’s what we (and those above) see happening…
- First, there is massive growth in social content. That much is obvious, and it’s not slowing down.
- Second, there is massive growth and fragmentation in the digital “surfaces” where audiences and customers spend time (web, apps, mobile sites, TV, social network, displays).
- Finally, audiences are demonstrating short attention span. Real-time, social content is proven to get more engagement and interaction within owned and paid media (aforementioned “surfaces”). Why? Social conversations aren’t viewed as advertising or broadcasting. They represent authentic voices. Someone “like me”.
Our mission is to serve our clients in the middle of these dynamic movements to find relevance from a mass of content, and bring it out to your mass audience in relevant ways.
We believe the convergence of these and other foundational shifts represent the next stage in the evolution of digital and social media. While there are still great opportunities inside social networking sites (the “feed” or “tab”), we are helping marketing and media companies capitalize on the new wave of opportunities outside of them.
For media companies and publishers, we enable scalable, high precision curation of the social conversation connected to your core content wherever it’s being consumed – an example of this is our work powering social media integration for The X Factor, The Voice, and the White House Twitter Town Hall.
For brands, retailers, and agencies, you can now have at-hand virtually any brand- or topic relevant conversation across social media and integrate it safely and seamlessly into your brand and marketing experiences – be that online, mobile device, or on-premise.
We want to reduce the barriers to fully tap into the brand engagement power of social content. We look forward to continuing to push the limit of social curation and integration.
Learn more about what our curation platform and services (labs, curation, studios) can do for you. You can request a demo. And follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay tuned for some exciting things to come!
Sam Decker