Privacy, Mobile And Battle Between Google Plus And Facebook Will Dominate The Global Social Media

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Privacy, mobile and battle between Google Plus and Facebook will dominate the global social media

DAVOS -- Privacy, mobile and battle between Google Plus and Facebook will dominate the global social media scene in the next 12-18 months, according to experts at World Economic Forum.

As social media transformed itself from "toy" to "tool" and become "mainstream" and "business like" last year, Luis Ubinas, president of Ford Foundation, said the world is inching closer a "one Platform" communication to serve up to 7 billion people. "It may transform the world," he said, relating to how inexpensive mobile phones have become to empower people.

He said while social media is at forefront of all Ford Foundation activities across the world, privacy is the biggest threat to its future. Social media communication is a kind of "social contract" but consumers’ awareness can shift with the loss of privacy. Ubinas dreaded the day where a government could sanction on "street protesters" from photos that are spread in social media.

Chan Yuen Ying, professor of journalism and media at th University of Hong Kong, said 2012 will likely see greater migration of media, business and education contents onto mobile. She added that the education sector could well undergo a digital revolution although it has been the most conservative to adapt.

Social media is beginning to fulfil its potential as a tool to drive social change. As mobile penetration and activity increase, there will be an explosion in mobile social apps. Privacy of the individual is a growing concern as social sites such as Facebook grow exponentially. Social media presents a threat to well-established industry and business models.

Participants agreed that 2011 was the year social networking sites started to deliver from a business perspective. Google launched Google+, LinkedIn went public and Facebook reached more than 800 million users worldwide.

Of every five minutes that people are online, one minute is spent on a social media site, prompting comments that social media has migrated from its initial use as a "toy" to becoming a "tool".

Social media is beginning to fulfil its potential as a tool to drive social change. In Nigeria in 2011, for example, election monitoring was done via mobile apps, delivering information in real time, including reports of mistakes and abuses.

There is still significant scope for growth in social media usage through Web access. For instance, China has about 500 million people using the Internet, but that number is only one-third of the total population.

The Internet is not the only way to access social sites. Cheaper mobile phones that are enabled for social media activity are driving uptake in developing countries. In sub-Saharan Africa, the average price for a 2G phone has fallen to US$ 14; some are sold for as low as US$ 9.

Mobile and tablet apps are expected to intensify social media engagement and activity. There are already numerous apps delivering social change, such as a mobile phone app used by African farmers that allows them to know the fluctuating prices of their crops. Commerce and business can learn from this sort of activity.

The breadth of activity on social media sites and channels is also set to increase. Opportunities exist in commerce within social media platforms. Web traffic to commercial sites has traditionally been driven by search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). That is now changing, with the increasing penetration of social sites, predominantly Facebook.

Mainstream retailers are beginning to regard social media as a tool to drive sales. One US store's website now sees 50% of its traffic coming from social spaces, and the rest from Google and other search engines.

One of the major threats to the growth of social media is the issue of privacy. Currently, individuals access social media sites on the basis of an implied social contract, assuming that the site owners will not exploit the information they upload. But those assumptions may be wrong; the implied social contract is actually a fragile one.

Social media presents a threat to well-established industry and business models. One panellist expressed the belief that social media has made "laughable" the view that traditional media practitioners are the "gatekeepers of the truth".

-- The Nation 2012-02-02