Four Stages of Social Media – My Social Media Briefing With Senior Brand and Marketing Managers

Tomorrow I will be in LA to give a talk about the Social Media Opportunity. I’m excited to brief a select group of mainstream brand marketers about the research that I’ve accumulated over the past few years. One of the benefits of being a pioneer in social media and “present at creation” is that I’ve either been part of or observed many social media experiments and programs in action. What’s even more exciting is that this is just the beginning of Social Media.

We are seeing the four stages of social media evolution in action:

Stage 1: The Pioneer: 2004-2005

Stage 2: The Early Adopter: 2006-2008

Stage 3: The Practitioner: 2009 – 2011

Stage 4: The Mainstream: >2011

Over the past few years social media has moved from the pioneering stage to the early adopter (evangelist and tester) stage. Now we are seeing what I call the practitioner stage. My Angle is that we will stay in this stage for 2 more years then move to the mainstream (scale) stage. We’ve seen this movie before in the search business. In fact with impeccable timing Gary Stein wrote a similar viewpoint in today’s ClickZ column called Social Media 2009 = Search 2002. Look for more social media opinion and analysis here on SiliconAngle.com. In addition look for some upcoming news about what were doing and researching in the coming weeks.

I’d be interested in hearing what folks think about their social media vision and feedback on the list of topics (below) on my LA talk to brand marketers:

As consumers continue to exercise greater control over media, social media will grow and gain influence. Yet the media remains in it’s experimental stage, with all of the opportunities and pratfalls that this stage entails. How do you optimize your approach?

• Where social media fits in the broader word of mouth marketing arena
• How social media is different than other forms of web marketing and what it takes to be successful
• Merging traditional brand, affinity and promotional approaches on the web
• How consumers view of “experts” is changing and the growing importance of micro endorsements
• Finding the affinity lynchpins for your category and using them to grow your equity and awareness
• Scaling your campaigns for maximum effectiveness