The future of social media: Augie Ray

by Stefano Maggi in News on 5 August 2010 at 11:59 Google+

How is social media evolving? What trends are developing right now? Few people can answer this question better than Augie Ray (augieray), Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, who focuses on “Social Computing”.

Augie was kind enough to let me interview him for the We Are Social blog: it was a great opportunity to talk about the future of social media and a few of the hot topics he’s been thinking about at Forrester lately.

Here’s what we covered:

  • Foursquare has some critical aspects in the US market, mainly because of the way brands are approaching this social network, through some logic near to a concept of advertising and paid media. The solution could be an approach that is more focused on the concept of “conversation”: location based social networks are still in their infancy and have many unexplored opportunities. Augie also refers to an imminent launch by Facebook of geolocation;
  • The value of a Facebook fan is zero. Unless you do something with them and for them. Augie explains how only strategies that build value work on Facebook and how it’s useless to give a monetary value to a fan;
  • About the future of social media, according to Augie, it’s impossible to think brands will have a unique single role on social media, but each brand will need to find its own way of “being social” to be really relevant to people;

Here’s the video: there are subtitles, so if you’re in the office without earphones, you don’t need to bother your neighbour.

As usual, your comments are very welcome. If you enjoyed this interview, consider subscribing by email or RSS to keep up to date with the latest We Are Social posts.

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  • http://thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com olivierBlanchard

    “The value of a Facebook fan is zero. Unless you do something with them and for them. Augie explains how only strategies that build value work on Facebook and how it’s useless to give a monetary value to a fan.”

    Thank you. Great to hear you say it. :)

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    [...] The Future of Social Media (We Are Social’s Interview with Forrester’s Augie Ray) [...]

  • Argentinae

    The value of a Facebook fan is zero just because there are different ways to be a fan I think. The term fan is too generic – it's like to say “women” but how many ways there are to be a woman?

  • http://blog.digitalingredients.co.uk/ Stefano Maggi

    Right. The term is generic, even if Augie refers to everyone who “liked” a specific brand. But this is also generic: there are so many ways of “liking”.
    The interesting point is that the simple act if clicking “like” in association to a specific content is just a potential conversation starter and not an asset. It can become an asset depending on how the relationship is developed and nurtured.

  • http://mediasnackers.com DK

    Big takeaways for me : the constant fluid nature of social media platforms and their (potential) uses, challenge popularity vs value, creating relationships rather than marketing to… good stuff :-)