(Sorry for the months of absence due to work commitments and travel. For more, see my recent blog entries at 1, 2, 3.)
While I was in San Francisco last week, I picked up a copy of the June 2 issue of Business Week which featured the cover headline of “Beyond Blogs”. There was an interesting article inside by Stephen Baker and Heather Green describing the latest movements in the social media space and how things have changed since their article three years ago entitled “Blogs Will Change Your Business“. (In fact, the authors have since revised, annotated and re-published their original 2005 article under the new title “Social Media Will Change Your Business“.) Some sites and services covered include TechCrunch, Engadget, the Huffington Post, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook and MySpace. They also did some research for the article via their Twitter accounts stevebaker and heatherlgreen.
For more information, see:
- Beyond Blogs: What Business Needs to Know
- Big Blue Embraces Social Media
- Video from Stephen Baker on Beyond Blogs / Updated Cover Story on Social Media
A picture on the cover of the magazine showed an interesting graph illustrating a surge in estimated social media spending over the next five or so years. I just assumed it was a mockup, but after searching with some related keywords I found an excerpt from a report by Forrester which says that estimated spending on Web 2.0 / social media will be $4.6 billion globally by 2013 (unfortunately the report costs $775 so I can’t see any more details, but at least I can view the press release!).
Graphs are always good fun, so here are two: on the right is a stacked horizontal bar chart showing the business adoption of social media tools this year, and on the left is the projected growth of social media spend over the next five years.
The three biggest areas seem to be social networking, RSS and mashups. To me, this seems consistent with the drive towards social objects: gathering and pushing the right information of interest to you from a variety of sources via your social contacts. There are also a lot of social media jobs now available: Robert Sanzalone posted a link to socialmediajobs.com on his Twitter feed yesterday.
Here are some related posts about the aforementioned Forrester report from other blogs:
Technology Voice 