Web 2.0 Expo—State of the Web

Breaking news from the Web 2.0 Expo: What’s new? Nothing really! Social media continues to mature, and that means the market for social media services will become more crowded and shift.

We’re not seeing any new game changing evolution in social media this year. What’s new is the new Facebook, the more stabilized Twitter, and the solidification of top bloggers as influencers.

The biggest change this year is the increasingly competitive nature of social media. Consider Twitter’s pitched battle with microblog networks like FriendFeed, and increased video competition for YouTube. Or the attempts of the many to unseat top influentials. But in my mind this represents a maturation of the market. Nothing is really new.

And social media is maturing on the corporate side, too. Most companies are not doing social media well, but their toes are in the water. Now the latest studies show that enterprises are willing to let employees use social media at work 70% of the time. Fear fades as adoption increases.

This reaffirms that the landscape of social media is increasingly becoming more accepted and organizations are seeing that this is not a fad or fly by night. If you business hasn't jumped on board, you could get left behind. The key will be to get the masses to jump on board and identify how to acquire members. There's no place like Facebook. There's no place like Facebook... Our approach at WeAreTeachers has been to develop our app, I Am Teacher and engage where they currently hang out. Traditional marketing says to bring members to you; Social media says let's do a meet-up... if you can't beat them, join them.