Last week, yet another social media solution was announced. This time, it came from the Internet giant Google, and it is called Google Buzz. In my opinion, Google Buzz is a mixture of FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter.  It resembles FriendFeed in the sense that it can aggregate your activities across multiple social networks and display those to your followers in one place. It resembles Facebook in the sense that it has a status update and commenting function similar to Facebook status update.  And it resembles Twitter in terms of its follower structure and also its status update functionality. The one key difference with Google Buzz, however, is its integration with email, where you see all the buzzes within your Gmail account.

Frankly, I am not impressed. With so many social media solutions already out to “revolutionize” the way we communicate, I am starting to feel indifferent.  Just count the sheer number of social networks out there, and we see how fragmented online social networking has become. While I am a strong believer in the value of social media, the number of competing solutions is suggesting that this market is getting to a more mature stage.  Just like the hundreds of car brands in the earlier part of the last century, we are bound to see a shakeup of this marketplace, and the ones that eventually survive will be the ones that offer differentiation that appeal to a large enough network of consumers.

So with this idea of differentiation, I thought of doing an exercise.  In market research, there is a technique called brand personification which is used to explore in-depth a brand’s meaning to consumers.  The technique asks consumers to imagine a brand as a person and to describe what this person would be like.  Here I took the liberty and brand personifies some of the best known or “buzzed” social networks we see today.

• Facebook: A child prodigy who won the heart of America almost overnight. But now at a mature adult age, he has not quite found who he is and who he wants to be. As a result, he does face lift or nip/tuck every so often, and he is hopelessly addicted to Farmville, Cafe World, Happy Aquarium, and the like.
• Twitter: A geek with an entrepreneurial soul.  He is fun loving, quick to act, and can get really passionate about a topic. But because of interest in a large number of topics, he also shows symptoms of ADD and can have a fairly short attention span.
• LinkedIn: A businessman dressed in a suit and tie. He is ready to do a sales pitch at any time, and he always carries with him a briefcase no matter where he goes.  In that briefcase, he never forgets to bring with him a copy of his resume in case some better job becomes available.
• foursquare: An overly social person who thrives on attention to such an extent that he literally lives in the public’s eyes.  His smartphone is his prized possession that indulges his need for constant connection to the outer world.
• Google Buzz: Someone in his 40’s or possibly 50’s.  He has gotten onto the Internet late, after his son, daughter, and friends have enjoyed it for quite a while.  Once online, he cautiously explores around and finds email as a safe haven for staying connected. He hangs out with @mashable often, who admires him for his infinite wisdom.

Not hard to see that I am a little cynical in almost all of these.  Perhaps we haven’t found the winning formula yet?  Or perhaps I am just an outlier in the sample.  If I were to pick one from this list as my friend, I would choose the geeky Twitter, which is also the service that I find myself gravitate toward the most nowadays.  What would your choice be?

New Year is a great time to look forward and to anticipate and prepare for what is to come.  So I thought I would use this blog to discuss a few important trends that I believe will impact the way we do business in the future.  This originated from a question asked of me on a fellowship application: “What do you think are the 3 most important trends affecting business, technology & communications?”  Below is my response.

1. Emergence of “Individual” Corporate Identity

As social media give companies an opportunity to step closer to their end customers, this new strategy also puts individual faces onto what used to be a collective corporate identity.  Two cases in point: Peter Cashmore for Mashable, Scott Monty for Ford, to name just a few.  While such corporate spokespersons have existed before, now they have a much more personal face that interact with consumers day in and day out. This new corporate “individual” identity can have important implications for corporate branding and even companies’ hiring practices.

2. Mobilization of communication via geo-enabled services and mobile devices

Foursquare, need I say more?  Undoubtedly this represents great business opportunities for many companies. But more than that, this finally arriving mobile market is going to create new consumer privacy concerns and will require new types of policy to regulate how consumers’ geographic information can be used and protected.  Coupled with the buzz on real-time search and interaction, business practice and public policy in this area can be complicated.

3. Real-time verbal and textual translation

Google recently added a real-time translation service that can be integrated into an online chat session or used via its new Google Wave service.  When the precision of this type of services improves, its impact on cross-cultural communication will be tremendous. With the help of the Internet and social media, individuals already collaborate in many areas such as R&D, open source applications, and cause advocacy.  Now only imagine magnifying this many times to a global scale.

In the spirit of this blog, I’d also like to refer my interested readers to the predictions made by a few other web and social media experts:

• Social media prediction for 2010 by Scott Monty (Ford social media expert)
• Trendspotting’s expert trend predictions in 140 characters
• Social marketing trends from reviewing 2009 by web strategist Jeremiah Owyang

What about you?  What do you expect to see in 2010? Whether you agree or disagree with all these predictions, I hope everyone has a happy and productive year!

Colloquy’s weekly newsletter reported two stories of new coupon strategies: one is P&G and Korger’s adoption of mobile coupons, and the other is Kroger’s partnership with AOL’s Shortcuts Program, which allows users to download coupons online and have them preloaded on their store cards. Both of these stories represent a fundamental change in coupon usage. Traditionally, the time-consuming process of cutting coupons and the subsequent process of remembering to use the coupons (which I often forget) have made coupons a self-selected promotional tool. Consumers who value their time more are unlikely to spend the time needed to benefit from coupons. But now, with immediate and mobile access to coupons, the cost of coupon usage is going to reduce dramatically. This has both positive and negative implications for a business. On one hand, easy access to coupons means they are going to be more influential in consumers’ real-time decision making. On the hand, universal use of coupons means that the self-selected nature of coupon usage will disappear and the cost of using coupons as a marketing tactic may go up because of the higher redemption rate. What the CPG companies gain, however, is consumer information. With customized coupon service made available by the Internet, it is possible to embed a code in each coupon downloaded and subsequently track the coupon usage of each individual. This should grant CPG companies more power and immediate access to consumer insight, without having to rely on retailers for that information.