As I was thinking about social media in 2010, I believe a different thought process because Social media is NOW mainstream!  My proof? 

Everyone is doing it, speaking it, and mobilizing it!

Here are the big 3 I read over the holiday!

1) Top 100 Companies “doing” social media! I love this article on Social Media ratings for companies around their Social media saviness.  This means that Social Media has now become mainstream.   Check out the who whose list of those who are leveraging Social Media.

Is there anyone off the list on the Fortune 500?    Well, a few, the biggest Exxon, Chevron, GE,

http://mashable.com/2010/01/04/most-buzzed-about-brand/

I love this survey too!  According to a survey from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), BtoB Magazine and ‘mktg’, despite continuing concerns about measuring ROI and effectiveness, two-thirds of marketers have used social media in 2009 and half have used viral videos, making these two formats the fastest-growing tactics in marketing!!!

 2)  Social Media Terms go mainstream!   When even my dad says, you’ve been tweeting a lot lately, you know something is happening!

I went to see if this was just “my family” or broader.  Check this research out — already “unfriend” and “hashtag” have made the dictionaries as common terms!  The world is changing!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/185729/social_network_terms_go_mainstream.html

Some examples include:

Words of the Year 2009

Tweetup – noun: a meeting or other gathering organised by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter. [from tweet + up on the pattern of MEETUP].

Hashtag – noun: a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets.

Tag cloud – noun: a visual depiction of the word content of a website, or of user-generated tags attached to online content, typically using colour and font size to represent the prominence or frequency of the words or tags depicted.

Slashdot effect – noun: the slowing down or crashing of a small website due to a huge increase in traffic when the website is linked to another, much more popular one.

Unfriend/defriend – verb: to remove from one’s ‘friends’ list (e.g. on a social networking website).

3)  Mobile is main stream and everything hot is on mobile — over 50% of B2C marketers are using Social media on Mobile!

While mobile is used by 32 percent of overall marketers, it is three times more likely to be used by B2C versus B2B marketers (52% vs. 18%).

Social Media is mainstream!!!!