The Marketing Revolution, oh children...

WILL NOT BE TELEVISED!

I have said it before and I will say it again... TV is on the way out! This is not blasphemy! NAY! This is not anarchy! This is revolution...NAY! This is, ADVOLUTION! Those who are fearsome will expire, or retire. So, its not about being stagnant or staunch anymore, fools. Join the pools and get social because you can't shake hands with a clenched fist.

Today, it's about social media and it is not a FAD.

Top ten Social Media Applications:

#10 Tagging
Descriptive words, aka metadata, assigned to content like blog postings, photos or videos to facilitate in-site searching and sharing.

Leaders: Flickr Del.icio.us Digg Shadows
Opportunity: 100 bricks of gold to the company that combines this well with SEO
#9 PodCasts
Audio and/or Video content downloadable to a device like an iPod for playback. PodCast is a fancy term for content on demand.

Leaders: Podcast Alley, Odeo, PodShow, Juice, itunes
Opportunity: Content is still king in this medium. Find the right programming that will appeal to the 24% of online North Americans interested podcasting but don’t do it, and it’ll rain pennies from heaven.
#8 C2C eCommerce
Sites that enable Consumers to sell to Consumers with web properties often skimming a facilitation fee.

Leaders: eBay, Amazon, etsy, craigslist
Opportunity: About a quarter of online North Americans and just over a fifth of online Europeans buy and/or sell online. The biggest drag (and always has been) is delivery charges. Couriers should get into this business.

#7 Comparison Shopping Sites
Head to head comparison sites where consumers write and review the content.

Leaders: PriceGrabber, Froogle, Shopzilla
Opportunity: Corporate transparency is quickly becoming a reality in modern business. If you make a good product and don’t lie in your marketing, you will win. This is true of every product and service in every industry. If you don’t follow this advice, your company will fail within 10 years. Radical Trust me.

#6 P2P File Sharing
Here the users act as both client and host, exchanging audio, video, photos, software, etc, over a decentralized server network.

Leaders: BitTorrent Kazaa eDonkey
Opportunity: The music business should stop fighting and start feeding it. Provide your content on these networks, and make your money in concerts and royalties from other sources. Simple enough eh?
#5 Wikis
Shared web publishing software that allows users to edit content.

Leaders: Wikipedia, Socialtext, Basecamp, jotspot
Opportunity: Accolades to the Dr. who puts this type of social media into scientific research. Think of the wiki application to track bird migrations in ornithology. This is also the ultimate democratic tool. Unite “the left with agreements on environmental, social and economical issues with a wiki-policy tool.
#4 Search Engines
Web searches based on user specified terms.

Leaders: Google, Yahoo! MSN AOL Technorati Ask
Opportunity: Almost 80% of American surfers use search engines weekly. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your content is the most important thing you can do to raise your profile online. If I had it to do all over again, I would make myself an expert SEO’r.
#3 RSS
Call it Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, or whatever you want, RSS is quickly becoming the new norm in content collection. Why go to a each site via bookmarks when you can bring the site to you?

Leaders: Bloglines, Newsfire, FeedBurner Pluck, NewsGater
Opportunity: 6% of online North American’s use RSS feeds weekly, this number is growing rapidly. The OS that integrates RSS tightly into the UXP will be the winner of this race for sure. Marketers take heed. “Design, build and post may not cut it in the future. What you need is post and feed.

#2 Blogs
Online journals with content management systems allowing for rapid publication. Blogs often include text, photos, video and other media.

Leading Blog Enablers: TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, Weblogs, Windows Live Spaces
Leading Blogs: Boing Boing, Autoblog, Gawker Network, LifeHacker
Opportunity: This is the new journalism. Blogs will eventually replace newspapers as 10% of online North Americans already go to them weekly.
#1 Social Networks
Destinations that enable users to customize, maintain and control their own personal network of contacts.

Leaders: MySpace FaceBook Friendster Linkedin YouTube
Opportunity: This rapidly growing segment has increased by 50% from 2004 and the trend is expected to continue. Marketers should stop trying to build and start partnering with these guys. The people that can truly crack social networks with sustainable relationships will literally change the face of marketing.

So there it is on a silver platter. A quick cheat sheet of the best Social Media Tools, each complete with description, best practices and the business opportunities they present. You have no excuse not to succeed!

Go forth and ADVOLVE.