It set a standard of how to integrate Social into 'traditional' advertising. It combined bought media with earned media. Broadcasting with conversation. And most importantly, it had the numbers to back it up, so even the brands that were slow to catch on HAD to start thinking about the role of Social within their organisation. Will be copied over and over in 2011.

The 2010 Social Media Significant Six – #2 Social Media Monitoring

2010 was the year that dozens of companies introduced tools that purported to make sense of social media. With sentiment analysis you type in your brand name and watch it perform or fall in the hands of the crowd.

Not. We tried a few services and unfortunately there is no silver bullet. Algorithms have difficulty knowing positive from negative and neutral talk. You still have to spend time on social media if you want to know what is being said.
 

The 2010 Social Media Significant Six – #3 Mine is bigger than yours

If we're moving to a world where ordinary people are publishers, knowing which people are the most influential is a potential gold mine. We think it's far more likely that an acceptable influencer algorithm will be built than one that does sentiment analysis. But our tests showed the current leaders Klout and Peerindex are not without their problems.
 

The 2010 Social Media Significant Six – #4 Have you checked in yet?

Twelve months ago, the phrase 'checking in' was restricted to hotels and airports. But the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla made it one of the buzzwords of 2011. Not only did we check into bars, restaurants and other real venues, an entertainment check-in service like GetGlue is creating content communitues by letting people 'check-in' to TV shows, bands,…

Fad or fact? Our bet is it won't go away just yet. GetGlue just raised 6 million dollar and is partnering with mainstream media players. Foursquare is making a tv show with Endemol. And of course there's the question of how Facebook will integrate Facebook Deals with their (so far pretty unsuccessful) Facebook Places.
 

The 2010 Social Media Significant Six – #5 Advertising

Advertising has embraced the social platforms whole-heartedly. Facebook now accounts for 23.1% of all display ads in the US. Twitter has just opened up their Promoted services. And a mobile game like Angry Birds is making more money from advertising in their free app than from their downloads.

That's partly because of the sheer volume of traffic on social networking sites (Facebook is now close to hitting the 600 million mark). But it's also because of the potential social power of ads on these platforms. The opportunity of bought media becoming earned media. A Facebook ad that can be Liked can be 4 times more effective than a standard display ad.
 

The 2010 Social Media Significant Six – #6 Where does Social Media fit in?

All year we heard a meta conversation about social media. Who owns it? Edelman claimed it is PR that will win out and claim social. But Old Spice was done by an Ad Agency.

We expect the debate to continue. But we will find that there are many sides to social: some kinds of social that are more PR-like (monitoring, crisis management, Twittering) and other kinds of social that are more advertising-like.
 

The 2010 Creative Trend – Data visualisation

People like Aaron Koblin have been 'designing with code' for a few years, but data visualisation really took off this year. We featured the beautiful Flickr-based tourist maps of Eric Fischer, there was the intrigiung BBC Dimensions website and we've just seen the amazing Facebook connection maps.

But even though data visualisation can make for pretty pictures, there's more to it than pure esthetics. The New York Times has dedicated a whole department to the art of data. And if you get bored of afternoon Christmas films on telly, sit yourself down for this documentary on 'Journalism in the Age of Data' by Stanford professor Geoff McGhee.

The 2011 Trends – #1 Mobile

There is ample evidence to suggest that mobile will shake the world in 2011. In this video interview with Robert Scoble, Scot Kventon, CEO of Urban Airship, claims mobile will be even more disruptive than the web has been in recent years. One early casualty? The digital camera. 2010 was the year when the iPhone became the single biggest source of pictures on Flickr.

Advertising is moving to mobile at pace, with the US market said to have doubled in the last year alone to $890m. It is thought Google claimed more than half of that money.

Europe is slower. But mobile ad network aggregator Smaato and research firm mobileSQUARED forecast an increase in mobile ad spending in the EU-5 from $122.6 million this year to $1.29 billion in 2015.

Not surprisingly really as Techcrunch reports that in the US people are already spending as much time on mobile as on newspapers and magazines combined. The number shot up by 28% in 2010 and this trend will continue.

It will be a make or break year for mobile operating systems. At the Le Web conference in Paris last week Scoble poured cold water on Nokia's chances. Read this blog post for a rebuttal, but also for many good comments for and against. We think that the iPhone and particularly the more affordable Android will dominate more and more, because both of them have a better user experience and they are supported by the developer community.

Not surprisingly and mimicking its position on the web, Facebook is the biggest mobile media property in both the US and Europe. More interesting is the fact that Twitter is third in the Japan and fourth in both Europe and US, indicating its relative strength in mobile. With mobile becoming more important, expect Twitter to rise in prominence.
 

The 2011 Trends – #2 HTML5

HTML5 will change everything on the web as we know it. And most of us don't have a clue how and why. Most of us actually won't know HTML5 when it jumps out of the browser window and hits us between the eyes with a hammer. We just assume it's Flash. Read more >>

The 2011 Trends – #3 Social buying

Uniqlo lowered the price of their clothes according to the amount of people that tweeted about it. And thé social business success story of 2010 came from group buying service Groupon, culminating in them turning down a 6 billion Google bid.

Not so surprising if you know that a person landing on a website from a social network referral is 10 times more likely to make a purchase. But the connection between social and shopping will become more widespread. Brands will do more to integrate social into their e-commerce platforms as well as in their physical shops. And how Facebook Credits will influence all that is anyone's guess.
 

The 2011 Trends – #4 More social unrest

Wikileaks was a constant item in the news this year. Even if they get shut down, there's already a European and Russian whistleblowing site in the offing. The Evening Standard asked Can Twitter start a revolution? Expect more revelations and seemingly spontaneous protests popping up all over the world in the year to come. It's never been easier to organise and energise. And there is a lot to be upset about.
 

Oh go on then – we're going to stick our necks out and make some bold predictions for the year.

“Looking for a shit hot Ning programmer”

That is how RAAK first came to hear about the MTV project for the European Union: through a Twitter message.

>> The brief
MTV was tasked by the European Union (EU) to increase awareness about the upcoming EU elections amongst young people. And energise them to take part.
The core idea was built around ‘The Shout’, giving young people the chance to make their voice heard. This would be done through 3 events, a tv campaign and an online presence.
To achieve these objectives online, the EU wanted to build a bespoke social network where young people could interact around a common European-ness.

Importantly we were only six weeks away from the launch date.

>> The RAAK approach
At RAAK we think before doing.
We don’t just want to build or produce interesting media for the sake of it, we want it to work for its intended users and meet objectives.

There are now a number of very cool platforms and tools with which bespoke social networks can be built, like Ning, the open source Elgg and also BuddyPress.

However, building a bespoke social network – that gets user traction – is not desirable or even possible in all circumstances. It takes time.
In this case we felt it was much more effective to create a site that ties in strongly with the use of existing social networks where the users are already active and have strong connections.

>> RAAK’s pitch
Videos are a good way of driving traffic, especially if you have star attractions like Depeche Mode. Same with competitions. So those 2 elements were an obvious part of our proposal.

But once we have the eyeballs we want to draw the users in deeper.

We suggested to build a forum where users could debate issues round the EU. But making forums work is notoriously hard, so we suggested a Twitter Forum using hashtags. This was a much easier way to engage from a user point of view because people take part on their own terms.
We guided MTV on moderation & Twitter policies to maximise constructive participation.

We also allowed blog-style comments on the videos and created a Shout Box where people could leave short messages.
We gave people the option to do this using Facebook Connect, allowing users to send their comments to their Facebook newsfeeds for that extra viral impact.
FB Connect was also integrated in the Polls, where people could voice their opinion about European issues.

MTV also wanted something that reflected the buzz of an event, a virtual party. Because of considerable time and budget restrictions, we suggested covering the Shout-events live using Qik. Live video streaming through mobile phones. We ‘live edited’ what streams were most prominent on the site by switching between videos.

We delivered www.caneuhearme.eu on time, in 23 European languages (yes, in six weeks!) and launched several new sections to the site to encourage repeat visits.

>> Pros
The CanEUhearme site ranked #3 for first week traffic volume (Unique Visitors) behind only two movies’ micro sites, Indiana Jones and Iron Man.

On the Caneuhearme site we had far over 50,000 unique visitors in two months, who viewed on average 2.5 pages and spent nearly 2 minutes on the site.

The site generated hundreds of “Shouts” from users across Europe.

But it was the Twitter discussion page and discussions and hashtags that proved to be the most popular. We believe the site became a hub for people interested in and disaffected with the European Union, with debates and conversations starting on the site and elsewhere.

>> Cons
Neither ourselves nor MTV could get Flickr to play along. So we had to abandon using their service (the Flickr API) and rebuild the Competition engine and gallery from scratch.

To brag a bit, we also feel that an integrated campaign, where RAAK produced the video, wrote the copy and steered the Twitter accounts, would have made for tighter messaging and even better conversations.

>> Coverage and links
The site was written about and linked to from numerous sites including the BBC, Brand Republic, and dozens of blogs including that of Le Monde, the NRC Handelsblad. And it had its naysayers.

Some other sites and blogs that linked to the project include:
Codice Internet
Democracia Electrónica
Jessica Best – European elections for dummies
politicaduepuntozero
institute
Persiguiendo Sueños
EUROBITÁCORA
The Veronicas
Bloc de Pia Bosch
Blogspace
EU observer

So far Google has counted over 250 backlinks to the site, with a Pagerank of 6.