As social media matures, apps proliferate and new enterprise platforms appear everyday, it’s almost impossible to track with all the changes let alone integrate them into your company. With that in mind I felt it might be useful to distill and  isolate ten trends that are reshaping the social business marketplace as we speak.

1. The future web is being re-built around people.

2. Consumers now expect real time, personalized and seamless engagement.

3. The amount of information consumers can access is increasing exponentially (as a function of auto-publishing).

4. All this information and all our relationships will be available everywhere (as a function of tablets, smart phones, and the cloud).4. Competition for consumer attention is increasing exponentially diminishing the impact of traditional advertising. 

5. All this information and all our relationships will be available everywhere (as a function of tablets, smartphones, and the cloud).

6. Leader brands are being distinguished by the quality of their social listening and response to consumer needs and demands.

7. Social technology is changing at an increasing pace and being adopted and adapted by consumers before brands.

8. Consumer activism is rising.

9. Co-creative brand/consumer marketing campaigns are becoming the new standard.

10. Social technology is becoming increasing fractured, crowded, and niche every day.

In the face of such blistering speed and complexity of engagement, the wisest thing a brand can do is to serve as its own compass. It does this by defining what it stands for, and its core values, and then bringing those to life in a consistent and creative way across new technologies and platforms. To do otherwise is to chase the tireless tail of technological innovation only to broadcast your schizophrenia and confuse your customers.

Brands must know themselves before they can expect others can talk about them and so as counter-intuitive as it seems, the most valuable investment of time you can make as a brand is looking inward towards self-definition, rather than chasing the latests social technology.

Do you think the pace of social technology is helping or hurting brands trying to define themselves?