Two words: Big Data

Social is all about conversations, right? Wrong.

Social has now moved into its third phase – optimisation. The future is Minority Report, and whether you like it or not we are already on our way there. The future of social is in businesses that are able to offer AI systems that mine large amounts of data (too large for humans to handle manually) in order to predict behaviours and trends. The first application will be hypertargeted ads which are customised to your personal demographics, preferences and social circles. Does this scare you? It shouldn’t come as a surprise – Facebook and Google have been doing this for some time now.

Check out this conversation with Jeremiah Owyang – it’s a highly insightful commentary on where social is heading from a guy who spends his life performing researching in this space. If nothing else, check out the question of the week at the 8:40 mark – “Jeremiah, can you engineer serendipity?”

Conversations are out. Big Data is in. You heard it here first.