Who has ever sat back and thought what social media may offer in the near future or what other new platforms may exist in the coming future. Well I have, have you? Now consider this, dating websites are known as a totally different platform for many years now where specific websites are designed and developed just for dating purposes. Whereas the social media platform of Facebook was designed for the purpose of users connecting with one another throughout the world. However, Facebook has now announced that they are integrating a dating feature into its social media platform where users from around the world will be able to view compatible matches who are making use of the dating feature. This is a great stepping stone towards future growth of the company as it is something that is outstanding and Facebook is the first to offer this feature compared to other social media platforms, giving Facebook a competitive advantage.

Who would have thought that social media would be used for business purposes in reaching a company’s goals and objectives? As social media started to become popular around 2005, people from around the world had a platform where they could share life events with one another. As various platforms came into existence such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, communication between individuals increased and it became a thing to do with much more ease. During this time, as social media was still developing in today’s modern world, organizations saw an opportunity to connect with its consumers and create brand awareness. Considering Facebook, if you recall, there was a point in time where organizations would share posts in regards to advertising their business just a normal Facebook user. Social media metrics were developed not too long ago by social media platforms as it gave benefits to both the users (companies), and the social media platforms themselves as it enabled both to increase profits and gain more insight in regards to specific posts. Adidas had been taking advantage of Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp to engage with its customers. They used these platforms to measure engagement rates, view-through rates, and how many views are generated.  

You’ve found the perfect boots. The problem is they are on a photo on Instagram that isn’t shoppable nor does it have a tag or mention. So, you pull up google and start describing keywords “winter boots, no-heel, brown, tall” and hope something similar comes up. Wouldn’t it be easier to take a screenshot and be directed to the same pair of boots in the photo or a similar pair? This is exactly what visual search can do. Users can upload an image and conduct a search to get more specific results. With visual searches, the image is the query, and rather than just identifying the image, search engines understand it. According to a study done by Slyce, 74% of consumers they asked in the study replied that text-based keyword searches are inefficient in helping to find the right product online. Taking photos with our phones is so ingrained in our lives and posting photos on social media is part of our daily lives. With visual search, every image becomes an opportunity to engage and convert consumers into customers. Images and video content on social media outperform written content and so it seems natural that we would want to search by using an image.

Growing up in Toronto, Ontario I thought taxis/cabs were just for people to go from an origin to a certain destination because they did not have a car, or needed a ride from/to the airport because they had to leave their car behind. I grew up in a household watching my grandpa make a living by driving a taxi where people would need rides to the airport, or a ride to the grocery store. Considering the 1990’s there were not a lot of taxi companies that operated in the city, however there were a few main ones that majority of people knew of. Moving forward into the 21st century, the taxi industry revolutionized with Uber bringing in a modern yet exceptional product development and design to the fore front of society which conveyed many benefits to all people of society. The success of their product development and design comes from the use of 3 product development factors which consist of speed, cost, and brand impact.  

At the end of a long day, or any special event, everyone deserves a special treat, especially when it comes to desert. Since social media has become a norm of society in today’s world, I have never gone by a day where I haven’t seen one of my friends or colleagues share a post of desert that they are having. Jennifer Grossman, owner of Irresistibly Delicious has established a successful at home business where she bakes various custom deserts and cakes and is known throughout the GTA. Many may think how Jennifer managed to grow her business since it is run and managed from home. Well the answer to that is the success of her business comes through her exceptional customer engagement tactics which she uses through social media platforms.

Live video is more popular than ever before. And with 47% of adults aged 22-45 not watching television, they’re getting their content elsewhere. Social media is replacing television; audiences still want to consume video. Nearly everyone has a device in their pocket allowing them to stream a live video. This is where talkshoplive™ comes in. Launched in March 2018, it’s the first live streaming, social buying and selling platform for anyone. The platform embraces the concept of live social eCommerce, allowing you to host your own streaming show, selling product and engaging with your customers at the same time.

Cédric Villani, French mathematician and politician, said in March 2018: “Artificial intelligence will be everywhere, like electricity.” (Source: Nouvel Observateur) Indeed, AI technologies are progressing rapidly, with countries like the USA and China investing massive amounts to develop the field. “Until recently, AI has proven itself by surpassing humans in terms of its analytical capacity and its ability to build relationships and bring out the “message” hiding behind a cluster of complex information. Data analysis and the determination of usage trends on social media are part of this trend […], says Alexandre Beaulieu, PhD Candidate. In the future, I believe that it’s the application of “generative” algorithms – those who, beyond analysis, specialize in creating new content – open the most possibilities. Chatbots, like those who assist the customer service, are the simplest expression. It’s not foolish to imagine a machine producing promotional material specific to each customer, who develops the argument most likely to join him, and who chose the best platform to do it. Or, I imagine that we will see more and more internal social networks of large companies to grow the knowledge accumulated by all resources over the years. So we could think of a robot that determines what problematic an employee is working, and sends solutions that exploit the work done elsewhere in the company that could have passed under the radar of this employee.” Regarding social media most specifically, the applications of AI are already multiple: choosing the right clothes, communication, data analysis, chatbot, market research, etc. Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI), a firm based in Ottawa, is a pioneer of market research and analysis, opinion research and real-time surveys using AI.

Technology and technological advancements move at a rapid pace. We now have more power in our pockets than ever before, and the possibilities seem endless. The Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been a fascinating concept of science fiction for decades, but now it’s a reality. As social media and technology continue to develop, other technologies will advance too, and organizations of all shapes and sizes will be affected – but how?

The modern workplace continues to evolve, in both technological advances and a shifting work culture. Companies across the globe are becoming more concerned with efficiency, and productivity, culminating in the quest for new opportunities for collaboration and resulting in employee engagement via internal social media. Social media can be effectively used internally within an organization to engage employees, the same way it is employed externally to engage customers. Increasingly, organizations are adopting internal social media platforms such as Workplace by Facebook to inspire symbiotic relationships of mutual support and trust. These platforms can help foster the necessary conditions for collaboration and facilitate cross-pollination of ideas and information throughout the organization.

I don’t know about you, but I do know that I can’t tell the future of anything, let alone social media. Trust me on this one, if I could, I would be super wealthy and be way more advanced. Unfortunately that isn’t the way it is, so your best chance with knowing the future of social media is to search and investigate new products on the market. After I did a lot of searching to determine what I would write about this week, I decided to go with the company that I believe has been a pioneer in e-marketing since the beginning. Constant Contact is an email-marketing program that helps small businesses succeed and excel in the online world. Back in the day when email programs were only used to view emails from friends, the people at Constant Contact knew there could be so much more to it. Constant Contact was founded as “Roving Software” in 1995 and set up shop in Brookline, Massachusetts. Randy Parker was the brains behind this very valuable marketing tool that helps small businesses succeed against the large businesses out there.

IBM has always stayed ahead of the game. As one of the world’s biggest technological companies, they were forecasting the rise of social media and immediately jumped on the opportunity.  Back in 2007, they foresaw how much of an impact social media was having on the world. They launched Lotus Connections, a product that combined five social networking applications into one package. Since it was aimed at the corporate social and collaborative environment, the apps focused around tools that allowed workers to communicate with each other via blogs, profiles, and common community areas. This was the start of an enterprise-wide integration and employees would have access for more information to collaborate with. IBM LotusLive has become IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. It’s used for business grade file sharing, social networking, communities, online meetings, instant messaging, email and calendar. There is also a productivity center that employees can edit documents in real time. Keeping employees involved has helped with successful organizational strategy.

Social Media has become a widespread way of marketing for organizations. While many of us have used social media in a variety of ways, the question is what are some best practices in using social media? Now and in the future? I decided to pull together a few sources to see what others are saying about best practices in social media. Read on and decide for yourself. In a How to Guide by Lithium, 10 Best Practices in Social Media Marketing, summarizes 10 key ways to use social media in effective ways. These ten suggestions include: respond promptly, engage your organization, share conversations, use data to decide when to post, talk with your customers, optimize your efforts, make technology your friend, measure your success, learn about your customers, and enjoy the process!

Mention the brand Adidas, and people all over the world will think of those three stripes. The brand is synonymous with style and sport, and Adidas has done an incredible job of breaking into both the athletic and personal style retail categories. So how does one of the biggest brands in the world ensure that it stays on top? The answer’s easy: social media.

Data collection and artificial intelligence can be very disconcerting to social media users. Regardless of how consumers feel about the common availability of their personal information, it is often unavoidable when one chooses to participate in online activity. There are many well-know negative impacts of the publication of personal information; however, there is an almost endless list of positives available to consumers when their information is made available to technology. Google’s ability to reroute drivers proactively in the case of an upcoming incident helps drivers get from A to B as quickly as possible. how does it work? It relies on Google’s ability to monitor the location, speed, and direction of travel of almost all drivers, anywhere in North America, by tracking drivers’ cell phones in a passive, undetectable manor. This is a great example of how personal information being made public, and it’s combination with powerful artificial intelligence software networks, can provide major benefits to those who can tolerate the risk.

Food Bloggers of Canada (FBC) is a business that works to help build the food blogging community in Canada. Some of the ways they do this by sharing the content of Canadian food bloggers on their social media platforms, running a food blogging conference, and connecting food bloggers with brands to create sponsored posts.

The use of social media continues to grow at a rapid pace. Sometimes it feels like I just get used to a few social media tools and then all of a sudden, there are new ones to learn about and explore. Staying on top of all the possibilities can be daunting. I’m sure many of us wonder – what is the future of social media? Ash Read of Buffer, in an article “The Future of Social Media (And How to Prepare For It): The State of Social Media 2016 Report” describes three key social media takeaways to guide social media efforts for 2017 – focus on video, spend time on Facebook and use social media to pay attention to customer support. The article also focuses on objectives and challenges, insights for marketers, and social media role evolution.  

It’s inevitable. The future of social media is going to be bigger and greater. I can’t say it is coming because it is already here, so if you are a business, company or person who isn’t signed up to one of the many social media platforms, you are already falling behind. So much happens on social media – the good, bad and ugly – but it is up to you on how you are going to use it and the contributions you are going to make to the greater conversations. People give social media a bad rap because there is a lot of negative that goes on with it, but truthfully, it’s how you interact with it, what you share, and who you interact with that makes the platform you choose really amazing. If you look for the bad, you’ll find it. If you look for the good, you’ll find it and hopefully be amazed at the power these channels have.

We’ve known this for a while now – humans have a need to be social.  They have a need to feel seen, heard and valued.  They have a need to connect with their fellow humans and a need to feel they are a part of something greater than themselves.  Social media platforms happen to be a perfect way to fulfill a lot of those needs.   Because of this, and the fact that it is open and readily available to anyone, it tends to attract people from all walks of life.  It is a mirror, reflecting back to us the behaviours, views, sentiments, predilections, fears, dreams, and values that are present in the collective human sphere at any given time.  Some of those things, when we see them, can cause us utter disgust.   Other things might inspire us to change, while others still might comfort us.  Social media seems to have become a very useful and valuable tool in self-awareness and personal growth. “Having knowledge of our strengths and weaknesses gives us the ability to use our strengths at opportune times and work on our weaknesses when we can. As we understand ourselves better, we can also understand others. Through this wisdom and understanding, we uplift each other.” 

Organizations of all sizes have seen immense success in the use and integration of social media. The tools, data, and many other capabilities that these platforms provide, have shown to deliver significant benefits for any organization’s overall performance. Despite all the known qualities social media platforms have to offer, the true reason these organizations see positive results is because of the proper application, structure, management, overall strategy and its effectiveness when it comes to integrating social media across the whole organization. We have seen how social media can benefit organizations in a variety of areas, but once social media has been integrated across the whole organization and working in unison, we can also see more powerful and substantial results.

“The future is always virtual and some things that may seem imminent or inevitable never actually happen. Fortunately, our ability to survive the future is not predicated on our capacity for prediction, although, and on those much more rare occasions, something remarkable does come staring the future deep in the eyes and challenging everything that it seems to promise.”     Luke Robert Mason, Ethereal Summit, May 19, 2017, Brooklin, NY The purpose of this case study is to look at the future impact of social media on organizations. The premise is an expected progression of social media use integration with other integrated information technology–based systems will increase organizational performance. It is a popular opinion that despite enormous potential, most organizations have failed to capitalize on inter-stakeholder collaboration because the elusive but profound emotional factor, being able to trust partners without fear of exploitation, is an almost impossible obstacle to overcome in most existing business-to-business transactions today. The premise then is that the trust factor is likely to continue to be a hurdle in the future. The premise is that through social media integration, collaboration on improvements to product and process performance are possible at all levels and offer the opportunity for substantial benefits. The above are the premises behind the examination of the future impact of social media on organizations. Let’s first be clear: what social media integration platforms are being put forth to change the nature of knowledge work and management inside organizations? In 2016, products like Jive, IBM Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco Quad, Microsoft Yammer, Google Apps for Work, Facebook at Work, Facebook Messenger, etc. were indeed being used to improve performance and foster innovation. In 2017, Slack for chat, JIRA for task and issue tracking, CONFLUENCE for wiki, and GOOGLE DOCS for document editing and management are being integrated rapidly in transformative technology businesses. Social software integration will become a vital tool for transforming virtually every part of business operations, from product development to human resources, marketing, customer service and sales – in a sense becoming the new intra-operating system for the twenty-first century organization. But what if it is already recognized there are clear limitations on today’s suite of tools? And what about that small matter of trust – just what are the economic issues (apart from the ethical ones) about the importance of trust in business? Let’s define trust as the expectation the other party will… Read more »

Recently I was invited over to my Friend Jeff’s for dinner. He mentioned that he recently had purchased a new VR (Virtual Reality) system and thought, while the kids were playing after dinner, the adults could take turns exploring his new toy. I was hesitant at first, as some of the POV video games makes me feel light headed and unbalanced. I’m not one to turn down an opportunity to try new technology, so after setting up all the proximity sensors, I slipped on the Oculus system and was immediately transported to another world. VR and AR (Augmented Reality) are two technologies that are changing how social media adapts and individualizes experiencesfor consumers. While the experience wasn’t tailored to me, I did get a first-hand look at how realistic the experience can be through VR. The individualization of experiences for consumers is setting the tone for new ways to use technology. One company in the hospitality industry that has done this is Marriott International. A massive hospitality and entertainment company. They have long been using social media to help drive business performance but they also use it to help create experiences for their guests. Listening to their guests’ needs helps Marriott ensure that the guests’ every wish is fulfilled while they are in their care.

You may have heard about Snapchat, the mobile app that allows users to capture videos and pictures that appear for a maximum of 10 seconds, and then it disappears. This instant messaging app created by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, and Reggie Brown became increasingly popular within a few months of its launch and is now a leading platform for social media. What is more interesting is how Snapchat itself uses social media in its day-to-day functioning. The increase of social media in today’s society has led to an increase in opportunities organization-wide collaboration and sharing information, which is exactly how Snapchat has taken advantage of social media. It ‘s hard to know how businesses will use social media in the future; however, there are a few predictions about how Snapchat will possibly use social media in its next phases of evolution.

Social media for business purposes has been a main staple of marketing for many years now. As each new trend and each new platform is released, companies have scrambled to be at the forefront. Over the years we have seen many success stories and many disasters come of social media, but the fact is it isn’t going to go away. Truth be told, social media advertising budgets have doubled over the past 2 years and ad spending has ballooned to roughly $35 billion this year, according to Hootsuite. The future of social media will likely require marketers to rethink their current strategy. The move toward instant, in the moment news feeds, augmented reality, and posts that will disappear after 24 hours are changing the way we view social media. Businesses will have to become adept at following these trends if they want to stay in the game.

Nowadays social media marketing has become incredibly important for businesses all sizes. One reason behind marketers’ attention to social media is technology: new platforms, networks and apps. Another reason are people, who use social media to create, publish and share content. The same people are consumers, who share their thoughts about their experiences and are looking for new ones. So what does the future hold for the world of social media?

If MIT Professor Edward Lorenz hadn’t gone for a cup of coffee when he did fifty-six years ago, his 1972 seminal paper, ”Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?” [1] may not have been written, Robert Redford may not have played a wise gambler in the 1990’s movie “Havanna”, Ashton Kutcher may not have travelled back in time in his 2004 movie, “The Butterfly Effect” to fix his childhood, and perhaps, least of all, chaos theory [2] may not have been discovered. For those unfamiliar with Professor Lorenz’s story, on that day in 1961, Lorenz was repeating a simulation he’d run earlier — but this time he rounded off one variable, from 0.506127 to 0.506, of the experiment’s 12 variables, representing things like temperature and wind speed to simulate weather predictability. To his surprise, when he got back after coffee, that tiny, tiny alteration (a 0.000127 difference) drastically transformed the whole pattern his program produced, over two months of simulated weather. “It was philosophically very shocking,” [3]  says Steven Strogatz, a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell and author of Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos. “Determinism” [4] was equated with predictability before Lorenz. After Lorenz, we came to see that determinism might give you short-term predictability, but in the long run, things could be unpredictable. That’s what we associate with the word ‘chaos.’ ” How does this lesson, that a minute change in variables can have an enormous impact in outcome, affect business product launches today? Let’s look at a recent failed social media effort to access millenials’ wallets. On the surface, it was a winner: the 2014 non-profit industry celebrated a huge success with its major international ALS fundraising movement, “The Ice Bucket Challenge”. The program went viral, raised over $115 million in donations, and attracted 2.5 million new donors [5]. Naturally, the ALS non-profits ran the same program again in 2015, but to their surprise, raised only $500,000, or 0.00434783% of 2014’s donations. So what was the minute variable that had changed in just over a year to cause the failed fundraising? In Philip Haid’s article, The Ice Bucket Challenge Part 2: What we can learn from why it didn’t work [6], he suggests the ALS non-profits forgot to consider the “why” variable in the program’s 2015 success. “Most people don’t interact with charities on a daily basis the way they do with their favorite brands, so it isn’t easy… Read more »