The Fastest Talking Guy in Social Media Tells Us Where All of This Might Be Going

Jackie Peters | Digital Life, General, Interactive Marketing, Marketing, Mobile Internet, Mobile Marketing, Social Media, Viral Marketing, WOM, Web-centeric | Thursday May 22 2008

A guest post I contributed to Mashable, see the whole story here: http://mashable.com/2008/05/22/future-of-social-media/

I’m here at day two of the Executing Social Media conference in Pasadena, CA. Blogger, PR stuntman, and social media maven Peter Shankman gave a very energetic keynote on how the social web is changing the way we do business and make money. Peter is CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc. and has recently launched Help A Reporter Out (HARO,) a service that helps journalists connect with sources.

Peter prefaced his entire presentation by telling us the problem with predictions; he played a short clip from the movie Back to the Future 2, which was released in 1987. According to the film, in 2010 we would have a fax machine in every room – the Internet hadn’t proliferated yet and fax machines were what the writers could envision.

That out of the way, Peter went on to share with us a few predictions he has about the future in regards to social media and technology. Peter sees an information overload starting to occur. There are too many channels, tools and platforms out there. He sees a convergence into one tool that helps you manage your entire network from any device at any time and automates the process for you. He cites FriendFeed and Socialthing as an early entrées into the space.

But the future that Peter predicts includes not just life streaming, but life tracking, life sharing, and network-building. He builds a mental image for us: you are a business traveler leaving for a trip, as you enter the airport, your Bluetooth device signals a computer which prints your ticket and it’s ready for you when you arrive. Your status is automatically updated on all of your networks so people know you are getting ready to go somewhere. He stresses that it becomes more about recommendations and ideas coming from your trusted network, and much less about those coming from the traditional “restaurant reviewer” or “movie critic.” In fact, he mentions the upcoming demise of the newspaper world as we know it, with “reviewers and critics leading the trail into the darkness.”