Abrams Research Blog

Although social media has been used by the likes of students and musicians for almost a decade (oh hey, MySpace!), only within the last few years has it been embraced by international and corporate communities. The late ‘aughts’—is that what we’re calling them?—brought about a social media explosion, pushing us into 2010, where its popularity continues to grow, monitoring and analytics technologies have been vastly improved, and social media-based marketing reaches becomes the norm. What a perfect time, then, to discuss where social media is headed!

This week, an interesting article by Freddie Laker in AdAge featured 11 social media predictions for 2012. Ranging from the obvious—product/venue ratings becoming the norm—to the more extrapolated—social media augmented reality overtaking reality as we know it—Laker offers a comprehensive overview of what 2012 could really be like, assuming, that is, that the earth isn’t destroyed by the apocalypse. Here’s a quick rundown of his most interesting/important points. read more »

You’ve heard it before: “Too many cooks in the kitchen spoil the broth.” But for Wikipedia, too many cooks may not be such a bad thing. Common sense recognizes the collective wisdom of the group; the more who contribute, balance and check, the (hopefully) better the final outcome. Common sense also dictates that a website whose traffic dominates Yahoo, Google and MSN should be taken seriously.

To test the “Wikipedia Effect” (how public opinion forms a Wikipedia article and how Wikipedia affects search engine results), Marcia Watson DiStaso and Marcus Messener of The Institute for Public Relations analyzed the wiki’s influence on the social media platforms of 10 of the most visible U.S. companies.

What did they find? read more »

After the launch of Google Buzz and your personal information’s unexpected debut into high society, you may be tempted to conclude that February has not been the best of months for social media. But rest assured, Google is Google and with enough consumer ire the kinks will be worked out and your focus will eventually shift back to where it should be, on Google Logos.

In the meantime, there has been some good news for Twitter. The best being, of course, that the Dalai Lama now has a Twitter account. So with the Vatican, the Dalai Lama (and as of February 22, Lil’ Wayne) all official members, the implications of this exponential growth become clearer. According to the Neilson Company’s recent report, social media use has grown 82% in the last year alone. Twitter boasts 50 million messages a day, up from 5,000 in 2007. Someone is obviously paying attention. read more »

Courtesy of A&E

Would you pay a one-time charge of $100 to use a job-networking site? $10? How about $15,000? OneWire, a New York job-networking start up, bets that you will. Well, that a Wall Street firm will. With more than 61 firms and 40,000 individual candidates already on board, the counterintuitive notion of a business paying for services currently offered for free elsewhere may not be so far-fetched.

Until now, LinkedIn has been considered the dominant force in the world of job-networking, providing professionals with a platform to expand their business contacts. So what strategic innovation could be causing such a stir? OneWire claims that LinkedIn-inspired sites, by requiring individual users to search for job opportunities rather than streamlining the process and focusing on corporate recruiters, are simply approaching the situation from the wrong direction. read more »

I love how consumers have so much power at the tip of their fingers now. They contribute reviews, discussion, multimedia and a plethora of other types of content daily. The way consumers are utilizing the technologies available to them is uniquely shaping the internet in numerous ways. Iranians using Twitter to protest their presidential election shows us how users can truly innovate technologies. This influence that users are having online is beginning to permeate to other dimensions of the net. In particularly, the field of online search is drastically, for better or worse, going to change as a result of how we behave.

read more »