year in review

What were the biggest stories in social media and communication this year? Plenty to choose from. We saw theemergence of Pinterest, which in a few short months went from a hobbyist site to a major player and one that individuals and brands now develop strategies around. Facebook bought Instagram for a cool 1 billion dollars. In just the past few days,Instagram’s new privacy policy highlighted just how much we mistrust Facebook. It has truly become the network we love to hate, and the one we are not even close to cutting loose. LinkedIn revamped it’s site and added many user-friendly features. And it’s not surprise that with the popularity of Twitter, that the platform reached 200 million users this year.

But the rise of visual social media is key, in that we saw that more people want to look at video and photos versus reading blog posts. Even tweets, at 140 characters are too long to hold our attention. I suspect we will see visual apps rise in popularity in 2013, based on the significance gained this year.

Social media has also infiltrated the hiring process with 92% of employers using social media to find talent. That’s a staggering number, but what’s even more significant is the number of hiring managers who use social media for candidate background checks. These trends are leading us to believe that our online reputation will grow to act more as our social currency in what some have called The Reputation Economy.

In terms of sports, we’ve seen Major League Baseball establisha fan cave and social media nights in most ball parks. The NFL allowed players to tweet live during the Pro Bowl. The LA Kingscontinue to set standards for sports brands. And athletic programs across the nation struggled to keep their student-athletes in-line, as many teams and players landed in hot water for inappropriate tweets or posts. My work of providing social media and reputation management education, could not have come at a better time!

What was evident this year is that no matter what people may say about Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, Google+ and more, social media will only continue to evolve. It certainly will not disappear. With more people integrating these networks into their daily lives, it’s no wonder brands and businesses are scrambling to find ways to reach out to customers and even urging their top executives to start tweeting.

Amidst all of this, I find myself working to help people and businesses better communicate with you. My goal is to infuse communication with positivity and purpose. Positivity, because goodness knows we need to receive more uplifting messages against the negativity that seems to be ever-present in the media today. And Purpose, because I want people to really think about what we say to each other. If there is no point in sharing that photo, making that comment or sending that tweet, then why do it? Why? It’s a question we should ask ourselves more often, and one which was not asked enough in 2012.

We learned a lot in 2012 about the limits and boundaries of social networks and what we need to do to encourage more meaningful interaction online…communication that will nurture your reputation and allow you to build a strong network of stellar people. I can only imagine what will happen in 2013. Buckle up!