I worked with the Advertising Educational Foundation & Xavier University to develop a presentation for students and academics in marketing | Presentation took place on October 9th, 2014 (a day before my 31st birthday)

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The Creative & Digital Media Landscape Beyond 2030
The Future of Social Media
9.10.14

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Better Understanding the Creative & Digital Media Landscape
Social Media Today

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Social Media is Being Leveraged in Increasingly More Diverse Ways
To Express
Personal chatter, humor and wit, activism, personal
announcements
To Sell
Commercial usage, customer service, brand image
To Reassure
Governments, politicians, state initiatives, damage
control, announcements
Algorithm-Driven
Bots, newsfeeds, machine-driven

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It’s Being Adopted Across the Age Spectrum
In May 2013, 74% of women were users
of social networking sites, compared
with 62% of men. Between February
2005 and August 2006, the use of social
networking sites among young adult
internet users ages 18-29 jumped from
9% to 49%

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It’s Being Adopted Across the Racial Spectrum
Minority adoption of technology is
gradually overtaking usage by the wider
population: Among the biggest drivers of
these increases are spikes in technology
adoption among foreign-born Latinos and
Spanish-dominant Latinos.
3 key demographic characteristics are
correlated with technology adoption:
• Life Stage: Young people ages 18 to 29 have higher adoption
rates than those ages 65 and older.
• Education: Adoption rates are higher for those with some
college experience than those with less than a high school
diploma.
• Family Income: There is a correlation between with
technology adoption–those with higher incomes also have
higher adoption rates than those with lower incomes.

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Contextualizing the
Future of Social Media
Better Understanding the Creative & Digital Media Landscape

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Understanding the Cultural Context of the Future
TODAY 2030 2050
European Union Institute for Security Studies “Citizens in an Interconnected and Polycentric World”
National Intelligence Council “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”

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Contextualizing Technological Innovation

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Better Understanding the Creative & Digital Media Landscape
4 Trends Shaping the
Future of Social Media

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We’re witnessing the emergence of a global, immersive,
invisible, ambient networked computing environment
Invisibility

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INVISIBILITY
“Hundreds of experts agree that trends now underway will make the internet
more important even as it becomes less visible in daily life. They believe it
will become more “like electricity” and produce vastly greater human and
machine connectivity that will change everything from personal interactions
to the decisions made by governments around the world.“
PEW Research Center, Digital Life in 2025

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Microsoft believes
technology is becoming
more natural and intuitive.
Leveraging gestural and
voice recognition, their
Natural User Interface
(NUI) projects focus on
future computer paradigms
by keeping the human
user in mind.
Examples of Invisibility
Koubachi is a plant
sensor for indoor plants.
The hardware/software
system brings
customers’ plants to the
internet to help plants
live longer & grow faster.
Browser add-ons like
Ghostery and AdBlock Plus
help users maintain
anonymity while they browse
the Internet. We can expect
more products to emerge,
some of which we will need
to pay for, to help us manage
our privacy and the
information being gathered.
“LG is promoting a future
where all home appliances
talk to each other, and to
you. The idea of appliances
contacting their owners
doesn't sit well with some...
In the future, refrigerators
may use some type of
tagging technology to alert
the appliance automatically
to the presence of food that
might go bad, he said. The
fridge then, of course, could
text its owner to make sure
the sour food wasn't
consumed.”
CNN.com, When
Refrigerators Tweet and
Washing Machines Text

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Humanization of
Brands
Consumers are watching brands try to be their
friends with a healthy level of skepticism

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“Brands will never be your friends because they are trying to sell you.”
Tyler Tangalin Social Media Community Manager @ Peter Mayer

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Humanization of Brands
The business landscape
saw a dramatic rise in
Corporate Social
Responsibility programs
around 2010. Since then,
social media has
perpetuated what is
sometimes referred to as
the ‘humanization of
brands’.
Today’s consumers expect brands to ‘feel human’. While much of this
depends on in-store experience and the brand ‘voice’ on social media, some
brands are emboldened to vocalize their opinion on a variety of social
issues.

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Chipotle positions itself
against the
industrialization of food.
Before making a big
statement on TV, they
were talking about food
integrity (i.e. anti-biotics,
organic food).
Humanization of Brands
CVS boldly decides to
stop selling cigarettes,
solidifying its
commitment to health
and asking smokers to
join them along the way.
Chik-fil-A took a
controversial stance against
gay marriage in a statement
made by its CEO.
Acknowledging the long-term
damaging impact of these
statements, the brand is now
working to counter their
position by being more
‘urban’ and forming ties with
gay rights advocacy group
Campus Pride.
When the FDA rejected
Prop37, a bill mandating
the labeling of foods that
contain GMO’s, retailer
Whole Foods made a bold
gesture by assuring their
customers that the store
itself will label products with
GMO.

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Monetizing Openness
Competition between open-source and closed eco-systems
is spilling out of tech into other industries

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Monetizing Openness
Without these two opposing forces, the technology
industry would cease to be what it is.
Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Google’s Android are
traditionally open source operating systems
Apple, Oracle, IBM, HP, and Microsoft are traditionally
not, but they are gradually targeting outsiders through
open-source products.

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The two opposing forces are creating a development
culture where code and data is kept free, but everything is
trackable and quantifiable.
Digital Tools, Built by the Average Person: open source
makes it easy to skirt bureaucracy to get started on your
projects by starting with the community editions of most
open source software.
Monetizing Openness

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Driven by new research in the fields of biology and neuroscience, we are starting to see
vivid links between computer and neural systems. We are expecting to see an uptake in
wearable technology, the production of bionic limbs, and 3D printed organs as new research
uncovers new realities about our bodies.

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Tesla is opening their
patents so that the thinking
behind their patents will be
accessible and useable to
all. They are placing a
focus on battery
technology, which is
critical for the
advancement of green
tech and alternative
energy.
Monetizing Openness
Github is the open-source
community’s
Wikipedia. Source code
is shared freely, enabling
people all over the world
to be digitally creative. It
is a staple site amongst
the open-source
software community for
developers.
“Intellectual
property is an
important legal and
cultural issue.
Society as a whole
has complex issues
to face here: private
ownership vs. open
source, and so on.”
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
“The problem with the open
source community is that it
is, by design, not owed
anything for its work, yet
expects utmost deference to
be paid. To be clear, Linux
could have never gotten off
the ground without the
community that surrounded
it. But that does not mean
that every business based
on open source tools
(provided that business
returns the various and
direct changes to open
source code when
applicable) must grovel at
the feet of a self-designated
cabal of protectors. The
same can be said of 3D
printing.”
John Biggs, TechCrunch

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Plug ‘n’ Go
Tech advancements are re-defining the
relationship of identity to machine

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Plug ‘n’ Go
Cloud computing, biometrics, and artificial intelligence
are expected to transform how people and machines
interact.
Our identity will become a highly mobile construct that
can plug into a variety of “devices” which (beyond the
phone) might include the home and automobile.
You’ll be able to take your social content, history, and
personal data wherever you want to take it.

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“Identity will become the most valuable commodity for citizens in the future and it will primarily exist
online. Ideally, all people would have the incredible self-awareness to closely manage their online
identities and the virtual lives they lead. Monitoring and shaping them from an early age so as not to limit
their opportunities in later life.”
Eric Schmidt, The Future of Identity, Citizenship and Reporting

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Sharing Economy
platforms have
reconfigured our
relationship to material
possessions, particularly
larger purchases like
transportation, power
tools, and hotel
bookings.
Plug ‘n’ Go
Facebook Connect was
introduced to the web to
expand the company’s
footprint in the online
space. Instead of
creating seperate
accounts for each site
visited, you can just
plug-in your FB account
and engage.
Apple’s Touch ID uses the
fingerprint scanner on the
iPhone 5s to authenticate the
user and allow access and to
make purchases on iTunes.
With the launch of iOS 8 and
the new iPhones, Apple
introduced Apple Pay, which
combines a NFC chip on the
phone and Touch ID for secure
payments. Retail stores and
banks are installing readers so
that users can use their
accounts through their phone
for payments.
“Due to easier access to data,
identity’s meaning increasingly
relates to the multiple providers
and apps that an individual
maintains. But today, users are
accessing organizational
resource from outside the
firewall, on more devices. More
users are telecommuting. Users
may have a desktop, a laptop and
a smartphone. The smartphones
may be either company owned or
employee owned. There are more
cloud applications being used,
adding to the complexity of
managing identity and access.
There’s now more tied to the
professional’s identity than just
passwords and permissions, and
companies are trying to mine
value out of that data.”
Klint Finley, writer at
SiliconAngle

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Wrap up
Working in Social
Media

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Skills for the Future of Social Media
Working in social media today means you are doing one of 3 things:
1. Community Managers take notes, gauge
the community’s temperature, follow
changing interests, identify influencers,
post responses/prompts
2. Creatives create the content
3. Strategists analyze the community. They
might do scenario-planning,
Some agencies believe in collapsing these
responsibilities while others want to parse them out.

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The growth of social media is driven by two core human needs: the
need to connect and communicate
What Will Never Change About Social Media

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THANK YOU
@plusaziz