To say that 2011 was a big year for the media, technology and PR industries would be a huge understatement. We saw LinkedIn’s IPO, the firing of Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, the firing of Carol Bartz from Yahoo!, the launch of Google+, the unfortunate passing of Steve Jobs and much, much more.

Here are some predictions from several Bateman Group staffers, including yours truly, on the biggest trends and events we believe will unfold in the coming year.

Tyler Perry, Vice President

The Continuation of Page-Driven Journalism — Media properties are fighting for eyeballs, so we will continue to see ridiculous headlines and extensive coverage of the same five brands.

A Backlash on Daily Deals/Group Buying — Many brands are using this as a marketing tactic, but the increasing deal fatigue will make this less of an effective strategy. The incentive must be attached with other value.

More Companies “Doing Well by Doing Good” — Using the digital medium or gaming techniques to help people live better and help solve some of the global issues we are facing, but paralyzed to solve from a government leadership standpoint.

The Mobilization of Business Will Change the World of Journalism — It has already shifted the game with advertising, marketing, e-commerce and collaboration. Now that people are consuming more and more content on smartphones and tablets, will journalism shrink its content accordingly?

 

Lisa Melsted, Vice President

Corporate social media responsibilities will continue to fall on PR…but not forever — Social media responsibilities are increasingly being placed on PR firms and outside teams.  As companies try to figure out what their roles should be regarding social media and struggle with internal bandwidth for implementing these programs, those responsibilities will increasingly fall to their PR teams. This trend will likely be short lived however.  Much like the website building capabilities that fell onto PR and advertising firms with the advent of corporate websites in the late 90s and early 2000s, these responsibilities will likely be pulled back in-house over the next 3-5 years as more people build up expertise in social media and the responsibilities for corporate blogging, Tweeting, etc., become full-time jobs (much like website management). PR and ad firms will lead the way for now and should take advantage of this climate for the time being, but should not count on these programs (and revenue from them) to be within the purview of the outside firms forever.

Siri Will Disrupt the Way We Communicate — Apple’s voice recognition/search technology will begin with a slow build and then skyrocket and totally change the way we interact with our phones once again.

 

Rod McLeod, Senior Associate

TechCrunch takes a status hit, becomes a better publication — TechCrunch and ValleyWag were probably the first two tech blogs that I read when I began working in the tech industry. I always found TechCrunch offered a pretty high level of quality and kept me up to date with trends I found interesting. And after a month of reading ValleyWag, I lost interest after I read a few too many articles that were written in poor taste.

I’m sure everyone has been keeping track of the recent CrunchFund debacle and the exodus of top brass like Michael Arrington, Paul Carr, MG Siegler and now Sarah Lacy, but I think that this will usher in a new era at TechCrunch. I never worked with any of the previous editors, but I’ve certainly heard stories of the rage of Michael Arrington from other PR colleagues (see the comment section on a previous Bateman Banter post for yourself), as well as first-hand stories from friends who work at top-tier startups. However, I have worked with a few of the younger writers in TechCrunch’s stable, and I only have positive things to say about them.

I think that TechCrunch will begin to take a more journalistic approach in 2012 and beyond. I’m talking embargos, no more blackmail or “revenge” and FULL disclosure – yes, I said the “D” word. While this won’t reverse the site’s horrid redesign, it will improve the quality of an already highly-regarded publication, and also make it easier to develop and foster real relationships with TechCrunch writers.

 

Amy Ziari, Senior Associate

Competition will increase over “Celebrity” reporters — Jolie O’Dell goes to VentureBeat. Josh Constine and Sarah Perez to TechCrunch. Robert McMillan to WIRED. Ashlee Vance (an author of one of my favorite books about Silicon Valley) to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Blogs and news outlets are in a feverish race to add reporters that come with their own loyal audience – and personal panache – into their fold. Expect to see more of this in 2012 as competition heats up among the top technology, business and venture news outlets to acquire the same “celebrity” writing talent. It’s not just about the words anymore.

Bill Bourdon, Senior Vice President

Creating a Google+ Business Strategy Will Not Be a Top Priority — Google recently launched Google+ brand pages, which generated a good amount of fanfare and positive reviews in true Google fashion. But here’s the rub: investing time and resources in Google+ will not be a big priority for businesses in 2012.  At least it shouldn’t be. It doesn’t matter if Google+ is better or even if the SEO value of Google+ brand pages is superior to Facebook. It ultimately boils down to market share, and Google was just too late to the consumer social media game to engage a critical mass of users, let alone the early adopters. I don’t think Google+ will be shut down next year – there’s too much at stake. But the service will definitely need to reinvent itself to become viable. Robert Scoble and others are predicting Google will extend its social software to enterprises that can use it to network and collaborate internally, akin to Yammer and Salesforce Chatter. Seems like a reasonable move to capitalize on their investment to me.

 

Elissa Ehrlich, Director

As Social Media Matures and Shakes Off Some of the Hype, PR Will Get Back to Basics — With the explosion of web content and social media engagement, PR has been increasingly viewed as the more valuable and strategic marketing function when compared to advertising. Indeed, PR is owning more and more the content companies push out to their audiences. Why? I feel its because we’re already engaged in a conversation with these constituencies and can communicate more authentically than our friends on the advertising side. The PR industry has been forced to reinvent itself in recent years and I think we’re almost done with the transformation. I do know this - PR pros are once again in high demand. We can’t find people fast enough and we’re turning down great new business leads due to lack of staff!  This is proof that the approach that many agencies are taking is working, and companies are finding value in the work that we do.

Social Media Fatigue Sets In – Already, it’s the same people on your Facebook news stream posting mundane updates, and no one cares all that much about Google+.  While social media will continue to be important for many brands, perhaps in 2012, we’ll get back to the basics and return our attention to securing quality media coverage in highly credibly publications, establishing our clients as true thought leaders in their industry sectors, and other “old fashioned” PR programs like placing keynote speaking engagements and pursuing awards.

Fred Bateman, CEO and Founder

Facebook will be bigger than Google — Facebook will go public and eclipse Google in market capitalization — perhaps permanently

Silicon Valley Will Be the Next Madison Avenue — Just as technology talent is finding its way to New York City, the reverse will also happen.  As Facebook and Twitter start generating more revenue, advertising and marketing talent will start heading West to cash in.

Cloud Computing Will Continue to Reinvigorate the Software Market — Business applications and data are moving to the cloud at a rapid pace and it’s not going to stop there. The day will come when companies outsource not only their software, but network infrastructure as well. The main beneficiaries will be the SaaS companies with the foresight and agility to go where the market is heading, not where it is today. Just as we’ve seen Salesforce, SuccessFactors, Qualys, Zuora, Taleo, NetSuite, Box and Workday grow into successful companies seemingly overnight, I predict there will be others to emerge to join this group, benefiting all of us who make our living from the tech sector, either directly or indirectly.

Consumerization of IT Will Continue to Impact All Corners of Technology — Soon, it will be standard across the software industry for all vendors, regardless of sector, to offer freemium or very low-end products as a point of entry for individuals or small businesses, including mobility, security and virtualization.

Now a little over a month since the launch of Google+ and the most buzzed about online service already has 25 million users, estimates ComScore. These stats mean Google+ is growing faster than Facebook and MySpace did in the early days. Further, according to a new survey from Bloomberg/YouGov, Google+ is on track to claim 22 percent of online U.S. adults in a year, which would place it second behind Facebook as the most-used social site – ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn.  Says the survey, Google+ has already snagged 13 percent of U.S. adults and will add 9 percent over the next year.

It’s no wonder why marketers are so excited about Google+, despite the fact that it’s not technically open to brands. Ford is among the shortlist of brands to test the platform, and understandably its audience is relatively small. At the time of this blog, 12,154 people had added Ford to their circles. This compares with 781,899 people following the brand on Facebook and 75,327 on Twitter.

As a marketer, I am personally a little nonplussed by all the hype around Google+. As a shareholder on the other hand, I love it.

I admit Google+ has some shiny new features that certainly hold promise for marketers once consumers sign onto the service en masse and actually stay on it. For example, Ford’s head of social media Scott Monty says the chat capability has potential for webinars, analyst calls, and even customer service uses for people to have a face-to-face experience with the brand. But it’s not clear whether Google+ brand profiles will support the same functionality for individual users. Just think about how powerful features like Circles could be in supporting audience segmentation and message customization. And potential integration with Google Analytics could give brands just the social ROI metrics they have been waiting for.

Like the Bloomberg/YouGov survey, I predict that adoption of Google+ will continue to grow if only because it has the advantage of being pretty seamlessly integrated into the overall Google ecosystem (search page, Google Docs, Chrome, etc.). This integration should conceivably increase the likelihood that Google search users will check in regularly on Google+. But what will it take for the masses to stay there?  Apparently 31 percent of users polled in the Bloomberg/YouGov survey said they have already abandoned their accounts or not written any posts yet on the site.

As a PR practitioner who spends a large part of the day searching for and reading news from my personalized iGoogle news page,  I check in more frequently on Google+ because the icon is an eye’s distance away, but still spend considerably more time on Facebook and Twitter. This is because the content and interactions I have on those sites are more valuable to me. Although truth be told, I use both Facebook and Twitter increasingly less and less. This brings me to the premise of this post.

Drumroll please.

Above all else, when developing their social media strategies, marketers must remember that the quality of the content will always trump the quality of the platform. This holds particularly true in an era of social media fatigue when consumers are growing tired of how brands are communicating to them via social channels. As Tom Fishburne poignantly said in his recent blog about social fatigue, “It’s not enough for communication to be good for the brand. It has to be good for the consumer.”

So, will social media fatigue kill Google+? Given its steady rise, innovative features, and strong base of early adopters who are charting purposeful best practices, the answer is probably not. However, a good platform with a strong following does not a successful social media program make. At Bateman Group we are admittedly still wrapping our heads around Google+ and formulating our ideas on where, if at all right now it should be used with clients. Given the service is still very much in early adoption mode, it’s currently better suited for most of our clients to communicate with and engage their respective industry influencers versus their direct buyers. Hangout, for example, offers a new twist on how we can engage with influencers but only time will tell if the feature poses too big of a cultural shift to become a mainstream anytime soon.

We’d love to hear from other PR and marketing professionals about how they have begun to incorporate Google+ into their mix of social media tools.

Follow Bill Bourdon on Twitter @bbourdon.

I was a little bit disappointed that I dropped the ball on getting a Google+ invite on the day of the launch, but was finally granted access to the site yesterday around 5:00 p.m. and have been tinkering with it ever since. I still don’t quite know what exactly the site is trying to do (and I bet there will be many pivots moving forward), but I am very excited about its potential.

When you "Hangout," be sure that you're well dressed - at least the top half

While social media has raised the Internet to a whole new level, I’ve been hearing rumblings that it’s become too closed. Content curation is certainly the next iteration of the Web. While it has obvious benefits around filtering through all the noise, it also has potential to take away from the Web’s original mission of free flowing information and idea sharing. If all of your information was fed to you by your network, wouldn’t your scope (and your overall knowledge) be limited?

Google+ is exciting because it gives you the tightest network possible of close friends and colleagues, while allowing you to expand your network by interests and what you share. And when you think about the number of Web properties that Google has (Google.com, Gmail, Picasa, Google Voice, YouTube etc.), this has the potential to dwarf what Facebook is doing to make itself the Web destination.

Here are a few of my initial thoughts:

• More personal than Facebook: This is the most personal social media site since you need to have a person’s email address to add/invite them into your circle (Yes, there is a good search functionality, but many people are going to add people based on contact information). How many of your Facebook friends’ emails do you have? At most, I probably have about 20 percent, and that 20 percent is much more important to me than the other 80.

• Control over your content: As I mentioned above, when you post to your stream, you can control which of your “circles” sees the information, and you also have the option to make it public to anyone on Google+. A friend pointed out to me yesterday that Facebook has this feature, as well (which I never knew about), but I don’t know anyone who shares their information beyond their own personal network. This puts privacy controls at your fingertips every time you share a post.

• Ability to share publicly: One of my first reactions was that this has an old school AOL style chat room feel to it (Sam Diaz beat me to the punch in publishing this). This is the first social site that has come out in the long time where you can chat with a group of friends and people you don’t know. During the AOL days, you could join chat rooms based on random interests, trade “data” and download free music during the 90s if you knew where to look. To get all of the aforementioned things, I go to specialized sites or forums. Google+ puts it all in one place!

• Hangout function: “Hangout” is where Google+ gets interesting, and also where the list of competitors grows. You can have a regular group chat, a video conference, watch YouTube videos together or do all three things simultaneously! And once YouTube integrates live movie streaming (you know that has to be in the works), you’ll be able to watch movies with your friends across the world while chatting simultaneously. This would be a true disruptor in the streaming space, because of the added “group” functionality, and a service that cannot easily be built into services like Hulu, Netflix and even iTunes.

• The future of business meetings? My colleague, Amy Ziari, just raised the point that Google+ could be great for business too. For client facing businesses like PR, you have to have multiple accounts on various sites, conference lines, etc. to accommodate various meetings and presentations. Add Google Docs, Google Voice and Wave into Google+ and you have a one stop shop for your next client meeting or analyst presentation. The convenience of one destination that has all of these features would be pretty amazing when compared to the number of dial-ins, links and access codes that are necessary for one meeting.

Google has tried various social media products over the past few years that have failed miserably – Buzz and Wave come to mind. People have been complaining that Google has not produced anything truly innovative since Gmail, but the disruptive potential of Google+ is simply astounding. Google just threw down the gauntlet. Facebook, Apple, et al – your move.

Another week, another ethics scandal here in Silly Valley…

Last week we were all a-Twitter about a PR debacle featuring Facebook and PR firm Burson-Marsteller each throwing mutual blame on the other for a smear campaign that was undertaken against Google. The campaign in question?  Planting stories with the press about Google invading people’s privacy and encouraging influencers to dig into the company’s privacy policies in an attempt to divert some of the negative attention related to privacy away from themselves.  Burson got caught with its pants down when a blogger exposed them and The Daily Beast broke the story, accusing Burson of starting a whisper campaign against Google.

This is ugly on so many levels, not the least of which is how it undermines the already tenuous relationship that we as PR practitioners have with reporters. We have a symbiotic, but sometimes tenuous relationship with each other already—and for a supposedly “world-class” PR firm to be caught planting smear campaigns on behalf of a client doesn’t help those of us who do honest work on behalf of our clients on a daily basis.

This one should be pretty simple, folks.  Don’t spread mistruths, don’t work with companies who want to hire you just to muck rake against others.  I’m sure every PR firm in Silicon Valley and elsewhere can tell you stories about potential clients that have come to them with “projects” that are not on the up-and-up.  I know we’ve gotten calls like that before—and we’ve turned them down.  And if you do have the lack of principle to take such an assignment, at least own up to it when you’re caught (and you will be caught eventually). And then don’t throw the client under the bus to deflect blame. (Both Facebook and Burson are now trying to throw each other under the bus, each blaming the other for the incident—in the words of my 10-year old self: “How gross.”)

I’d like to think the majority of us who do practice PR for a living go about promoting our clients and their products in an ethical way. Does that include presenting them in the best light possible? Sure, but I’m not about to lie or spread rumors about other companies on behalf of a client.

It’s an industry cliché that PR is all about “relationships,” but when it comes down to it, it often is.  When we are fortunate enough to be able to build relationships with the reporters we work with, it’s because we’ve put a lot of time and effort into doing so and because those reporters know that we can be relied upon to give them the stories they need. They trust us to do that.  As with any relationship, trust is key. Breach that trust by lying or cheating or not being reliable and there goes the relationship.

As embarrassing an episode as this is for our industry as a whole, it’s both Burson-Marsteller and Facebook’s reputations that will ultimately suffer. I suspect Facebook will recover faster—Mark Zuckerberg has already proved himself to be a Teflon executive despite the company’s controversial beginnings and Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of him as a sniveling weasel in The Social Network. As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out, Facebook’s deflection of this situation is smart and they’ll come out relatively unscathed because the company is a bell weather of the second Internet boom and a part of the fabric of the tangled Web. This despite the fact that the company has an all too well-documented habit of not always doing the right thing.

Instead, it’s the PR firm that will likely end up taking most of the heat for the client, which is unfortunate because each party is equally to blame.  For Burson, it’s going to take a long time until reporters look kindly on pitches they receive from anyone with a Burson-Marsteller address again.  For a firm whose purpose is to manage reputations, they should have known better—theirs will be stained now for quite some time.

Below is the eagerly anticipated third edition of the Bateman Buzz Meter, our ranking of recent newsworthy events based on PR and Social Media effectiveness. Our goal is to publish a new Buzz Meter every six weeks; however, the holidays, new business pursuits and 2010 client planning meetings conspired against us this time. Apologies to all our readers desparate for their Bateman Buzz Meter fix. As always, please comment on any current news headlines or PR stunts you think are worthy of the Buzz Meter.

(Remember to click on the image to view it in full screen)

Welcome to the second edition of the Bateman Buzz Meter, our take on the best and worst from the last 6 weeks. Reply in the comments if you came across some news or PR stunts that you think should have been included.

(Click on the image to view it in full screen)