Everything is Social—But Some of Us Are Sick of It.

In just three years, Social Media Week has expanded to 21 cities including San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong and São Paulo. As a newcomer to San Francisco, I had the pleasure of attending Social Media Week in person and online, since many of the hundreds of events were streamed live. Most of the sessions were held in New York, featuring categories for marketing, media and business but interestingly also for health and social and environmental change, proving that the latter topics are now firmly interwoven into social media.

From the overwhelming amount of different sessions here are five interesting reflections to share:

This is the year of Social TV & Second Screen
Although it’s still in the experimental phase, top players in the field say 2012 is going to be THE YEAR of social TV. Right now the market is highly fragmented with all the different players using their own apps and technologies, so consolidation and agreement upon a common platform must occur at some point.
The industry is waiting for content creators to actually make experiences for two screens and not just extend the one screen experience, which is currently the most common premise. This requires integrating the social elements into the TV show scripts from the beginning—a totally new idea for TV companies.

Licensing is still very far behind the whole second screen discussion and negotiations with content owners over content syndication on new platforms are going to be long and draining. On the other hand, advertisers are eagerly waiting to jump aboard and start engaging in the second screen discussion in a relevant way instead of just making noise.
So, in everybody's visions there is this two-screen, personalized TV experience – personalized between people watching in the same room, different shows and different times – but there is still a long way ahead of us.

Social technology humanized & the movement from e-commerce to s-commerce
What does the future of social technology look like? Jason Kinkaid from TechCrunch and Michoel Ogince from Big Fuel had an interesting discussion on the topic. Ogince stated that so far social technology has failed to a significant extent to mimic complex human behavior. What does this mean, then? Here’s an example:

Two people meet in a workplace, chat about work-related issues and get along well. Then they become friends on Facebook and all of a sudden the other one starts getting all these updates about the other's snowboarding hobby that he is not interested in at all. So the communication on the social platform doesn't cohere with their real-life communication.

The next step is to tackle problems like this to get the social technology more humanized, so that the conversations you have online mirror the ones you would have offline with specific categories of people in your life. And mobility is an important part of this since humans are mobile by nature.

Kinkaid and Ogince also discussed the emergence of social commerce technologies, referring not only to sharing e-commerce purchases in social platforms, but to doing the actual transactions in social space. For instance, 8th Bridge is a technology enabling purchases in Facebook Timeline, and according to Ogince, there are rumors that Twitter is following with something similar. Watch the discussion online here.

How do we make web search social?
Betsy Aoki, Senior Program Manager at Bing gave a fascinating insight into how social media affects search engine operations. In social networks, people get information in three ways: by receiving opinions from trusted friends, using common reference sites, for instance Yelp, or having conversations with other people.

Now web search companies are trying to figure out how to integrate this kind of social behavior into search engines. If your friend has recommended, let's say, a Chinese restaurant on Facebook, the information is valuable to you when you search for a good Chinese restaurant.

The challenges are how to present these kinds of search results and how to find a balance between too personalized search results — you don't want to live in a bubble, without finding any information outside your own circle — and general information.

The Future of Sharing
Many future predictions were made during Social Media Week, and one of the most interesting was based on social media agency Beyond's US- and UK-based survey, which gave predictions of sharing in the future. Below are briefly the main points; the whole report can be read here.

1) The rate of shared content is going to plateau. After people log into a social service there is a high peak of sharing for around three to 12 months, later users will become more passive, although they tend to log in more often. So the question is how to deal with more passive social media users in the future.
2) Believe it or not, frictionless sharing is here to stay. But it has to become better, because people find it annoying.
3) Segmenting friends (like in Google+ circles) is going to become more significant. The question is how to make it easier and more manageable.
4) "Tried and true marketing tactics" are going to fuel the sharing revolution. Discounts and free giveaways will encourage users to share branded content.
5) We are going to see a more action-oriented sharing culture, in which people start sharing their transactions and life events in a frictionless manner.
6) And finally, personal motivations for sharing will remain the same— the top motivations being informing friends, expressing point of view, and humor.

Are we getting tired of all this?
Although there is no proof in numbers of social media usage (actually, vice versa), the topic of social media fatigue, de-teching and social-space saturation came up several times. With more and more apps and sites where you could be sharing all the time and with only a limited amount of hours in a day, a "counter-movement" toward niche social networks or offline experiences is likely to occur.

The most extreme opinion is that "technology is the new cigarette.” For instance, in London there are programs for internet addiction disorders and a growing concern about children spending too much time online. With an increasing number of people discussing ”switching off,” some companies are engaging in this trend. Some restaurants and bars in big cities are celebrating “disconnectedness,” for example in Germany, Volkswagen shut down after hour e-mails for all employees using Blackberries.

In the end, it's all about consumers finding a balance between the time they spend online and offline, as industries grapple with this development in new ways, like the slow media movement, which we blogged about last week.

Has to be mentioned: Pinterest!

Finally, we have to talk about the elephant in the room: Pinterest. There have been a trillion blog posts lately about the hockey-stick growth of Pinterest, so I'm just going to mention that it was on everybody's lips during Social Media Week, mostly people just wondering about the huge growth and not having a sophisticated analysis of it – yet. As one panelist put it "two weeks ago no one even knew Pinterest and now it's all we talk about." You probably know that Pinterest is the fastest growing website in history and that it drives more web traffic to other sites than Google+, LinkedIn, & YouTube combined. So let's stay tuned to see how social bookmarking evolves.

All in all, Social Media Week demonstrated the deep integration of social networks in our lives on the individual, corporate and societal levels. The social media industry is booming, with huge opportunities for the future—and lots of open questions.