Apparently next year will be the “year of the social“, whatever that means. The author of that article seems to insinuate that to this point social media has stagnated and now these four “megatrends” will take the world, at least from a social media standpoint by storm. Bear with me on this one as I wrote it and then realized that I may be splitting hairs on the definition of “trend”, which to me indicates a feature that is likely to pass with time (i.e. the trend is to wear tube socks with shorts during the summer or the trend is have A Flock of Seagulls hairstyle).

If you ask me, and not that anyone did, I’d be hard pressed to agree that these four items are truly “megatrends” but rather adaptive uses of existing infrastructures. Is it really a trend if some group, or vertical as the author calls it, begins using the social media tool to market its services/goods/etc.? I would propose that such adaptive usage is the next natural progression in social media tool usage rather than a trend. (Editor’s note: It has been pointed out to me that trend in a fuller sense of the words indicates the general direction in which things are progressing.  I knew that of course, but as I said above, when I think of trends, I think hipster trends, not motion of the world trends.)

Just like when any tech product arrives on the scene, early adopters are few and far between and are often those with some connection to the product (or with sufficient funds to play with a new toy they never fully appreciate. Take cell phones for example, they were certainly something that started out with a niche market. Arguably the first adopters were the very groups of people I suggested above. Those first users were never sure how to fully utilize this new fangled toy. But only over time did the early adopters realize new uses and only over time did others outside of the niche group begin taking advantage of the features of the cell phone. The early adopters were soon enveloped by later users and they had to think of new ways to differentiate themselves from newbies. Along came everything from cases to sleeker looking phones to make everyone’s usage experience somewhat unique. Of course the price barrier being lowered along the way is also a factor, but that is to be expected when a demand/supply curve escalates.

For social media tools the early adopters are being enveloped by newbies, in this case hyper-local companies that are slowly adopting social media for the first time. So these trends the author suggests are not just a fad, they are the natural progression of users/adopters. New users are arriving on the scene because rather than seeing social media as a trend, they are viewing it as a tool that they need to adapt to, or adopt as the case may be, or they may just get left in the dust.

In other words, these aren’t trends, they are how we adapt and adopt new technology.  I’m splitting hairs here, aren’t I? What does trend mean to you?