A Look Back at Social Media in 2009
Monday, January 4th, 2010
As the year comes to a close, I reflect back at the good, the bad, and the ugly that happened in 2009.
The Good…
The biggest thing to hit Social Media, becoming the top word of 2009: Twitter. Twitter blew up in a big way in 2009, the explosion starting somewhere around March from what I can tell. Twitter became a way of life for many of us, the way we received and shared information about anything from current events to who was best dressed last night at the Oscars. For me personally, it was how I learned Social Media, how I became wrapped up in this evolving world of communication. We learned the right and the wrong ways to tweet and how tweeting can benefit your business and also hurt it. Companies like Zappo’s proved to be leaders in customer service while others fell by the way side.
Another word of the year… unfriend; declared by the Oxford Dictionary. The definition: “To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”
Other honorable mentions include: Facebook in general; whether you mention the acquisition of FriendFeed, exceeding 300 million users, or helping Zynga’s (creator of Farmville) worth exceed $1 billion, Facebook had a pretty amazing year.
The Bad…
The rapid decline in traffic over the year has spurred MySpace to consider other ways to recover from a pretty bad year for the once leading social networking site. Recently, MySpace acquired imeem, a social music service, hoping to spur more traffic to the site. To listen to music on imeem now, you have to create a MySpace profile, plus those previous imeem users have lost their playlists and can no longer access the mobile apps, something MySpace assures will be fixed… we’ll see about that. Speaking as someone who just deleted their MySpace profile this weekend, I’ll go to last.fm or Pandora as I’m sure others will as well. After spending the better part of the year trying to reinvent themselves, it seems they have little to show in terms of progress losing over 5 million users this year. One can only hope they’ll find a way to successfully reinvent themselves, not to stay afloat, but to achieve relevancy again.
The Ugly…
Twitter Celebrity Wars. Do I really need to explain?
