Google+ Rises – Google, the company that made its fortune in search, will figure out that G+ isn’t a social network, it’s a content directory. Google+’s best chance at success lies in its bread and butter – SEO – by giving big brands, celebrities and other entities the opportunity to dictate organic search. Look for Google to start showcasing G+ content in organic search results. It’s already starting to happen; expect more of it in 2013.

Snapchat Gets More Buzz – Snapchat, a messaging service seemingly inspired by Inspector Gadget with its self-destructing (sort of, but not really) messages, photos and videos, will go mainstream. It’s just starting to pick up buzz and the teenage demographic. Parents are no longer in the dark about Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but how many know that their kids are on Snapchat? After all, teenagers are always looking for loopholes, so if you tell them they can’t use Instagram, they’ll just go somewhere else. For now, Snapchat seems to be that destination.

MySpace never really takes off – Tom may be sitting on his $580 million while you slave away hoping for another half day off, and Justin Timberlake may have signed on to be the new face of the old social network, but so far, there’s no evidence that every day users have interest in reclaiming their old space on the new Myspace. I’m not holding my breath. Besides, I always liked Friendster better back in the day.

Facebook and Twitter continue aggressive monetization push – Facebook changes the rules of engagement on a weekly basis, and they’re guaranteed to continue to seek out more revenue channels. Now a billion users strong, Facebook has gotten very aggressive about monetization, looking to charge fan pages anywhere from $2-25,000 for millions guaranteed impressions from, get this, their own audience! In December 2010, I predicted in this space that Facebook would charge brands in 2011. Looks like I was ahead of the curve at the time. But it was inevitable. As for Twitter, look for them to follow suit, and look for more tweets from people you never followed popping up in your timeline.

Social Networks Continue to Sell Your Data and Content – Most of us will continue to agree to the Terms of Service without thinking. But no worries, that picture you took of your lunch isn’t valuable anyway. But your data, what you like, and your user behaviors are likely all up for grabs.

Here Come the Commercials – With DVRs and On Demand neutralizing commercials on television, look for advertisers to seek out targeted video ad placements on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Social Media Gurus Go Out of Business – As Corporate America continues to staff up to manage social media internally, it will continue to realize that the only thing many outside social media consultants are actually selling is unquantifiable “engagement,” not to mention their own books. Those who refuse to measure ROI (with ridiculous justifications like, “What’s the ROI of your mother?”) or generate tangible results will be out of business. I think we’ll see more and more of the self-promoting, self-proclaimed “gurus” running for the comforts of a steady paycheck with a full-time job in Corporate America.

Journalism Continues to Die – As the gap that separates professional journalists from citizens narrows and the race to be first with a story intensifies, you’ll see more shoddy reporting from professional news outlets. This trend is well underway, but as traditional media relies more upon gathering information from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, the quality of reporting will continue its steady erosion.

The Daily Deals Industry Finally Dies – Either Groupon, Living Social or both will go out of business this year. There’s a million stories out there about Groupon “deals” putting restaurants out of business. It will finally come back to haunt them and the shoe will land on the other foot. Remember when they turned down a $6 billion dollar offer from Google? Who was dumber? Google for offering, or Groupon for turning it down?

1,000 More Bad Ideas Emerge – They’ll be easier to spot this year. Let’s face it, for every Pinterest, there’s 40 startups out their trying to be Pinterest-meets-Tumblr-meets-Instagram. Trust me. They’re all horrible ideas.

Necessity is often the mother of invention, and in the case of the hashtag, it evolved from Twitter users’ desire to categorize their thoughts into groups. As the legend goes, @chrismessina, an early adopter of Twitter, suggested in a 2007 tweet, “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

The idea, of course, was to provide context and organization for his missives. Without such a utility, many of the communities that exist on Twitter may never have materialized. Likeminded users would struggle to find each other, and it could be argued that the platform as a whole may have stagnated without the semblance of order that hashtags provided in the early days.

Five years later, the convention has morphed dramatically. Far too often, the hashtag is misused for attempts at humor, sarcasm, irony, or simply to avoid using spaces, given that the 140 character restriction can be a bit, well, restrictive.

But it’s not just individual users who misuse whimsical 45-character hashtags. Sadly, many brands and “gurus” have poor understandings of how to use them. Plenty of them have been blindsided when their marketing plans blew up in their face.

But when used properly, hashtags are powerful tools for spreading your message, as well as measuring audience volume and sentiment. A well-promoted hashtag creates and curates online conversations about your topic, while categorizing that content for searches. Many vendors have built businesses around delivering relevant content powered in large part by sourcing hashtag content, which can then be embedded in your website, integrated into your broadcast, or ingested and displayed in venues via digital media displays.

For advertisers, buying sponsored tweets against a hashtag is still a nascent method for reaching a target audience, and if poorly executed, the purchase could end up doing more harm than good.

Spammers (and even mainstream marketers) often attempt to do this for free by tweeting unrelated content against trending hashtags. It even works sometimes. Trending hashtags can become the gateway to generating extra exposure for their Viagra offers on the backs of otherwise interesting and innocuous trends.

There’s much to evaluate when launching a hashtag campaign. Since there’s no handbook, here are five guidelines for using hashtags in your marketing:

1. Keep them short and sweet – While there’s no official convention, I’d suggest that anything over 20 characters is way too long for a tag that you’re going to ask people to use and retweet. In general, shorter is better, as long as the tag is specific enough to be absolute in its meaning. About 10-15 characters is probably the sweet spot. After all, you’ve only got 140 characters to use, so the longer your tag is, the less room users will have to share meaningful thoughts about the topic.
2. Make them clear – You’d like to think it goes without saying, but casual twitter users too often create lengthy tags that convey little to no meta information about their tweet. In fact, usually the “hashtag” itself delivers more punch than the tweet. But the best hashtags are unambiguous.

   For instance, Fox Sports recently used #Rivalry on screen during a Red Sox and Yankees national TV broadcast. While it was clear to viewers that Fox was referring to the age-old rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees, #Rivalry lacked context for Twitter users not watching the game; the hashtag was far too generic. Remember, hashtags on TV aren’t just for your viewers, but they’re also free advertising to reach potential viewers who will be exposed to your tag in their timeline.

3. Consider how it might be used against you – If you’re going to promote a hashtag, consider the fact that it could blow up in your face. Of all the classic examples, #McDStories is among the most notorious, as the fast food giant’s detractors commandeered the generic tag by sharing horror stories about McDonald’s, turning their marketing dollars against them. Mitigate that risk by considering what might go wrong before handing your branding over to the public.
4. Promote it…without being obnoxious – Twitter users understand what a hashtag is when they see it, but not everyone is familiar with the platform. So while the hashtag should be prominent enough to be recognized, there’s still a universe out there that doesn’t even use or understand Twitter. Displaying your tag persistently on screen during a commercial or prominently in a print ad is an effective way to generate buzz and encourage use, but be mindful of cluttering your message with information that’s not necessarily relevant to a large portion of your audience.

   Comedy Central was among the first media outlets to fully embrace the on-screen hashtag, tagging its Charlie Sheen Roast program with a #SheenRoast bug in the lower left hand corner of the entire broadcast. It was subtle, but effective. Similarly, NBC Sports is currently using the #StanleyCup hashtag just below their iconic peacock logo just next to the score at the top of the screen, away from the on-ice action but conspicuous enough to generate plenty of activity.

5. Don’t expect it to trend – Set realistic expectations, and don’t gauge your success on whether or not your hashtag managed to trend. Most trending topics happen organically, briefly, and with little fanfare. Instead, set specific, measurable goals for engagement. Then analyze the number of users tweeting your tag, the nature of the conversation around your brand, and finally, identify commonalities among influencers participating in your campaign. Your most invested fans will likely join the conversation by using the tag you’ve provided, but how effective was your tag in reaching your existing audience, as well as a new audience?

But at the recent Social Commerce Strategies show in Las Vegas last month, something new came up, and it came up more than once. Everyone was talking about something called Pinterest.

Pinterest is the hottest new social networking site, and its user base skews as high as 97 percent female. The Boston Celtics are among a few early adopters in the professional sports industry.

I’d heard about the social media platform a few times before the conference, but in the course of two days in Vegas, I heard the word “Pinterest” more than I heard “Changing $500!”. So it became obvious that I needed to know more about Pinterest, aside from the basic idea that it was a social network dominated by women.

Given that the online fan base of the Boston Celtics, and presumably that of most professional sports teams, is about 75% male, Pinterest peaked my interest. Perhaps it’s a way to reach an underserved demographic? Pinterest’s user base is overwhelmingly dominated by women; it’s reportedly 97 percent female.

Upon my return to Boston, I launched a Pinterest page for the Celtics. Within an a few hours of pinning items like Celtics merchandise, players, Celtics Dancers and ticket packages, we’d picked up about 100 followers. After a Facebook and Twitter post later in the day, we were somewhere around 300 followers.

I posted another notice to our six million Facebook followers on Presidents Day, when many Americans probably spent their holiday planted in front of their home computers, and we doubled our audience within minutes.

As of this writing, we have over 650 followers. What does it all mean? It’s too early to tell now, but I tried to explain what we know about it so far to SportsDigita last week when they noticed the Celtics are among the few pro sports teams dabbling with the platform.

These vendors still send me emails every now and again, but at this point, enough time has passed that brands who were sucked in by the promise (and challenge) of monetizing Facebook to seek out ROI have already found out it doesn’t work. This article in Bloomberg basically says I’m right; it talks about how big brands like The Gap shuttered their Facebook stores almost as quickly as they opened them thanks to underperformance.

Bottom line? People don’t go to Facebook to shop. They might follow News Feed links back to your own website store, but they don’t want to do it inside the Big Blue Walls of Facebook.

On the scale from skeptical to optimistic, I often lean heavily toward skepticism, and in most cases it’s saved me a lot of time with the never ending stream of vendors trying to get rich in the social media gold rush. Very few vendors have been able to get my attention, and those who have typically have a very real product that solves an actual problem.

F-Commerce may sound good to people who don’t truly understand how Facebook works, but if you’ve taken the time to run a fan page and take a peak at Facebook Insights, you’ve probably already drawn the same conclusion.

Google is more interested in owning the search engine results market. And that’s what Google+ brand pages are really all about.

In fact, for brands that sell their products directly, I’d bet Google+ brand pages could become more important than Facebook fan pages. In case you missed it, after an initial false start at launch and months of speculation, Google+ finally opened the floodgates for brands today.

Google+ claims to have 40 million users, but it’s unclear how many of those accounts are actually active. Anecdotal evidence – my personal Google+ feed is repetitively filled by the same four or five users despite having 200+ in my circles – suggests that most users signed up, checked it out once or twice, and never returned. Full disclosure: I logged on to Google+ for the first time in about a week today when the brand page announcement came down, and I do digital marketing and social media for a living. It’s my job to care, and I’ve had a hard time convincing myself that I should be logging in.

Until today.

The first time I wrote about Google+, I maintained that Google+ accounts would be more competitive with LinkedIn, and more important for professionals looking to build their own personal brand. I still maintain that personal Google+ profiles will be important for that purpose, even if the service has already run out of friends to suggest for your Circles. But even if most Google+ user accounts are dormant, Google+ brand pages are going to become important quickly.

Google+ brand pages look a lot like Facebook fan pages, and hence, drew criticism from some corners for a lack of originality. That’s a fair critique. But here’s what truly matters: Google+ pages, unlike your Facebook fan page, will actually generate traffic, because of a little thing called, um, Google. You know, the world’s biggest search engine?

The size of the Google+’s user base is irrelevant with regard to brand pages, because after all, Google is a search engine, not a social network. And Google is the undisputed king of search. Google enjoyed 65% of the U.S. search engine market in September 2011 according to ComScore.

Lost in all the hype around today’s announcement was the following paragraph from Google’s blog:

“People search on Google billions of times a day, and very often, they’re looking for businesses and brands. Today’s launch of Google+ Pages can help people transform their queries into meaningful connections, so we’re rolling out two ways to add pages to circles from Google search. The first is by including Google+ pages in search results, and the second is a new feature called Direct Connect.”

As I suspected, Google is going to include Google+ pages in search results. In other words, if people are Googling for “Boston Celtics tickets”, our new Boston Celtics Google+ brand page will show up in the results, presumably near the top. After all, doesn’t Google have a vested interest in keeping its own traffic in house, on pages it controls, featuring ads it can sell? You can bet Google will eventually place advertising on G+ pages the same way Facebook places ads on your Facebook profile. After all, Google reported made $28 billion in ad revenue in 2010.

That’s $28 billion. With a B.

Celtics.com is already one of the top organic search results for “Boston Celtics tickets”, but secondary market ticket brokers, who’ve spent a fortune mastering SEO techniques, all rank highly thanks to both paid and organic search results alike. Obviously, we want Celtics.com to be the first destination for potential ticket buyers, but if a Google+ brand page is going to perform highly in search results, we need to be there too.

The power of Facebook is that it allows us to grab mindshare whenever we choose from fans who’ve opted-in to our Fan Page updates. Still, we can’t force people to buy tickets just because we put an offer in front of them. More likely, when a fan actively wants to buy Celtics tickets, they will either visit our website, or Google something like “Celtics tickets”. Presumably, our Google+ brand page will give us more control over the search result for that query, and give us a better chance to capture that customer who’s demonstrating buying intent.

As an added bonus, for those users who are active on Google+ and want to become a Boston Celtics follower, we’ll be able to reach them there too, Facebook style, with status updates. I expect that content we publish on Google+ will eventually become more relevant in Google’s search results as well.

So, if you haven’t set up your brand’s Google+ page, what are you waiting for?

“Digital technologies and social media have only recently become marketing tools for the Boston Celtics, but there’s always something new to learn about them.

“We got on board early with Facebook and Twitter, and built large audiences around them: Our 5.2 million Facebook “likes” is the second-largest audience in North American team sports; and at 220,000 Twitter followers, we rank the third-highest in the NBA. We’re out in front because we got there early and made social media a priority for communicating with our fan base all over the world.

“We were the first team in the league with a Facebook app—and among the first in pro sports—when we launched in October 2009. That app, Celtics 3-Point Play, allows us to identify fans on Facebook and get them into our database. It’s a simple fantasy game that enables people to predict players’ stats before every game and get awarded points.

“We can identify fans and collect basic marketing information through 3-Point Play, and then we can turn these fans into customers who buy jerseys, tickets and—the ultimate goal—season tickets. In the two seasons we’ve had about 180,000 people play, and we got marketing info for about 85,000 who live in New England. Our existing email database was about 250,000. So we experienced a huge percentage growth to our overall email base.

“When people sign up for 3-Point Play, we can find out if they’ve bought tickets in the past. We sold $150,000 in tickets to fans who played last season. Some would have bought tickets regardless, but it tells us that Facebook fans do come to the games and want to become customers.

“Overall, there’s more social media integration on our website. We’ve seen traffic drop on Celtics.com, but we’ve had dramatic growth on our social media. People want you to come to them as they spend more time on Facebook and Twitter and less time surfing the Web. You have to be where your fans are discussing your brand and engage them with a constant presence and dialogue.”

– Download PDF from AdAge

With that said, Facebook has recently made some other tweaks that are less intrusive, and actually seem to serve some utility. By nature, Facebook has a pretty low signal-to-noise ratio. If you’re being updated about the happenings of 400 “friends”, not to mention a handful of brands, you’re bound to be inundated with notifications in which you’re not particularly interested.

Facebook has started to consolidate your news feed items by type, grouping multiple posts from third-party services like Instagram together to cut down on noise.

In the last few weeks, Facebook’s begun grouping news feed updates by type, i.e. all Instagram, Foursquare and Twitter updates are appearing together. They may be from different people or different “circles” of friends, but if six of your friends post Instagram photos to Facebook within a few hours, Facebook is grouping them together and hides all but one (presumably, the most relevant) update. I’ve been unable to find any confirmation behind the methodology used to pick which photo Facebook shows you, but we can safely presume that EdgeRank has something (or everything) to do with it.

While it doesn’t appear there’s a preference for unfolding these types of updates by default, and this behavior may annoy some users who will have to click to expand all of their Instagram-related updates, this would seem to be useful functionality.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is a new type of grouping I discovered Friday night as the Red Sox and Yankees were battling at Fenway Park. Facebook grouped three posts containing the words “Red Sox” from two of my friends and one brand that I follow. They were collected under the heading, “Billy and 2 other friends posted about Boston Red Sox“.

By grouping posts from your friends together by topic, Facebook is creating a new opportunity for brands like the Red Sox to get in front of new audiences who may not have been exposed to their Facebook presence. If your friends are talking about the Red Sox, there’s a strong chance you’re also a fan.

This was interesting for a number of reasons, the least of which being that my friend Billy is a loud-mouthed Yankees fan who mentioned that life was good because it was the beginning of August and the “Yankees and Red Sox are playing each other for first place.” More relevant was that Facebook grouped these status updates and included a link to the Boston Red Sox fan page.

Presumably, the next time the Kings of Leon play the TD Garden here in Boston, Facebook will group posts from my friends who are bragging about going to the concert and couple those status updates with a link to the Kings of Leon fan page. That activity could lead to additional ticket sales or incremental growth for the KOL fan page.

It’s a clever way to consolidate noise while helping brands grow their fan pages when they’re highly relevant in a specific community at a specific time. What’s not clear is whether this new feature is part of the “Sponsored Stories” ad product that Facebook introduced earlier this year. If you’re unfamiliar, Sponsored Stories creates ads in the sidebar that include your friends’ updates saying they went to Starbucks, with a link to the Starbucks fan page. Starbucks has paid for this ad to appear, and it’s one of many ways they continue to grow their Facebook fan base by targeting the friends of fans of their Facebook page.

So is this new News Feed functionality a new advertising platform (or an expansion of Sponsored Stories), or simply a consolidation mechanism?

My guess? It’s probably both.

Think of it like Twitter’s trending topics functionality, but with a much more viral impact. After all, if my friends are fans of the Red Sox or Kings of Leon, there’s a good chance I have interest in them as well. And while the traditional Sponsored Stories layout in the right hand side featuring a logo is an obvious ad, this new consolidation of related topics is a much more subtle approach that could prove more effective at generating click-throughs and “likes”, simply because it doesn’t look like an ad.

Either way, it’s an interesting development for the News Feed that’s got monetization potential for Facebook — if they haven’t sold it already, that is.

Google+ has drawn numerous comparisons to Facebook and the popular theme seems to be that Google is poised to take on Zuckerberg’s 700-million+ user empire. Facebook’s continued work to block contact exporting to Google+ is feeding that fire.

Still, I’d argue that LinkedIn, and to a lesser degree, Twitter, should be much more concerned with what’s brewing with Google+.

Google’s already suffered two well-documented stumbles in the social networking space over the last few years with Wave and Buzz, but it’s different this time around. Google+ quickly gained street cred with the social networking uber-gurus, and as the invitations trickle down to garden-variety social media experts and everyday folks, the hype and chatter continues to build.

But the question is, why? What has Google achieved with Google+ (Or should we really call it Google Circles? Or is that just one feature? Paging the Google marketing department…) that has everyone so excited? Will it really be a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” with Google regaining online supremacy and toppling Facebook?

I’d submit instead that digital-savvy people are more scared than anything. I know I am; I feel like Google’s finally gotten it (mostly) right, and as I result, I need to drop anchor in case Google+ explodes. The Circles concept is much more analogous to our real-life relationships than Facebook’s “friending” mechanism. People are quickly growing more comfortable with the idea of connecting online with nearly or complete unknowns, but still want privacy controls to filter their outgoing missives and basic data set. Facebook, despite continuously changing the rules of engagement, has failed to make this easy.

The Circles concept resonates for those of us with geek sensibilities, and so far we’re embracing Google+. Given the buzz, as soon as Google+ brand pages are available, I’ll launch one for the Boston Celtics, and add the +1 button is coming to Celtics.com as well. I presume similar organizations and brands will follow suit. Our new Google+ Celtics page won’t catch our five million Facebook “Likes” anytime soon, but if people are going to be discussing the brand there, we need to have a presence.

But here’s the big reason to watch Google+: Since Google’s already the reigning champion of search, it stands to reason that Google+ profiles could soon become the new social directory of the Internet. It’s somewhat surprising that it’s taken Google this long to figure it out, or at least to unleash it on the masses. After all, LinkedIn profiles and Twitter posts have been peppering Google’s search results for some time, and even the most pedestrian of social networkers understand that their contributions to these networks are highly searchable by default; in fact, that’s the whole point of LinkedIn for many of its users. So it stands to reason that Google’s been contemplating this step for a while.

But as I finally got around to fleshing out my Google profile this week — I’ve never been a Gmail guy so this was a fresh start for me — I really tried to think about what makes Google+ different, and why it’s so critical to participate. And despite the shiny new features like “Hangouts” and “Sparks” (something sports brands should keep an eye on), I keep coming back to search engine results.

Simply put, if you haven’t Googled yourself in a while, drop everything and do it now, or at least after you’ve finished reading here. Search results are constantly in flux, and you’d have to imagine that Google will eventually rate their own profile pages higher than third party results for a bunch of obvious reasons. The most obvious of which being dollar bills. So far, Google+ profiles are devoid of advertising. But how long will that last? Google draws almost all of its revenue from advertising. They literally make billions of dollars on this each year.

You do the math.

With 100 million users making white-collar wages, LinkedIn has built a highly-targeted audience that should carry incredible advertising value. Obviously, Google is interested in competing for this audience.

But back to what it all means for you. When it comes to basic personal branding, LinkedIn is the dominant platform. Chances are, if you meet a young professional today, you can track them down instantly on LinkedIn. But the profiles I’ve seen to date on Google+ appear largely professional in nature, and Google+ looks and feels much more like LinkedIn than Facebook, and that’s with good reason.

Unlike a Facebook page, where nightlife pictures are de rigueur and dominate the photo uploading activity with the understanding that they’re, um, mostly private, a Google+ profile seems inherently intended to be public. Unless you really want those college keg stand pics coming up in search results against your name, Google+ probably isn’t the place for them, even with privacy settings in place.

The young professionals set, and for that matter, anyone else who has a vested interest in building an online brand, seems to get that and be comfortable with it as well. If Google+ results are going to eventually be the first thing that comes up when you’re searched, you’d better control what shows up. You’re already working on your brand now with LinkedIn, a Twitter feed, and maybe even your own blog/portfolio site. But if you want to control it tomorrow, get your Google+ presence sorted now.

LinkedIn launched several years before the social media explosion, and because of that, most users are still reluctant to connect with people they don’t know. LinkedIn explicitly tells them not to do it, and for most people, that makes sense. A LinkedIn profile is a reasonable facsimile of a resume, and exposes quite a bit about one’s identity. With that in mind, LinkedIn profiles are typically kept private to users outside your network.

LinkedIn is vastly dissimilar from Twitter. There’s the strong perception that by connecting with someone on LinkedIn, you’re vouching for them; drawing that conclusion from a Twitter follow is a much greater stretch, although a retweet tends to convey that connotation.

That perception probably hurts LinkedIn’s growth, and it’s unlikely to change unless LinkedIn takes the Circles approach and acknowledges the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Currently, when you fill out the brief form to invite a connection on LinkedIn, the site warns you “Important – Only invite people you know well and who know you.” When you click on this message, a pop-up window informs you, “Connecting to someone on LinkedIn implies you know them well.”

Google+ goes in the other direction, offering pre-fab circles called “Following” (“People you don’t know personally, but whose posts you find interesting”) and Acquaintances (“A good place to stick people you’ve met but aren’t particularly close to”), recognizing and encouraging the growing trend Twitter really popularized: following people and personalities that you’ll never likely meet in real life.

With all of that in mind, mainstream adoption will take time for Google+. Launching their iPhone app on Tuesday was another step in that process. Still, the average social networking user will need a compelling reason to find time for Google+ updates.

With all of that in mind, I asked an old college pal who’s in one of my Circles what he thinks of Google+ and its potential staying power. He Facebooks as much as the next guy, but isn’t on Twitter, just learned about Instagram last night, and has yet to do anything significant with his Google+ account.

His take: “I just don’t get it. There’s enough social media crap going on anyway. I mean, people keep adding me and I’m like, OK. Whatever.”

Sobering? Perhaps. Time will tell if it gains mass traction with the non-digerati. Still, amassing 18 million users in a two-week private beta is encouraging, and a reality check for the Foursquare fanboys out there who recently celebrated 10 million users after two years. While LinkedIn should officially be on watch, I don’t think Facebook has much to worry about in the short term.

That said, I’m sure they’re paying attention like the rest of us. Close attention.

While there’s been a digital component to the Big Game over the last decade, with the explosion of media attention surrounding Facebook, Twitter and digital media in the mainstream media over the past 12-18 months, this year’s tilt is poised to be the biggest social media event in the medium’s nascent history.

As it is already, sports and social media dovetail nicely, and Facebook and Twitter owe much of their success to their natural fit with the affinity-laden brands of the sports world. And when it comes to second-screen experiences, the NFL’s game progression, emphasis on statistics and overall pace makes it the ideal second-screen sport.

The Volkswagon/Star Wars Commercial may have ben the most memorable spot of SuperBowl XLV.

But perhaps most important is this marriage: advertising goes hand-in-hand with the NFL’s showcase event, and this year it’s expected that more brands will look to activate viewers by driving them to their social channels than ever before. And they’ll look to do it in unique ways, whether it’s by driving football fans to their Facebook page or labeling their 60-second spots with a Twitter hash tag. Making an impression isn’t enough this year; brands are looking for social media’s biggest buzzword: “engagement.”

A quirky, memorable commercial is only half the battle this time around. Talking babies, Geico Cavemen, and “Wazzzup??” won’t be enough. Provocative Go Daddy commercials from a few years ago that directed fans back to the website to see the “uncensored” version of their commercial may have preyed on males’ base and unrefined instincts, but they were certainly ahead of their time with the idea of driving consumers to their website to convert business.

And for those brands who want to generate buzz, will they go the route of dialing up YouTube stars like Ted Williams and Antoine Dodson, or the Double Rainbow guy, to get your attention? I’d bet you may hear from all of them. And Volkswagon already took the YouTube spoiler approach, earning 10 million views on a Star Wars themed ad that could get more exposure on your friends’ Facebook wall than it will get on your flat screen on Sunday.

I don’t have any stats to back this up, but let’s assume that while the men at your Super Bowl party will be using commercials as an excuse to grab another beer, snack or take a bathroom break, the women in the room will be dialed into the commercials. Stereotypical? Perhaps, but advertisers will likely zero in on this concept, and given that statistically, women are spending more of their online time on Facebook than are men – and will likely be doing so while the Steelers and Packers are colliding on the field – it’s a huge opportunity for brands to drive customers to their social presence.

It will be interesting to see which brands look to push fans to their own website, and which go the facebook.com/brand route. And as a social media observer whose Patriots collapsed a few weeks back, for the first time, I may truly have more interest in the ads than the football this time around.

Sad but true.