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.

Expertise in digital media, of course, evolves literally by the day. What’s true of today’s technology may not be true tomorrow. Facebook, Twitter, Google and friends change the rules and capabilities daily, all while constantly raising the stakes. It’s not practical to expect universities to keep their technology curriculum current without instructors who are actively living and breathing this stuff. Students are likely to learn more than they’d ever absorb in the confines of the classroom by interning with a start-up or tech company, or by simply digging in and immersing themselves on their own time.

Journalism school used to be the prerequisite for having the power to (mis)inform the masses. The advent of social media certainly decentralized the creation and distribution of information, but that democratization of influence comes at a heavy price. Forget the pen; the smartphone is now mightier than the sword, especially where it pertains to self-inflicted wounds. Companies and brands must be vigilant and selective when deciding who will brandish their digital media assets. A journalism degree, not to mention common sense, would be a logical baseline requirement.

I thought the piece turned out very well, and believe it’s worth a read for sports and digital marketing professionals alike.

Inside Look: How The Boston Celtics Win in Social Media and Digital

If you’re lamenting the introduction of wireless on most of the major airlines, you probably skew a bit crotchety anyway. Face it: on a cross-country BOS>LAX trip, how else am I going to spend six hours? I might as well get some work done.

Over the past few hours, I’ve listened to a less-than-pristine audio broadcast of the Milwaukee Bucks playing the Boston Celtics, followed the NFL Draft on Twitter, shot off a few DMs to friends on the ground in Boston, wrote some JavaScript and knocked out a few emails.

Oh yeah, I peaked at LinkedIn and Facebook, and I wrote this blog post.

Spotty would be a generous way to describe the Internet connection at 35,000 feet, and it costs $17 on Virgin America. That seems a bit steep, but in the end it’s probably worth it.

I’d say I was relatively productive. The work-on-a-plane experience in 2012 is a somewhat reasonable facsimile of being at my desk at the office. You know, aside from occasional turbulence and wafting jet fuel.

With my noise-cancelling headphones, tonight, it’s just me, my music and my MacBook — and 150 silent strangers floating somewhere over the Midwest. Thankfully, I can still surround myself with my world back on planet Earth.

There’s something to be said for taking a digital vacation and going untethered. But that’s what tropical islands are for. I’m totally fine with staying connected up in the air.

Celtics 3-Point Play was a first-of-its-kind NBA team Facebook application when it launched in 2009. It’s helped the Celtics collect data and drive ROI through database growth and ticket sales over the last three seasons.

The game is in its third season on our Facebook page, and it’s been a big success since launching in October 2009, when it was the first NBA team application on the social networking platform. The game has been tweaked a bit since then, and we recently integrated 3-Point Play into our pregame show’s broadcast to help drive signups.

I’ve presented on this topic at several conferences around the country (and even Australia!) over the past year or so, but figured that the case study would be valuable for professionals around the sports industry.

You have to have a Sports Business Journal subscription to read the piece, but if you’re serious about sports marketing, you already have one, right?

Sports Business Journal: Moving beyond like: How one team monetized Facebook base

The day a Klout score prevents me from getting approved for a mortgage or car loan, I’ll be inclined to agree. I’m confident that day is not coming.

I’ve never been a believer in Klout, the service that claims to measure your online influence by assigning a 1-100 score based on your activity across multiple social networks. For many reasons, their system is incredibly flawed, even as they’ve continued to tweak their secret sauce formula for evaluating influence. Their constant tinkering has resulted in drastic score adjustments seemingly without reason, and Klout often concludes that you’re influential about nonsensical topics about which you’ve never discussed.

Klout assigns a score to twitter handles in an attempt to measure people’s influence across the social media landscape.

While I’m glad someone’s trying to measure and quantify online activity, I think Klout is way off, even when it comes to two of their top ranking profiles, @BarackObama (91) and @JustinBieber (100). For instance, how in the world is @BarackObama influential about Drone Music and Homebrewing? Or, for that matter, even Fascism? And in what universe is Justin Bieber an informed commentator concerning Adolf Hitler or the Holocaust? Klout made all of these claims on Sunday, February 19 when I looked up two of their highest-ranking accounts.

Currently, Klout thinks “Gym” and “College” are among the topics about which I’m allegedly influential, despite the fact that I can’t remember ever tweeting about a workout or academics. The closest thing I can recall mentioning would be a joke about a Shake Weight ad.

I’ve criticized Klout for their misrepresentation of influence on numerous occasions, but they’ve yet to fix the problem. Clearly their system is inherently flawed. But with that said, after watching this interview with Denise Blasevick (@AdvertGirl) on MSNBC where she explains how to use Klout to a reporter, maybe there is some value to keeping an eye on the service.

Denise isn’t caught up in her Klout score either, but she does see value in monitoring the topics about which Klout thinks she’s influential, even if the service is dead wrong.

Her point is important, because if Klout says you’re influential about dogs, uninformed strangers would have no reason to believe it’s untrue. So from the standpoint of brand management alone, you should probably keep tabs on Klout’s perception of your social media activity. And if nothing else, it may help you keep track of the topics about which you actually are tweeting.

“If I want to be influential about something in my industry – if I have a Green roofing company – then I want to make sure I’m tweeting about things that are helpful in that industry and then people will see me as an expert,” Blasevick told MSNBC in the interview posted above via YouTube.

She also point out that Klout is an effective way for small business owners to connect with niche tweeters and keep tabs on the competition, as it ranks its top 10 tweeters by topic over the trailing 90 days.

It won’t be valuable for tracking influencers in broad topics like “social media” – it shows you the same 10 people you’ve already heard of – but for something more specific like Cosmetics, it could be a resource to connect with online thought leaders in the space.

Overall, I still don’t put much clout in Klout, but Blasevick’s outlook made me take a second look. It’s probably worth keeping an eye on, but I’m not losing any sleep over Klout’s claims about my influence, good, bad or otherwise.

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.

Avalanna Routh has been fighting a rare and aggressive brain cancer called AT/RT (Atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor) since she was nine months old, but she got the thrill of her young life thanks to Barber, family and friends who launched an aggressive social media campaign to help her meet her “future husband”, international music superstar Justin Bieber.

Barber, who met Avalanna after seeing her on NESN’s annual Jimmy Fund telethon and then having an informational interview with The Jimmy Fund in September, has spent the last few months babysitting Avalanna and knew all about her dream to meet Bieber. Two weeks ago, Barber decided to try to make Avalanna’s dream come true.

After a two week social media campaign, Avalanna met Justin Bieber on February 13, 2012.

Amazingly, “#MrsBieber” trended all day on Monday, February 13. That’s because Avalanna spent the afternoon in New York City playing Candyland with Bieber, just two weeks after the campaign began in earnest.

“I don’t have a million dollars, I can’t donate a bunch of money, but I decided, ‘What else can I do for this girl?’ She just brightens my life,” Barber said Monday night, hours after Avalanna’s family met Bieber in a Manhattan hotel. “I said, ‘I’m going to get on Twitter and start tweeting about her.’”

Tweeting local athletes, celebrities and media outlets to raise awareness, Barber found little success, outside of support from WEEI’s Dennis and Callahan and local TV stations including FOX 25. She even had her account temporarily turned off for tweeting 1,000 times in a single day. Determined, Leslie spoke with her sister Lauren, who works in social media, and they asked the Routh family about starting a Facebook page to help get the word out. With permission granted, Leslie launched it and continued the campaign, inviting her 1,100 Facebook friends to like Avalanna’s page, and posting stories, pictures and video about her adorable young friend.

“It’s funny to think that a week ago I was thinking to myself, ‘We have 1,000 people who like our page.’ Who would have ever thought that a week later she was sitting down with Justin Bieber?”

Barber then continued her campaign on Twitter, and started getting strategic about reaching Bieber.

“You always see celebrities retweeting about someone’s sick friend, so I thought, ‘Maybe we can start getting some attention for her since everyone loves her.’” Barber established contact with a few minor celebrities, but found Twitter superstars like Lady Gaga, with millions of followers, largely unresponsive.

But rather than give up, Barber got resourceful. She started trying to reach people connected with the Bieber camp in a effort to reach Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun. If Braun had tweeted directly at them, Barber targeted them with tweets of her own.

“I started tweeting to people that he knew through his own tweets. They have less people following them, so I figured the chances of them seeing my tweets were a lot greater than Justin or his manager, who have millions of people following them,” Barber said.

“I was trying to get creative. How do you possibly get a hold of someone who has 17 million followers on Twitter and 40 million fans on Facebook? It took a little stalking,” Barber said, joking about how much time and energy she put into the campaign.

She’s quick to point out that she had a lot of help and was reluctant to take credit when I spoke with her, but Barber’s techniques for getting Bieber’s attention displayed the ingenuity that your typical “social media guru” typically lacks. Twitter and Facebook may have facilitated the contact from a technology standpoint, but Barber’s determination and problem solving skills really seem to be the differentiator in taking the campaign from a pipe dream to an incredible story.

BEST PART OF MY DAY twitter.com/justinbieber/s…

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) February 14, 2012

“I’d read (Bieber’s) tweets, I knew he was in L.A., and he was recording with Timbaland. He’d tweet about how they record at night. So I’d stay up until 3 in the morning, because I knew a lot of people (on the East Coast) would be asleep, so I’d have less competition. When they started tweeting, that’s when I would tweet them, hoping they would retweet it and (Braun) would see it.”

Meanwhile, the Facebook page continued to grow, with friends and friends of friends volunteering to reach out to contacts in the entertainment business. As the audience grew, it became easier to coordinate efforts to reach Bieber by rallying around the original #getAv2Biebs hashtag.

@selenagomez Please!! Help us #getAv2Biebs &RT for a 6y/o fighting brain cancer 2 meet her love @justinbieberfacebook.com/AvalannaRouthB…

— Leslie Barber (@LBarbs35) February 8, 2012

On Friday, February 10, Beiber’s manager Braun reached back out to the family after seeing a FOX 25 story about Avalanna’s campaign on Twitter, and he made contact with the TV station. FOX 25 connected Braun with Barber, who put the Bieber camp in contact with the Routh family. Braun told them that a meeting would happen “sooner than they think.”

just spoke to a mother who is selfless. really amazing person – cureatrt.org

— Scooter Braun (@scooterbraun) February 10, 2012

That meeting happened Monday, with Bieber’s camp flying the Routh family to New York City for the meeting. Bieber posted a photo of their afternoon to his 40 million Facebook followers today, with the caption, “hangin out with a special little girl. #MrsBieber”.

It’s a pretty amazing story, and Barber’s still in shock over the campaign’s success.

“I learned a lot about social media, but the biggest thing I learned is that anything is possible. We’re still looking for a cure for AT/RT. The survival rate is extremely low. It may seem impossible, but if we can get Avalanna to meet Justin Bieber, who is one of the biggest stars in the world right now, I really do think that anything is possible, and I won’t be giving up on any of my dreams any time soon.”

For all the hype around social media about viral campaigns and brands with millions of followers, it’s nice to hear a real world story about how regular people can use it to do incredible things.