Social Media in 2010: Nothing Important Will Change

So all the shiny social media gurus are out there inventing new terminology to restate the obvious for their "2010 predictions" posts.

But here's the truth: nothing of any consequence will fundamentally reshape the best practices of social media in 2010. NOTHING. Here's why.

Relationships will still be the single most important thing for social media. Opinion leaders in online communities will still be the ones driving most of the discussions. Content will still be king.

"Authenticity" and "transparency" will still be buzzwords, and some people will still try to come up with ways to get around both. A lot of PR flacks will still treat blogs like they're just online newspapers and send bloggers generic press releases.

Democrats will continue to use the Internet as an ATM, Republicans will continue to use the Internet as a way to write about what they heard on talk radio.

There will be a lot of useless blather about social media tools. Someone will come up with a new shiny toy and a select group of people will need to have it right away. Then in three months the price will drop. We'll see another iPhone-killer, Google-killer, Facebook-killer, and Twitter-killer. None of them will kill anything. This is the year that blogs will be dead. Again.

Someone will get burned for publishing something inappropriate on a social network.

Someone nobody knows today will do something creative and it will become very popular on the Internet for a short amount of time, and companies across the globe will say "we need to do something like THAT."

Social media flacks will publish astoundingly mundane things about their personal information gathering and processing habits. A few of them may actually think someone cares. Seriously.

Somebody somewhere will use a social network to do something that will do a lot of good for a lot of people, but very few people will notice it.

And the best in the social media PR business will continue to slowly, quietly, build relationships with online opinion leaders in interesting and important communities. They will continue to connect clients and bloggers and they won't rely on just conference calls to do it.

You know, just like 2009.