1) Luxury living without luxury spending:
Zuckerberg says a slew of start-ups are gaining traction by offering people the chance to live luxurious, decadent lives, without the price tag.
Airbnb, for instance, offers tourist accommodation without the hotel price tag by teeing up tourists with city residents happy to rent out their spare room. RentTheRunway allows women to rent out designer couture for the night for a fraction of the full price. FancyHands and TaskRabbit link up busy people with cheap personal assistants, who bill by the hour and do your chores from their own home.
2) The loyalty programs of the future
The next big trend Zuckerberg sees is the increasing sophistication of brands on social media. “It’s about emotional connection, and access,” she says. For example, she cites the AFL’s regular fan-only giveaways on its Facebook page. Collingwood Football Club highlights a ‘fan of the week’, and uses a picture of the fan as its display picture. Overseas, Gilt Group – a high-fashion group-buying site – allows its Facebook fans to browse the day’s sales for an hour before they go public.
“This is what the loyalty programs of the future look like,” she says.
3) Social media as a platform for customer service
“If you can only do one thing with your social media efforts, do this,” says Zuckerberg.
Customers have a mindset that brands will quickly respond to them on social media. “If no one responds, it’s a really negative experience,” Zuckerberg says.
This can make things difficult for brands such as airlines, which get a “bum deal” on social media. No one posts about the good flights, only the bad ones, giving the impression that customers are less satisfied than they really are. “That means things like airlines have to work even harder than most. But the ones that do it well, do it really well.” She singles out Qantas and ANZ as those who make good use of Facebook.
4) Mobile first
Zuckerberg says so many companies in Silicon Valley now think only about mobile. Many don’t even bother to make desktop websites. But it’s not just start-ups such as Instagram doing this. Starbucks in America has launched an application where customers input their credit card details into their phone, and from them on can merely swipe their phone to pay for their coffees, leaving their wallet at home. Chase Bank allows people to take mobile photos of their cheques, which are then transferred to their accounts without the need to go into the bank.
5) Experts are curators
“Now there’s an entirely new way to be an expert. We have an entire industry of curators.”
Zuckerberg gives the example of Tourism Australia, which, with three million fans, is the largest Facebook page in the country. Holiday snaps and professional photography are curated to create Facebook albums highlighting the best Australia has to offer.
This is something corporations can easily do to show their experts in their field, Zuckerberg says. “Think about what you can curate for your clients and customers.”
6) Humour in social media
People don’t want corporate professionalism on social media, Zuckerberg says. It’s an intensely personal forum, and brands are increasingly using humour to engage their clients and customers.
7) Crowdsourcing
Bankers, venture capitalists, all financial intermediaries are losing ground, she adds.
Kickstarter, a platform where people pledge money to see a project get off the ground, has funded more artistic projects than most national endowments for the arts.
But it’s not small amounts being funded on crowdsourcing platforms.
Eric Migicovsky and a small team recently raised $10 million dollars to develop a watch that connects to your smartphone to download weather information, reminders, and all manner of things you might want without fishing around in your pocket.
8) People as platforms and brands, meaning the message can’t be controlled
Through social media, people are increasingly becoming media companies in their own right, producing and promoting content. “Good news travels faster than ever before,” Zuckerberg says. “But so does bad news”.
She says she was recently cornered by a Hollywood movie executive who told her Facebook was taking away the ability of movie houses to release bad films, “which we need to do to survive”, she reported the executive saying. The feedback on bad films is now immediate. Studios can’t splash out on marketing and hope a few million will see a film before word gets around that it’s not up to scratch. The film-goers stop going right after opening night.
9) Video and live-streaming
As internet speeds increase, corporations and individuals are finding new ways to combine videos and commerce. Zuckerberg describes this year’s Cyber Monday (an American shopping day associated with large online sales), when several channels popped up giving customers the ability to buy the products that they could see featured on the live video in front of them.
Accountancy firm Deloitte uses video streaming on Facebook to drive recruitment. By interviewing Deloitte staff about their work, fans get an inside look into what it’s like to work there. “It gives people a real peek under the curtain,” Zuckerberg says.
10) The gamification of everything
We’ve covered gamification before on LeadingCompany. Everything is becoming a game, but luckily for us, it’s the things we avoid or dislike doing that are doing it most successfully, Zuckerberg says. Modern alarms charge you a $1 every time you hit snooze. Scales tweet your weight. Nike has an app that updates your social media status whenever you go for a run. Whenever someone hits ‘like’, you hear cheering in your head.
Not a bad way to make life more interesting.
Myriam Robin is a journalist with LeadingCompany. You can follow her on Twitter at @myriamrobin This article first appeared on Leading Company.
Myriam Robin is a reporter for SmartCompany and its sister site LeadingCompany. She has degrees in economics, international studies and journalism. She likes writing about businesses taking risks and doing new things.
