What will the future of social media look like? You just need to look around because “The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed.”

In rapid order I came across three articles that help paint that picture (all emphasis are mine):

Marc Meyer rightfully points out:

So I ask you, what is next? Social Media as you know it right now, will not be recognizable in the next 3-5 years. Think long term.

Chas Edwards discusses the success of Digg ads and hints at the future of advertising filtered by (and I’ll throw in co-created with) their customers:

Digg Ads: It’s Just the Beginning

As marketers perfect their skills as web publishers and invest more aggressively in content creation content about their products and services, as well as general content that might be useful to their customers it creates an opportunity for better advertising experiences: ads we don’t feel the need to block, skip or ignore. Digg Ads, we hope, will give those marketers a real-world proving groun” a place to measure their success in making content that’s relevant to their customers.

Now combine that with the LA Times story about how Google Wave (and many of the technologies coming out that are similar) could transform reporting:

Collaborative reporting: You may notice that double bylines aren’t very common. That’s because trying to co-author a news story stinks.

The process usually [...] result in a mess of incompatible and unrelated research that gets either thrown out or somewhat-awkwardly wiggled in.

We’re not going to e-mail our co-writers with every new lead and minute detail we dig up. But if we’re sharing a virtual notebook, we can scan through …

… or search the newest findings as they’re logged, make comments and highlight our favorite bits.

Then, when it comes time to write, we can rearrange and discuss the story’s flow in the same software. Thanks to the openness of Wave, collaborative pieces between bloggers could become more common.

To be fair collaborative, real-time or (what Shel Israel calls) Braided Journalism, has already been happening but it’s primitive compared to what is to come.

• Imagine for a minute that this blogger collaboration doesn’t have to be limited to bloggers or journalist writing for the same publication.
• Imagine that the story was reported on in real time in the public as it evolved.
• Imagine if the readers were invited to participate it the reporting.
• And finally imagine that marketers were invited into the journalism process and their contribution was judged for the value it added not the value of the ad buy.

What do you see now? I see a new business model for journalism. I see relevant advertising. I see a world in 3-5 years where journalism and advertising are better than anything we’ve ever had before.

As I think about this new model I think of the idiocy behind pay walls and intrusive advertising and for the first time in a long time I’m optimistic for the future of both advertising and journalism.

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