The Future Of Social: Crowd-Sourcing And Artificial Intelligence

In 2005, 5% of adults in the U.S. were on social media; today it's around 70%. Facebook has over 1.65 billion users engaging for more than 50 minutes per day. Social media is ubiquitous, and smart brands are sprinting to keep pace. What has evolved beyond Social Monitoring to Social Listening is now poised to enter a 3.0 phase in which crowd-sourcing and artificial intelligence will play pivotal roles. Social Listening starts with a required input: "What, where or whom should we listen to?" Creating that list, similar to how SEM and SEO marketers derive their keyword list, takes expert practitioners and smart tools. However, social is just more wild, more organic and more unpredictable than search.