Social Media Trends: Mashups

The art of combining ways to engage in the social media world is itself becoming a social media trend, and one with a somewhat ambiguous name.  Web 2.0 has the mashup to thank for its shaping - that is, the concept of a web page or application that utilizes something (data, function, looks) from two or more services to make new services.  With the myriad of services out there - and more every day, it seems - mashups are an almost inevitable result of all the frenetic Internet, and especially social media, activity.  They have a driving role in the development of social media, as well as social software, so they are a social media trend with which to become familiar.

While social feeds are a wildly popular social media trend, they're not quite ready for (successful) business use.  Mashups, however, are primed for the business exploit.  The concept of a mashup implies easily "togethered" ideas - that is, this really works best with two ideas that already sort of fit together both in terms of software and in terms of marketing strategy - but the mashup world is unpredictable.  A mashup is volatile in that it can combine two ideas that originally have nothing to do with one another into something completely different than - even unrelated to - the intents and purposes of its two sources.  The potential here for "new" and fresh ideas is daunting.

One way to improve your business's online presence is to make your own mashup.  Since it behooves businesses to be following social media trends anyway (social media's not going away any time soon, remember?), you should already be well versed in the comings and goings of social media and its users.  This means that you can pick and choose from any two or more popular social media trends (like location-based services and mobile app ads, for example) into a creative and compelling ad campaign or business web page.  The more interaction you invite users into, the better.

Most current mashups are client applications - that is, applications that allow remote access or enable multiple-user use.  This is useful for businesses, but the mashup world could be taken much further, especially since the creation of mashups does not require extensive software, code knowledge, or programming skills.  Mashups, rather, are predicted to be used in the casting of a new vision for the Web, since one of their primary uses is visual presentation.  Businesses who are on the front-end of such a monumental project as re-designing the Web - which is a likely implementation of the mashup concept, whether consciously or not - will be sure to improve in the coming year.  How do businesses get such an edge?  Starting mashing up now!

Photo credit: WebGlue