I just got back from Interchange 2012, an annual conference that brings together personnel from state CPA societies across the country to discuss the latest trends in communications, education, membership, student recruitment and more.
This year, Interchange was held in St Louis. If you've never been there, it's hot this time of year. Like Africa hot.
But I digress. To no one's surprise, social media was a popular discussion topic at the conference. Social media guru Michelle Golden provided a particularly interesting presentation titled Modern Marketing and the Social Web. She provided her perspective on Twitter (she sees a “large” CPA community on Twitter), Google+ (she’s not a big fan) and much more. Check out her full presentation on SlideShare for more insights.
As Michelle was speaking at the conference, it got me thinking about predictions from other experts. The blog Social CPAs recently published predictions from Jessica Levin, Bill Sheridan and Rita Keller. Here are some highlights:
Jessica
- Google+ will grow and will see more adoption in the CPA profession because it has the professional nature that CPAs gravitate to, but the highly social components lacking in their go-to resource, LinkedIn.
- CPAs who target certain markets such as retail, apparel or any other market that has a highly visual product should pay attention to Pinterest.
Bill
- 2012 will be the year when people start saying, “Enough is enough.” Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Foursquare, Flickr, SlideShare, Quora, Tumblr -- there are simply too many social tools out there and not enough hours in the day.
- Keep an eye on Google+. CPAs and state CPA societies have been slow to embrace it thus far, but they, this is Google we’re talking about.
Rita
- More firms will become active. We've been stressing it and stressing it (which helps) and they are seeing their competitors become very active.
Check out their complete predictions.
And for Facebook fans and investors, here’s a particularly chilling forecast from outside the accounting world: “In five to eight years they (Facebook) are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared,” Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson told the CNBC show Squawk on the Street. “Yahoo is still making money, it’s still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it’s 10% of the value that it was at the height of 2000,” Jackson added. “For all intents and purposes, it’s disappeared.”
Yikes.
So, anyone have any predictions of their own?