The short: The music industry has continued its dramatic shift from the record store to the web with persistent innovation in the field of social music. As music becomes more readily available on the web, it is also becoming more sharable thanks to services such as Spotify, Turntable.fm, Pandora and Google Music.

Why it matters: eMarketer reports that 53% of consumers choose to purchase their music online. When combined with the fact that CDs are continuing their decade-long decline in sales, the music industry is being forced to shift from the physical to the digital world. This shift could not come at a more opportune time for brands, as the ability to integrate sharing has become integral for successful digital and social campaigns. This move proves once again that a brand’s ability to integrate sharable content and campaigns is one of the best ways to engage its fans and followers.

The short: After facing some initial legal issues, Facebook finally rolled out the highly anticipated Timeline at the end of 2011. This innovation, combined with the Open Graph and Ticker, has paved the way for new methods by which brands can interact with users through apps and pages.

Why it matters: Recognizing the importance of the “like”, Facebook is combining its use of the Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph to allow for even more sharing and social activity. Brands can now design apps that let their users document actions ranging from “listen” to “watch”, allowing for constant broadcasting of every social move. If executed correctly, these innovations will provide the opportunity for brands to further engage and activate their followers in more ways than ever. Expect the launch of some of these applications in the beginning of the year.

The short: Each month comScore releases a mobile subscriber report which shows how many US residents over 13 have mobile phones, and of those, who has smartphones. For all of 2011, mobile phone penetration has been steady at 92% of the population, while smartphone adoption rates have climbed from 28% to 41% with a steady addition of about 2.7M new users a month. Should this pace be maintained, as it likely will, smartphone adoption rates will break 50% right around mid-summer of 2012.

Why it matters: With all technologies, adoption can be described with a standard bell curve, known as the innovation adoption lifecycle. As the second 50% of users (known as the late majority and laggards) start using a new technology, it is officially considered mainstream. With a majority of Americans walking around with smartphones in their pockets, mobile browsing, mobile shopping, mobile payments, and more will have gone from fantasy to reality, ushering in a new wave of social applications and experiences.

The short: Google has decided to throw its hat into the social media game with its new network: Google Plus. Closely integrated with Google’s pre-existing search, mail and chat functions, Google Plus hopes to keep the early momentum it gained in 2011 and take the field of social media by storm by providing a stronger overall experience for all kinds of users.

Why it matters: With total control over a brand’s ability to search optimize, Google is expected to increase the role of the “+1” in its algorithm in the near future. As these features begin to play a bigger part in a Google search, a Google Plus page may become essential for a brand to develop a strong web presence. Furthermore, the added features of “circles”, page integration and “hangouts” all present new opportunities for brands looking to build an innovative social campaign.

The short: When it comes to social media community management, influence matters. As more brands measure influence to help decide with whom to engage or to whom to offer a promotion, startups like Klout are gaining widespread popularity and even copycat services like Kred are getting noticed. Independent of how much brands benefit from influence-tracking services, some users have been up in arms, choosing to opt-out and go to great lengths to block their public social media accounts from influence analysis.

Why it matters: Because it is so important for brands to prove the ROI of social media campaigns, influence apps are going to remain an important tool for community managers. Even if Klout or Kred go under, other companies and products will spring up to take their place and continue to provide this much needed service to brands. No matter who ends up on top, privacy issues will need to be addressed to ensure that users have a choice in whether or not their accounts get analyzed. An opportunity also exists for brands to create high-quality and high-value promotions which reframe services like Klout as desirable and user-friendly.

The short: Two of the fastest growing, most interesting social media tools this year have been Instagram and Tumblr. Instagram has been a major disruptor in the photo-sharing world, despite the fact that Facebook, Flickr, and others have been sharing photos for years. And Tumblr has been spreading like wild fire while getting more minutes of web users’ time than Wordpress, Blogger, and other free publishing platforms. What’s the secret? Both services let users create and share image-rich content with minimal effort.

Why it matters: Innovation Fatigue affects us all, and with so many start ups and new social media platforms popping up each month, it’s getting harder and harder for a new product to get any traction. What Instagram and Tumblr proved is that users will flock to your product in droves if you create what they want: rich experiences that are extremely easy to use. For Instagram, the key decision was to make sharing the default behavior within an image app, and for Tumblr, it was to reinvent the blog post to be less about writing unique content and more about sharing images and reblogging the content of others. The success of Instagram and Tumblr is a reminder that there is room for disruptive innovation even in the most saturated markets.

The short: 2011 saw the year of many new consumer sites with one thing in common: beautifully designed user interfaces with simple, one-click actions. Pinterest, an online "pinboard" app, surpassed 421 million pageviews in October of 2011 and has caught on with the crowds of mommy bloggers, Etsy store owners and designers. Fab.com, a site for daily design inspirations and up to 70% off sales, saw more than $1.1 million in sales during this year's Black Friday to Cyber Monday season.

Why it matters: Simplicity is winning. Sites and interfaces are becoming major reasons for user engagement and many new applications are realizing this, as design and rebranding continue to pull away clutter and focus on large photos and better UX design. Path, Twitter, YouTube and Google’s apps all had a major design refresh at the end of 2011 with the hopes of making it easier for their loyal users to engage, while attracting new users to the product. Look to 2012 as the year when the trend of good design extends from the niche market of consumer goods to nearly all brand pages and mobile applications.

The short: 2011 saw an uptick of brands and developers leveraging years worth of public user data to create engaging online apps and stories. Intel's “Museum of Me” and the buzz generating "Take This Lollipop" were two ideas that took advantage of your personal and public Facebook photos, "check ins" and friend data, turning them into a visually creative story. These have lead to many brands discussing how they could do something similar and what to do with all of the data they have collected.

Why it matters: Consumers like to see their data and, through this data, see themselves. For the past few years we've tweeted, "Liked" and "checked in" to multiple places, authorizing others to collect this data with little knowledge of what will actually be done with it. Now brands are increasingly gathering insights from this information and are seeing an opportunity to help consumers visualize their own online identities, and even celebrate them, with enticing apps and rich experiences. Not only can you expect to see many more integrations like these, but you should also consider ways for your own brand to leverage the user data collected from your existing apps, sites, and services.

The short: Already the largest video-sharing site in the world with over three billion views per day, YouTube rounded out 2011, as so many do, by figuratively saying: “out with the old, in with the new.” In this case, it's out with stumbling upon random videos and in with a brand new homepage redesign, or “fresh coat of digital paint,” that provides users with a cleaner, more streamlined layout and highlights content from subscribed channels in a playlist.

Why it matters: This represents YouTube's bid to better direct viewers toward branded or professional videos and underscores the fact that “YouTube doesn't want to be like a TV network; it wants to be TV,” as the New York Times opined. In addition to 100+ channels featuring premium original content, YouTube made a recent deal with Disney to rent titles, supplementing existing partnerships with Sony Pictures, Warner Bros and Universal Pictures. Now YouTube is poised to redefine what content we consume online and how we consume it in 2012, especially as Google+ ramps up with its ability to share seamlessly.

The short: It's no surprise that the accessibility and always-improving quality of camera phones—along with platforms to quickly share what's produced—has forever altered the landscape of citizen journalism; news is no longer the cordoned-off domain of a few. Indeed, toward the end of November, CNN fired 12 of its photojournalists after it concluding that user- generated images could replace the professional in terms of speed and, more importantly, cost.

Why it matters: Crowd-sourcing public content is a growing trend for companies, as social media has made it easy to discover and source content for brands of all sizes, and it will continue in 2012 as sharing tools and technologies are improved or introduced. And while we’ve just started to see brands do this in interesting ways, like Club Monaco’s recent Get Inspired competition, the question for companies, rather than consumers, will be: how much is quality content worth?