Mal Fletcher reports on the technologies you & your organisation can't afford to ignore.

An avatar is simply a digital representation of the real you for the digital world. We already have avatars, though we'd seldom see them as such.

If you have a handful of social media accounts on different platforms, you already have personal avatars. You have invented and developed specific characters for each platform, which provide your digital face for the cybersphere.

None of these characters represents the entirety of who you are; at best, each highlights a different side of your personality.

This is caveman avatarism compared to what's on the horizon. For example, this year sees the launch of Virtual Social Media - or Sociable Media.

A good example of it is found with a recently launched platform known as vTime. Using a basic headset and any portable digital gadget, you can place a 3D avatar of yourself - designed by you - into an imaginary space and invite your friends to join you, via their avatars.

Instead of writing to or skyping each other, you can 'sit' in the same virtual space and chat.

This year will also see a much greater use of Big Data and the (slowly) emerging Internet of Things, to focus the power of geofenced marketing and social shopping.

In 2016, social media will find new markets among business users. Already, a growing number of companies in the US are experimenting with social media platforms in an effort to replace cumbersome email software, for both internal and customer-facing communications.

Only around 12 percent of companies doing this at present say they are doing it well. However, that percentage will grow as social media giants such as Facebook continue to push their new business applications - with support and training to back them up.

Social media will also start to play an even larger role in the direction of traditional media. We will see new mergers with established media players and more buy-outs of the type seen when Amazon's Jeff Bezos purchased the struggling Washington Post.

Arguably, if these buy-outs are carried out in the right way they bring great new opportunities to both new and old media. The Bezos-Post deal potentially combines the rigour and accountability of old-school journalism with the mass dissemination of social media.

The new phase in the evolution of social media will have a huge impact on politics. Already, with the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US, we are seeing the power of social media to disintermediate politics.

Cutting out the middle-man of old media to speak directly to the public is proving a winner with potential voters - though whether it can swing a US election remains to be seen.

Countries like Moldova have already shown how useful social media can be in bringing expat younger voters into national elections. Through canny use of e-voting, Moldova has reduced the impact of the nation's post-communism brain-drain, while helping to keep liberal democratic parties on top in elections.