What’s next…?
…in Social Media:
“At least one of the dominant tools for social networking will wind down and decline and people will leave it nearly as quickly as they joined it. I have no idea which one it will be, but not even Facebook or Twitter is immune from the possibility. The viral effect works in both directions.” — Jim McCarthy, Goldstar
“Many social network sites starting to charge for memberships for more quality control due to the amount of spam we saw in 2009.” – Mirna Bard, NuReach Global
“Location-based social media applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite. Social media moving to the next level of interaction.” – Charles Harris, Coast2Coast Expert.
“Integration between platforms. Things like ping.fm, Google Wave and other utilities out there centralizing the interface and use between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo and all the others.” – Chip Ahlswede, RegalStrategies.com
“Mainstream media will actually change their 20th century business models to meet 21s century needs. Otherwise, they are toast.” – Ron Ploof, ronamok.com
“Measuring the return on investment on social media efforts will become the norm in 2010. This will mean some companies will not be able to justify their current efforts. – Jim Marks, Virtual Results
“People using social media for civic engagement with those public agencies using social media and to encourage governments that haven’t adopted social media to use these tools to have meaningful dialogue with their constituents.” – Ted Nguyen, Orange County Transportation Authority
“Growing number of things which aren’t strictly people on your buddy lists. Suddenly I think we will see people friending their laundromat to see when machines are available, the roads they use to watch traffic, and groups of their friends at once. The latter will be interesting because you will only see updates when all of your friends agree.” – Don Patterson, quub.com
“A plateau of people flocking to Twitter. This year it was the new shiny toy on the street, but soon the Twitterverse will become saturated with push marketers, spammers, and in-genuine marketing campaigns.” – Justin Moore-Brown, Mobo Media
Social video. “We may start to explore social video, not only user-generated but also brand-generated.” – Tracy Marks, Souplantation
“Google and Facebook will do something major to completely change the game, and take over the world.” – Rochelle Veturis, LPA architects
“I think that pitching stories to the media via social networks, or the media picking up stories they heard about via social media, could be the next big thing.” – Jen Dwyer, thecutekid.com
…in Media:
…in Search:
I think that next year will see the continued convergence of technologies and channels, particularly TV, mobile, search & social. The real-time search movement will continue in some way, shape or form, though the engines still need to perfect ranking & filtering.
The continued rise of mobile web, pulling in GPS & augmented reality, means that people will expect geo-results. And as TV gets webbed up (Yahoo TV Widgets etc…) people searching and chatting on and around shows will become a new way of reaching people, or at least learning about what they want.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think 2010 will see the beginnings of a backlash against Google. There have been murmurings for some time among the tech community about their all-pervading presence, ambition to gather everyone’s data for their own marketing purposes and effective monopoly.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see them take a step too far and face political push-back over their expansion into the desktop and mobile phone markets. If they use market power in one arena to manipulate another, that’s classic monopolistic behaviour. Personally, I’d love to see Bing gain some market share. I think a strong competitor would ultimately benefit everyone.
We’ll see continued improvements in visual search. Google Goggles is one example but we’ll also see mobile applications that affect an augmented reality that combine search and location-aware search. These will let searchers show the engines what they want help with and get back results.
Privacy will also be a hot issue in 2010. Targeting becomes ever more important to companies and yet the ability not to be targeted becomes ever more important to people. It seems impossible that we’ll avoid tension on this front.
Of particular interest will be looking beyond the last click. DoubleClick offers Click Path Analysis. Atlas offers User Engagement Mapping. There will be other offerings from alternative technology providers who wish to remain competitive against these search engine owned offerings. 2010 will see sites wrestle with tagging and tracking but invest in the required technology in 2010 with the ambition of not having to return to this fight for a while.
As real-time search helps surface social media sites in the blink of an eye the aspects of ‘search’, ‘marketing’, ‘public relations’ and even ‘customer care’ will all get drawn together. We’ll see different types of agencies pitching against one another for the first time. We’ll see corporate departments defending their turf and fighting for budget against their colleagues across the hall.
Google page speed is going to have an influence over organic rankings in 2010 and is likely to have a strong impact on designers/developers as well as SEO’s. At the moment there are unanswered questions, such as how heavily will slow sites be penalised? Will fast sites be boosted in the search engines? So it will be interesting to see the impact this has.
Now that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal is now all tied-up, advertisers will need to start thinking seriously about Bing’s more sizeable market share and start to prepare for when this is integrated with Yahoo search.
Google Wave has been slowly rolled out to users so far during 2009, this has a lot of potential, which is unlikely to be truly realised until it reaches a greater audience. There’s a lot of uncertainly about how popular Google Wave will become at the moment, so it will be very interesting to see if this can really take off in 2010. I’m sure they’ll be new social media sites coming onto the scene too, along with developments to many of the current top social media sites; Twitter business accounts, for example, will be a good one to look out for.
Rumoured for a while, and discovered live on the web by a clever person over at Gizmodo, there is a new Google Interface on the way for 2010. Being referred to as the three panel layout this change will mean it will become increasing important to rank highly in Image, Video and other search results as Google gives more prominence to these sections within its interface.
Real Time search has huge implications in terms of brand protection, what results people will click, as well as creating new opportunities to rank. Google also announced earlier this month that everyone’s search results are now being personalised (to an extent) based on your previous search behaviour, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not. Are the days of the ranking report now truly numbered?
(via Econsultancy)
…in Marketing:
Other Trend Predictions for 2010 in 140 characters:
