December not only means packed shopping mall parking lots and holiday office parties but also the seasonal ritual known as next year predictions. In a year that began with the inauguration of a president who ran a ground-breaking online campaign to social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, exploding with year-over-year growth numbers, 2009 was quite a year for new media.
As for me, I’m thinking that 2010 will be 2009 on steroids, especially when it comes to search. “Building communities” and “engagement” via Twitter and Facebook were key 2009 buzzwords and activities. But as 2009 is drawing to a close and with this year’s successful launch of Bing and Google’s roll out last week of integrating real-time search into results and Google Goggles, a search by images feature for Android 1.6+ phones,
my prediction is that 2010 will be the year where search is ramped up to an even higher level. SEO budgets in businesses are on target to be bigger next year and I predict we’ll see search become less a function of going to a portal such as Bing or Google, but instead, being built into applications making for a seamless search experience for users. As a consequence, as Facebook pages and Twitter tweets will rise to the top of search results, businesses will need to commit more staff resources and budget into their social media efforts. Having the intern in charge of the Facebook page and Twitter feed will no longer make good business sense.
Here are some predictions from around the new media community:
Geoff Ramsey, eMarketer:
While media dollars have imploded, media consumption will continue to explode.
“Due to increasingly empowered consumers and further advances in technology, look for media to become more:
- Distributed—the same content will pop up in multiple locations, formats and channels.
- Personalized—media will be tailored to reflect what consumers have watched, read, experienced and shared.
- Contextualized—when and where consumers get their information will dictate its content and format, and that, in turn, will shape how they interact with and share it.
Each of these trends will lead to more precise targeting, which will also reinforce trend No. 2, the stagnation of media spending.”
David Armano, Dachis Group (Armano has recently joined the PR firm Edelman)
Mobile becomes a social media lifeline
“With approximately 70 percent of organizations banning social networks and, simultaneously, sales of smartphones on the rise, it’s likely that employees will seek to feed their social media addictions on their mobile devices. What used to be cigarette breaks could turn into “social media breaks” as long as there is a clear signal and IT isn’t looking. As a result, we may see more and/or better mobile versions of our favorite social drug of choice.
Sharing no longer means e-mail
The New York Times iPhone application recently added sharing functionality which allows a user to easily broadcast an article across networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Many websites already support this functionality, but it’s likely that we will see an increase in user behavior as it becomes more mainstream for people to share with networks what they used to do with e-mail lists. And content providers will be all too happy to help them distribute any way they choose.”
Pete Cashmore, Mashable:
“Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there’s no doubt this transition will continue. The trend, in which data and applications cease to reside on our desktops and instead exist on servers elsewhere (“the cloud”), makes our data accessible from anywhere and enables collaboration with distributed teams.
The cloud movement will see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010 with the launch of “Office Web Apps,” free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote released in tandem with Microsoft Office 2010.”
Sarah Rotman and James McQuivey, Forrester Research:
Growing Popularity of eReaders
(As quoted in InventorSpot.com)
“According to Sarah Rotman and James McQuivey, of Forrester Research, eReaders will be another place for app growth. ‘”As anyone with an iPhone knows, apps are where the magic happens: They make the device infinitely more useful.” Rotman and McQuivey said they ‘wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon launch a Kindle app store, too, including anything from a social-reading app from Goodreads to an enterprise app fro Microsoft or Oracle would make e-readers vastly expand the possibilities for consumers and businesses.”‘
Joel Postman, Social Media Today:
Augmented Reality Applications Will Start to Go Mainstream
“Augmented Reality (AR) is the ability to place computer-generated information, such as text and labels, on top of live real world data, such as video from a smart phone. Most AR applications in 2009 were quaint curiosities designed to demonstrate the AR concept. It took a lot of hacking and ingenuity to make these a reality since most consumer platforms lagged (but not by much) in features (think video finally coming to the iPhone) required for AR.
A few AR applications have been rolled out by progressive marketers and other organizations this year, but 2010 will be the year AR explodes. Expect to see applications from major corporations, municipalities, and institutions of higher learning. Some of the most interesting applications will be outside of marketing and promotion. These might include real time campus maps and guided tours; theme park guides; capital equipment location and inventory; and even applications in which the operator makes computer-based notes on top of realtime images, which would be useful for things like home inspection and insurance claims estimating.”
Via techPresident, 
