Time for the annual “looking ahead” post. From last year’s post, here were my predictions for 2009:
- Increase in Twitter use for businesses
- Smartphone growth
- Businesses providing more content – blogs, video, audio, and increasing the ways they interact with their customers.
So how’d I do?
I think Twitter definitely increased it’s use by businesses. Businesses are now trying to figure out the “rules” in terms of personal vs. business brands online. I’m not sure if this will every be completely sorted out, but I think we’ll have some more information going forward as to how different tactics are working.
Smartphones have exploded – we now have competition between iPhones, Blackberries and Android devices. This is good news for consumers. I’d love to see Google pull off a non-carrier based phone. I think we could all benefit from being able to move carriers at will – and it would force carriers to improve customer service and their communications networks.
I’m not sure if businesses are providing more content on their websites, but I think they definitely have started to reach out to their customers through social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. And they certainly are providing more content in general – I’d love to see that more integrated into corporate websites.
What’s Ahead?
With the explosion of smartphones this year, along with the growth of sites like Foursquare, I expect both mobile and local to be huge in 2010. You’ll probably want to make sure that your business has a mobile site (pretty easy with services such as mofuse), and make sure your local listings are up to date (check your Google profile, for example).
Now we can tweet from facebook and facebook on twitter (kinda). Expect social networks to start to blur the lines of content – they need to encourage openness in order to get the content for real time searches. With Facebook’s recent privacy setting changes, I’d expect privacy issues to be big in 2010.
Video, video, video – Sites like Hulu have made it easy for consumers to time-shift tv shows and online viewing of video has soared. I think this will continue as we see the way we’re able to view movies, tv, and other video change. Hopefully the media companies will start to leverage this so we can get all our favorite shows.
What do you think? What lies ahead in 2010?
(photo by seanmcgrath @ FlickrCC)
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