Since the end of the year is typically a time of reflection and relaxation, we are going to take a look at our best posts of the past year in this series – Best of 2008. These posts cover a variety of subjects – from advertising, to blogging and even programming. We hope you have a peaceful and happy holidays and wish you great success and happiness in 2009.
Product Marketing Blog
Looking Back at 2008 and Ahead to 2009
Taking a look at predictions I made for 2008, it seems they were pretty close to reality. To summarize:
- Business websites will increase the range of information they offer offer on their sites, starting to include more audio and video.
- Business websites will include more user generated content.
- Community and social networks will be important to the business community.
These may not have been all that hard to predict, but social networking has really taken off in 2008 for business use. Not only have LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. grown in use, but so have smaller, more niche social networks.
So what about for 2009?
We’ve recently seen Twitter use explode among business users. There are still some industries where useage is small, so I’d expect Twitter to continue to grow. Look for it to be integrated into all sorts of social networks, websites and new applications. While it already has been incorporated into many of these, I think it will continue to be used in new and interesting ways.
Blackberries, iphones, the google phone, etc. have increase competition for very smart phones which allow browsing on the web and interaction with websites via phone applications. This trend will continue and many larger business sites will start seriously providing mobile versions of their sites and services. This has already started to happen, but I think the trend will vastly increase to the point that even smaller sites will start to explore this medium.
Due to the recession I think we’ll see more business websites spending a bit more time providing more content – in the form of blogs, video, audio and ways to interact with their customers. Sales may be down, which means a bit more time to spend on tasks that have fallen to the wayside.
What are your predictions for 2009?
(photo by Bitterjug @ Flickr CC)
Finding Twitter Influencers to Follow
Reader Steven Woods had a great question that I think might be useful to others, so I’m sharing it in a post (thanks for the question,Steven!):
Have you seen any good tools for understanding who is the most influential in a given subject? Measurements and/or ranking of network/relevance/retweets?
Here are a few tools that can help find the influencers for a subject or in your network:
Mr. Tweet will analyze your network and followers and suggest who you should be following back as well as influencers outside of your network.
TwitterGrader will give you a suggested list of people to follow based on keywords in your own tweets.
Twellow won’t necessarily give you influencers, but it is a directory of tweeters by subject, so it can help you find people in an industry to follow.
TweetScan, TwitScoop, TweetDeck and Twitter all give you the ability to search on a keyword and see what people have said about it. I happen to monitor a few keywords using TweetDeck and have found it useful for finding new people to follow and connect with.
If anyone has any other tools or methods, please feel free to share.
(photo by 4RB @ Flickr CC)
Technorati Tags: twitter, social networks, social media, internet marketing, social media marketing, social media strategy, internet business strategy