Life Online: Forecast for 2010
Here are my latest random and unscientific thoughts about life and business online in 2010.
If 2009 was the year of 140 character tweets, I predict 2010 will be the year of who-cares-if-we-tweet. It will be a year of questioning and evaluating, planning and stratgy. I think many people jumped into the Twitter fray last year just because Oprah and everyone else was doing it. Now they are asking, “What am I doing here?” Case in point, Brand Republic reports Nielson Online research showing 60% of Twitter users stop using the service within one month after signup.
Socialness needs a leader. Even one or two person shops need a social plan and someone in charge. Like David Armano says, if you’re not a social person offline, you won’t be social online, so I think you best find the natural social butterfly of your brand, an honest and authentic representative, and put this person in charge (I am recruiting, btw). Creating, responding and engaging is important no matter what size company you have.
More and more community. User created content and engagement was all that in 2009 and will continue to grow in 2010. Traditional offline groups like Chambers of Commerce, churches and nonprofit organizations will migrate more and more to online interaction and new ways of doing business.
Remote sharing will grow. DimDim, Whistletree, GotoMeeting and other remote interaction tools make it easy to group and gather for whatever reason. Using these tools helps you engage, monetize and connect through classes, summits, pre and post conference discussions, whiteboard presentations, whatever. This is huge now and will continue to grow.
More blue moose-i-ness. We (web readers in general) can’t remember you if you’re too milk ricey. Give us something we can hang on to, if not a visual like a blue moose, at least a distinctive voice with a core message. We have trouble keeping track of our car keys and we can’t keep track of you unless you give us a compelling reason to do so.
Web A.D.D. on the rise. Attention is limited online and will continue to decline so your video demos, tutorials, edutainment, whatever best be rich and not about YOU but about the problem, solution or benefit you provide to the watcher. Either that or be funny. I think Common Craft has it down cold.
Personal brands will grow. I think we will see more and more personal brands from CEO’s and heads-of-important-stuff, take these guys for example, Michael Hyatt (Thomas Nelson Publishers), Gary Vee (Wine Library), Chris Brogan (New Marketing Labs). All of them are huge brands in and of themselves.
Instant collaboration. Google Wave will take us to the next level of interaction, online=real time. It is difficult to explain Google Wave, the best way to understand it is through experience. Request an invitation here.
Design trends. Monitors will continue to super size while hand helds proliferate (can you say 4.1 billion mobile phone users). It’s really hard to design for both ends of the spectrum so all we can do stick to good web standards and make sure we have mobile versions of our websites (some recommendations here and I still need to do this). Design trends are all over the board but I think we will see some creative uses of typography with the release of Typekit and other type rendering tools.
Geting stuff done. The web is a task oriented place and people don’t really like to read online so no matter what type of website you have – ecommerce, professional service, web app, or membership — I think you need to help your readers get it done on your site.
This is the view from my front porch. What do you see?
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