Don't Go Mad

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Telporting to 2010 -- Reproduced Under Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilderic/4222496679/

10 sentences about 10 of the digital trends I think will be hot in 2010. By no means definitive or exhaustive but here’s a starter for 10…

1)       Getting INLINE. It’s all about the message, not the medium, as an integrated communications strategy becomes the only way to make sense of the digital world; new research from WS shows influences on purchasing decisions and why brands need to tell their stories in the right place at the right time.

2)       Preposterously simple. Blogging and other social media will achieve genuine mainstream adoption by becoming despearately simple to use — check out new service Posterous which removes any remaining geekery from blogging, making it as easy to write a blog post as it is to email your friends.

3)       Social search. Google now incorporates results from social networks (including Twitter) which means brands need to create content that people will put on their profiles as way to raise the visibility of their stories in search.

4)       User generated revenue. Ford’s Fiesta Movement has created an online community to test-drive cars, with members reporting back on sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook in a move that’s apparently generated tens of thousands of sales leads.

5)       Business Twits. If you don’t already have a Twitter strategy then now’s the time to develop one as the internet darling is poised to introduce official B2B tools.

6)       Video news releases. Engage traditional media in an untraditional way using online video to turn complex news into globally popular coverage.

7)       Spending (even) more time online. Big players like Google want people to use the internet more – from watching video to writing spreadsheets, all within a browser-based operating system – and they’re likely to invest heavily to convince us because they make more money if we’re all living online.

8)       Where 2.0. We barely bat an eyelid at GPS these days and now so many of us have it in our phones the landscape is ripe for full exploitation of location-based services along with the mobile apps that mean you can do just about anything on the move.

9)       Get a life. Make content work harder by pushing it out to as many (relevant) communities as possible using a lifestream like Friendfeed or Facebook and become more visible in more places more of the time – this works offline, as well as online.

10)   Return on Involvement. Shifting to a model where ROI is based on delivering an engagement strategy which delivers against a business objective measurable in more ways than just website traffic.