It is important for organisations that operate in the online marketing environment to stay ahead of the latest developments and innovations if they want to maintain their current levels of customers, and capitalise on new opportunities. Failure to stay ahead of the curve could well see your online competitors gain a march on you.
So exactly what is likely to be a big area of growth this year on the web? What are our forecasts for the ‘next big thing(s)’ in online marketing? See below for our predictions on what to look out for in 2010…
Social Gaming
FarmVille, a Facebook game in which you grow and tend to your own Farm, currently has 70 million active monthly users. By comparison, Twitter currently has approximately 12 million users. Clearly Social Gaming is already popular, and will continue to grow strongly during 2010. I’d also wager that FarmVille has much more of a ‘middle America’ demographic than Twitter…
Brands looking for new & innovative online opportunities for exposure need look no further; create a killer Social Game on Facebook. These types of games could even be tied into product promotions; with codes to unlock various aspects of the game available on the back of packaging for example, as well as forming part of a link generation campaign.
Social Games are going to become the Flash Games of 2010 for big brands.
Payment Platforms
Those that just make the games will look to ‘internal game economies’ and user purchases for monetisation. Micropayments can already be made on Facebook for charitable donations and gifts, so this functionality lends itself well to this purpose.
With the seemingly never ending proliferation of Facebook Connect (allowing you to log into other websites using your Facebook ID), will 2010 be the year we see Facebook emerge as a general e-commerce payment platform? Probably not (just yet), but for micropayments (to access premium content for example), Facebook is in prime position. Expect to be using Facebook, or similar, to make micropayments to access individual articles on pay newspaper sites (owned by Rupert Murdoch).
The Amazon Flexible Payments Service is likely to be the early leader as a full blown payment platform, allowing consumers to purchase goods from third party websites through simply using a passphrase and a pin number. Clearly this adds convenience to a consumer’s journey through a website as they don’t have to enter details more than once. It also addresses any issues of trust a consumer could have with a small e-commerce website, no payment details are passed to the third party as Amazon processes the payment: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/. Online retailers unable, or unwilling, to obtain a merchant account of their own may also see this as a viable option.
Expect this to be a big area of growth in 2010 which the web’s big boys will fight over to control.
IPTV & Internet TV
I’ve been banging on about internet TV for years now and have been waiting with baited breath for the platform to come to full fruition. Will 2010 be the year more people watch TV via the Internet than traditional methods (digital or analogue)? Probably not, but 2010 will be a huge year for true Internet TV and could open up new online marketing channels.
IPTV
Whilst interesting in itself, IPTV doesn’t open up any new (& immediately accessible) marketing channels, as IPTV offerings are largely walled gardens such Virgin TV, for that you need the real raw internet. It will however, get consumers en-masse more used to the idea of Internet based Television.
You can already get YouTube and iPlayer on your telly via a wide variety of methods, we’ll see this and similar functionality make its way from the geeks living room into your grandmas living room during 2010 via the inclusion of Freeview boxes and standalone TVs with Ethernet or Wi-Fi connections.
YouTube
No wonder so many UK TV channels have signed on the dotted line with Google’s YouTube.
This makes it even more important to rank highly for brand related terms (for exposure and protection purposes), or your viral TV ad, as more and more people use YouTube via their normal TV.
Internet TV & Set Top Boxes
We will also see an excess of new set top boxes and software solutions offering to bring together the many current web TV services and other websites all in one place. As a long time fan of XBMC (Xbox Media Center), I await the launch of Boxee’s (XBMC predecessor) set top box with baited breath. For more information on Boxee check out my blog post from November of last year (link to blog).
Online Marketing
These new TV distribution channels will give online marketers an additional channel to work with; you’re probably already creating a large amount of video for your website or YouTube (or are about to), why not wrap it in a new little branded package and create a mini TV Channel based solely on your brand and push it onto Boxee or similar?
Widgets & Apps
Yahoo TV Widgets have been around on Samsung TVs for a little while now, though no one paid them any attention. The concept of TV widgets was re-launched at the recent CES show in the US, with Samsung announcing a new set of widgets supporting TVs and, importantly, a new iPlayer widget.
Whilst your digital marketing agency may discuss Facebook applications with you today, expect them to begin talking about making a TV widget or something similar by the end of the year.
Augmented Reality
The web will begin to bleed into the real world during 2010. Augmented Reality ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’, it takes reality (the physical real-world environment) and adds something additional in the form of computer generated imagery, in real time. This has a myriad of applications in the world of e-commerce, mobile marketing and paid search and will break through into more mainstream use during 2010. Find out more here.
Mobile Web
So iPhones and Smart Phones are generally pretty popular, right? Of course they are, but 2010 will be the year this area truly takes off with an abundance of new, more advance and most importantly, more affordable Smart Phones hitting the market. 2010 will be the year this platform becomes completely mainstream and we begin to see much higher percentage of users accessing the web via their mobile.
How people are viewing and using the web is changing. Websites that are serious about maximising their online exposure will need to pay closer attention to how their website operates in a mobile environment during 2010 and what additional services and applications they can offer to maximise the potential of this literally mobile audience.
Mobile Payments
Mobile Payments, the ability to pay for goods via the direct use of your mobile phone, rather than cash or credit cards is already popular in many parts of the world, will take off in 2010 in the UK.
Wave and Pay within Debit Cards may triumph in the UK in terms of purchasing goods in the physical world, but mobile payments are so convenient to make purchases with when you’re browsing a shop via your mobile phone that their increasing popularity seems certain.
The Web as a Platform
Always a long term goal of ‘web 2.0’, cloud computing will truly kick into gear in 2010 as businesses and individuals alike begin to see the Web as a platform itself, in the same way Windows currently is, as both Google and Microsoft strongly push their offerings.
As web users get more accustomed to the functionality in their every day websites, or applications, e-commerce sites will begin to feel the need to offer more advanced functionality in their own offerings.
Oh, and if you haven’t rolled out Facebook connect, OpenID or other such services into your website login procedure already, you almost certainly will during 2010. The use of Social Media APIs will also become increasingly popular and important.
The long term battle of the web lies not between the search engines, but the platforms…
Google in 2010
Google Wave (Real Time Collaboration)
Whilst Google Wave on the surface appears to be an over elaborate replacement for GTalk, when you think about the encroaching cloud computing and regularly using Google’s Chrome OS, this software takes on a more useful and substantial roll as a real time collaboration tool and its use will grow relatively strong during 2010. Welcome to NetMeeting, 2010 style.
When we think about ‘Crowd Sourcing’, and using it as a marketing tool, there is a strong chance that Google Wave will emerge as a platform on which we see companies and consumers collaborate. I have no doubt that someone, at some point, will attempt this in 2010.
Google Search as an Application?
If we begin to think and use Google as an operating system, this could potentially result in Google Search just becoming another application. Will this change how people use Google, and more importantly what search results they click on? Google Search being viewed ‘just’ as application, a widget, or an applet may be quiet a way off yet. The way people view and use Google, and thus what results people are drawn to however, will change during 2010.
The New Google User Interface
Rumoured for a while, and discovered live on the web by a clever person over at Gizmodo, there is a new Google interface on the way for 2010. Being referred to as the three panel layout, this change means it will become increasingly important to rank highly in image, video et al search results, as Google gives more prominence to these sections within its interface. Try it out yourself.
Real Time Search for the masses
Originally this article was to include a section on how Real Time search will break out of Twitter (and off Bing) and into the mainstream. The speed at which Google is releasing new features at the moment has made this prediction for 2010 out of date already. Announced at the end of 2009, Real Time search results from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and other news sources will be integrated directly within the natural search results.
This change has huge implications in terms of brand protection, what results people will click, as well as creating new opportunities to rank highly in the search engines. Check out my and others Expert opinion on this topic over at Econsultancy.
Personalised Results
Google also announced earlier this month that search results are now being personalised (to an extent) based on your previous search behaviour, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not. Are the days of the ranking report now truly numbered?!
Google Caffeine
Google Caffine, Google’s latest update to its core search offering, is set for release early on in 2010.
“At this stage, Caffeine is not a full-blown algorithm update although there has been a lot of speculation regarding things that may have changed. Caffeine is in fact, documented as a complete overhaul of the infrastructure that sits under the hood of Google’s search engine.”
Find out more from our Head of Search, Malcolm Slade.
Google’s Pace of Change
2 years ago, would we have seen Personalised Results and Real Time Search released in Google Labs first, before hitting the ‘big-time’? Most likely so, at least in the case of Personalised Results, so what has changed? Why has the pace at which Google is releasing new features increased so dramatically over the past year?
In a word – Bing. Increased competition from Microsoft’s search engine has resulted in Google upping its game, and we should expect the two engines to continue this pattern in 2010 as one looks to increase its market share and the other protect it.
Of course the web, and thus search itself has changed. Nowadays Google welds enough power to try and manipulate the environment in which it operates but for me, Google at its core is a mirror of the (web) environment in which it finds itself. As the web and how people use it changes, so will Google…
To stay ahead of the curve, and the competition, websites in 2010 will need to pay close attention to search engine innovation in order to maintain their current levels of traffic and capitalise on the new opportunities that will present themselves. Companies simply must connect with their users in order to keep them engaged and ensure they maintain the highest possible positions in the search engine results.