January 9

Top digital marketing trends for 2010 – Crowdsourcing, flash and more

digital marketing trends 2010

2010 is upon us. Get ready for another round of changes of both the monumental and incremental variety. Our friends as Last Exit have compiled a list of digital marketing trends for the new year. Some will seem obvious, others not so much. Read on to discover how the new year will play out:

1. Facebook continues it ’s eventual replacement of personal e-mail – This is already happening, thanks to the massive pre-existing userbase of Facebook and a few key conveniences that sites like Gmail and Yahoo can’t offer. For one, you don’t have to remember any e-mail addresses. Just ring up your friends name and it’s message time. It even has a chat functionality built in. But don’t worry, Facebook still hasn’t made a dent into business e-mail. Maybe in 2011.

2.The Cloud Helps Open-Source Software Make Proper Money – Open-source software projects that were typically a tiny niche market are now available to the masses. In this example, Beanstalk, a fully hosted, version-controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open-source project has created a subscription based service that – for a small fee – removes the hassle of setting up Subversions and maintaining those pesky servers.Cloud computing infrastructures is the only way to make this kind of business model profitable. Companies like Beanstalk don’t have to upfront capital outlay for servers. With the right skills any open-source project can be commercialized this way. Bring it on.

3.Mobile commerce finally comes into it’s own - Mobile commerce was something of a joke until the iPhone app store took the world by storm in the past year or so. This trend will continue as the new Google Nexus phone enters the fray and other companies finally play catch-up with Apple’s business models. Expect your all-in-one smart phones to be able to do all sorts of new things, for a fee, by this time next year.

4. Fewer registrations, less annoyances - How tired are we of remembering password after password after password? We are lazy, dammit! Well, companies are listening. This has already begun to happen. Notice once you sign into your Gmail account, you can pretty much do anything within the Google network. More companies will partner up to make this a reality amongst different websites. You should probably change your password from “hello” already, though. It’s 2010.

5. DIY culture comes into it’s own – Call it DIY culture, Web 2.1, or whatever you want. It’s here to stay. Sites like Cafe Press, Etsy, and even old stalwarts like eBay allow people to run their own businesses from the comforts of their own home. Etsy in particular has turned into a huge success story, allowing people to produce and sell their own art for whatever price they choose. And, of course, Etsy gets a cut. Not a bad deal for them.

6.Crowd Sourcing – Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of various outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special-interest groups to not only carry a message but also to lead and take part in activities on their behalf. From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, expect to see huge growth in crowdsourcing models provoked and led, in large part, by digital social media strategies.

7.Flash overtakes the universe – Every year likes to predict the death of flash, simpler is better after all. That’s a load of podunk, though. Flash is not only here to stay, but it will be wrapping it’s sinewy tentacles into every aspect of the Internet experience this year. Thanks in part to Adobe’s rich media tool. Also, several tricks, authoring tools and server side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash-built websites no longer serve up single, impenetrable pages. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization. Which is good for all of us.

Well that’s it for now. Let’s meet back here at the end of year and see how wrong we were. Isn’t that part of the fun?