It’s that time of year again when people are cranking up their predictions for the next year.
I’ve often made prognostications here on the blog. But to add different spin on things, I came across a list of predictions I made in 2010. Let’s see how I actually did with this social media forecast four years later …
Apps take center stage. I predicted the new battleground for marketing would be smartphone apps, which was going to drive an era of breakthrough creativity. I was right about that but honestly, this prediction was not much of a stretch : )
Augmented reality debuts, QR codes are dead. This was a pretty gutsy prediction because in 2010 everybody was hot, hot, hot about QR codes. I could see the basic problem of needing software and a hardware “opener” to access information, which people would ultimately reject … and they did. I thought augmented reality would be here sooner but it is the next big thing. Gigantic, in fact.
Social Media “re-set” – I predicted that companies would start to settle down after the initial social media hype cycle and create more realistic social media budgets and expectations. As I look back, 2010 was really the dawn of “content marketing.” I think that is the morph that had to happen. Years later I described content marketing as a “do-over” for social media and I think that is more or less the implication of the prediction.
Social scoring takes center stage – Back in 2010, nobody had heard of Klout and but I predicted that people would become obsessed with social scoring because it represented a “personal SEO.” In fact, for a couple of years I was right. There was certainly a Klout frenzy but that seems a little quieter now?
The social SEO snowball — I think I missed this one but I’m not sure why … In 2010, B2B companies were far behind the social media curve. Google was beginning to incorporate social signals into organic search results and I thought this would have B2B companies PILING onto the social web. There has certainly been progress but not to the extent that I forecast.
Social for the enterprise – What if we applied social software to people working within a company? In 2010 this was just beginning to percolate but it was on-target. Today, social software companies like Jive and Chatter are standard fare for many companies. In 2012, McKinsey predicted that MOST of the value of social would come from enterprise applications so I was ahead of my time.
Micro payments – finally? Facebook had just announced its virtual credit innovation and I thought this would finally be the micro-payments eCommerce solution everybody was waiting for. Wouldn’t it be fun if readers could click a button and leave you a few cents or a dollar for a great blog post? Wouldn’t it be cool to leave a “tip” for a favorite video or musician right on the site? I thought the Facebook credits could transform eCommece I was completely wrong. The company said it is doing away with the innovation altogether.
Any way, I thought that looking back at what I thought would be hot four years ago would be interesting. At least it was for me. What prediction did you make that came true? Which ones bombed?