Financial Resource

etc.
Sentiment – accurate and useful sentiment analysis has been a hard nut to crack for all the various sentiment analysis solutions out there. But it isn’t going away. And, indeed, it seems highly likely that sentiment will become an increasingly important factor in search engine optimisation which in turns means sentiment as a data point could suddenly become very valuable indeed.
“Lead nurturing” – some of the B2B guys are actually starting to do some pretty clever stuff in this space. Maybe B2C online can learn from B2B online for a change.
APIs, semantic stuff, Web 3.0… – just too much to write about it to cover here but some really interesting stuff starting to happen, from governments starting to open up rich data sources to organisations making intelligent commercial uses of web services to open up new business models and/or markets.

Privacy will be a big topic for 2011 and beyond. Cookies, digital fingerprinting, the FTC, Ofcom, the EU, tracking, behavioural targeting, Facebook… however, it’s hard to make specific predictions in this area and I’ll leave that to those who cover this area best, like the industry bodies and trade associations.

All sorts of interesting developments likely during 2011. Among them I’d pick out the following:

The “Humanisation” of the user experience online. Broadly speaking I’m expecting the online user experience to become more and more ‘human’. Whether that’s through the use of live chat, virtual environments, co-browsing, streaming of live events, virtual sales characters, much improved personalisation etc. As part of the integration of online and offline we need to bring more of the human/emotive/experiential power of offline to online. The iPhone, and now iPad, have brought a whole new human sense (touch) to interactive design. I expect to see more of this human/emotional/sensual connection embedded into interactive experiences with gestural interfaces being the most obvious.
The rise and rise of video. I’m particularly interested in the use of video for commerce (read Why online retailers need product videos for more), including the embedding of commerce links (e.g. French Connection’s Youtique) and also new tools and platforms emerging to allow marketers to manipulate and distribute video much more easily (e.g. buto.tv). This promises to bring the “world of TV” to SMEs in the same way that paid search has enabled SMEs to become advertisers on a level-ish playing field with bigger companies.
Evolution of search look and feel. In 2010 we had things like Google Instant but there are all sorts of further developments and experiments I’m looking forward to in 2011 as the search giants battle it out. Read our Expert opinion: What’s ahead for paid search in 2011? for more details.
Plenty of new ad formats and technology in the pipeline… not just from the likes of AOL (see Project Devil) and Apple but all sorts of niches. Read Three content-based ad units to watch in 2011 for further ideas. I’m sure Google are limbering up for further big announcements in this space too.
HTML5. It’s early days for HTML5 so noticeable changes may take until 2012 to come through but there is huge potential here to noticeably improve the interactive experience and make it richer, more immersive, more intuitive, more fun, responsive and engaging.
Fonts. I expect to see more creative use of fonts in web design over 2011 thanks to the likes of Google Font Directory, Typekit, Fontdeck etc.
Mobile… it feels like the early days of interactive design at the moment for mobile, including mobile web and mobile apps. Loads of change and learnings in the mobile user experience to come this year as this medium continues to grow and change. Our Mobile E-commerce Best Practice Guide looks at various aspects of the mobile commerce user experience.

This is another broad topic, but below a few highlights for what I expect in 2011:

“Social media” will increasingly become less just about sales or marketing but will touch all parts of the business. All businesses will become ‘social’ over time. I’m still predicting ‘social media’ will go the way of ‘web 2.0′ as a term in the coming years – see my post Death to ‘social media’ and seven other crazy ideas for more on this.
Co-creation and crowdsourcing will become more prevalent, especially for product development and customer service.
Customer service will become a lot more ‘social’ for a lot more companies – actually doing it rather than talking about it.
Crisis management (the world of PR) will become much more of a social media exercise than it currently it is – read Q&A: Edelman’s Monte Lutz on why PR firms are “owning” social for more on this.
Facebook (and possibly others like LinkedIn and Twitter) become their own “channels”. Some of these properties / platforms are big enough and complex enough that I predict we’ll have specialist job titles, teams, agencies, technologies and services which work solely on them. There are already specialist Facebook research services (e.g. Socialbakers), specialist Facebook ad management technologies (e.g. ONE media manager, Papaya etc.), Facebook enterprise platform management services (e.g. Buddy Media) etc.
I think location + social media will be bigger in 2011. It started in 2010 and Facebook Places will no doubt help accelerate things. But it’s clear how live events (location) and social media can combine very powerfully, just as it’s clear how coupons, group buying and location can combine. Google may have failed in many of its social media attempts (Orkut, Buzz etc.) and in its recent bid for Groupon, but I predict big attempts by Google to dominate location (primarily via mobile) and embed ‘social’ in this.
People resources will continue to be the biggest challenge in social media (see eMarketer’s Resources Are Now a Big Issue for Social Media Marketers which references our own Social Media and Online PR Report)

Gaming, social gaming, game theory, badges, reward mechanisms, game mechanics… it’s fast hotting up as a new-ish realm for marketers of all types to look at.

Games are engaging, games can drive loyalty, games can make money directly or indirectly, games work well on mobile as well as web as well as TV etc, games are already BIG business (witness the likes of Zynga and American Express’ deal with them, EA’s acquisition of Playfish, Disney’s acquisition of Playdom and so on). What’s not to like?

Get inspired about gaming and the impact it will have on marketing, especially digital, with the following:

Econsultancy’s Social Gaming Smart Pack – get smart about all aspects of social gaming with our brand new 50 page guide
Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 presentation on ‘design outside the box’ and game mechanics
Gabe Zicherman – his book, his blog, the Gamification Summit etc.

Broadly speaking I believe all media will move over time to exist in a biddable form. This will be made possible by all media becoming digital (including TV, ‘print’, radio, billboards etc.), and by platform players (primarily Google at the moment) enabling the marketplace via exchanges and tools/services with a broad range of creative, targeting and payment options.

Most exciting for me is the way this will open up all media to organisations of all sizes in a way that has not yet existed.

Specifically, for 2011, I believe we’ll see this most in evidence with online display advertising becoming more like PPC in the way it is bought, measured, serviced.

For more on all this read What does 2011 hold for display and demand side marketing? and also our recent Online Media Report.

Real time is obviously a good one to follow biddable media. But it’s not just real time in display advertising, it’s about the speed of everything getting… erm, faster.

Specifically, I expect 2011 to see the need for speed evident in the following:

Publishing and content generally. If you look at your analytics, you look at how social media works, you look at content distribution and sharing patterns, you look at SEO and the way links accrue… it is clear (at least, to me) that if Content is King, then Speed-to-publish is Queen.
Crisis management, reputation, PR. Shit happens very quickly online. You need to act fast, even if it is only to say you are working on an answer. Corporations and their agencies need to act (even) faster in this area.
Customer service. Companies need to respond *much quicker* to inbound customer enquiries online. Not just the ‘social media’ ones but, in particular, email enquiries where response times are typically still woefully bad.
‘Search’. It’s in apostrophes because it’s not user-initiated search but ‘pushed’ search, so not search as we traditionally know it. Read up more about how Google intends to get pushy and how this could evolve the search experience in a real time way.

Obviously mobile is experiencing huge growth but I’m strangely less excited about it than most – perhaps, because like social media, I hear so much about it but see relatively little really good stuff happening.

I think in-app payments will become much bigger in 2011; there are some big possible things afoot in NFC (near-field communications) wallets. However I think we’ll probably have to endure much gnashing of teeth around the challenges of mobile measurement (reminiscent of ‘measuring the ROI of social media’ from 2010).

For me the really interesting thing about mobile isn’t mobile as a ‘channel’, or indeed apps (which will continue to service specific needs), but the ‘mobile web’. Or just the web as I like to call it, which is obviously mobile as well as PC as well as iPad, TV and so on. I believe when HTML5 starts to gain momentum that much more focus will be on the ‘mobile web’ than apps

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