Outlook 2010 – Part 1: Consumers

This month, I’ll be looking ahead to 2010 and the developments that I’ll be looking forward to. In this post, I’ll be discussing trends on the consumer side and in the next post, we’ll be looking at developments on the business side. The developments on the consumer side I’ll be looking at are:

• Social Developments
• Content Developments
• Technology Developments

Social Developments

• Organizing Contacts Facebook had user groups where members could organize their friends. This year, Twitter introduced a list feature. More social media platforms will introduce a list-esque feature to help members organize their contacts. This will help drive the growth of the social CRM.

• Privacy Privacy settings will become more prevalent. Certain services, like Facebook, have complex privacy settings and more services will adopt similarly complex settings. On the other hand, the information that is publicly available will be found more easily due to SEO (search engine optimization) and a higher level of linkability and context.

Content Developments

• Organizing Content Social media offers a low threshold for people to publish and distribute content. This has, however, produced a large information stream that has overloaded people. People will be looking to organize and filter content more to feed their interests in a more targeted way.

• Collaboration We will see more collaborative content efforts as opposed to content provided by one person, as observed by the advent of tools such as Google Wave.

Technology Developments

• Dust Settling The statistics on social media tools are still hugely skewed. Twitter, for example, has 70 million members. However, only a relatively small subset of those 70 million is truly active. The dust will need to settle on the true activity numbers and monitoring by organizations will help them acquire these insights.

• Real-Time We’ll witness a larger demand and supply of real-time information and services. Consumers will be more demanding on having information available at anytime and any place. Organizations will want to benefit from the information stream that is current and publicly available.

• Geo-Location Location-based services, like Brightkite, Gowalla and Foursquare, will play a more prominent commercial role. With integration becoming more important, these services are able to help local businesses find their patrons and vice versa. These services have the ability to become the new loyalty card, with perks built into the service.

• Augmented Reality AR will take flight next year with more applications that are able to provide more information or an improved user experience to consumers. Organizations can use this to create added value and a (temporary) competitive advantage.

• eReaders As the availability of literature in electronic form increases, ereaders will become more popular with the public. During the year, we might even see ereaders that incorporate some of the other developments mentioned above.

As always, your comments are welcome.

Photo credit: Mike Kemp