New Year is a great time to look forward and to anticipate and prepare for what is to come. So I thought I would use this blog to discuss a few important trends that I believe will impact the way we do business in the future. This originated from a question asked of me on a fellowship application: “What do you think are the 3 most important trends affecting business, technology & communications?” Below is my response.
1. Emergence of “Individual” Corporate Identity
As social media give companies an opportunity to step closer to their end customers, this new strategy also puts individual faces onto what used to be a collective corporate identity. Two cases in point: Peter Cashmore for Mashable, Scott Monty for Ford, to name just a few. While such corporate spokespersons have existed before, now they have a much more personal face that interact with consumers day in and day out. This new corporate “individual” identity can have important implications for corporate branding and even companies’ hiring practices.
2. Mobilization of communication via geo-enabled services and mobile devices
Foursquare, need I say more? Undoubtedly this represents great business opportunities for many companies. But more than that, this finally arriving mobile market is going to create new consumer privacy concerns and will require new types of policy to regulate how consumers’ geographic information can be used and protected. Coupled with the buzz on real-time search and interaction, business practice and public policy in this area can be complicated.
3. Real-time verbal and textual translation
Google recently added a real-time translation service that can be integrated into an online chat session or used via its new Google Wave service. When the precision of this type of services improves, its impact on cross-cultural communication will be tremendous. With the help of the Internet and social media, individuals already collaborate in many areas such as R&D, open source applications, and cause advocacy. Now only imagine magnifying this many times to a global scale.
In the spirit of this blog, I’d also like to refer my interested readers to the predictions made by a few other web and social media experts:
- Social media prediction for 2010 by Scott Monty (Ford social media expert)
- Trendspotting’s expert trend predictions in 140 characters
- Social marketing trends from reviewing 2009 by web strategist Jeremiah Owyang
What about you? What do you expect to see in 2010? Whether you agree or disagree with all these predictions, I hope everyone has a happy and productive year!