2010 Social Media TrendsSpotting

I’m kicking myself all the way to Sunday for not getting on the Trendsspotting bandwagon this year.  TrendsSpotting CEO and Founder Taly Weiss reached out to me on December 14th asking me to participate in this year’s predictions.  I actually started drafting my thoughts and still have my draft email, but got sidetracked when I decided at the last minute to visit my parents in Ohio before Christmas.

So, I never got around to sending my predictions to Taly.

But if I would have followed up, here are the predictions that would have been included:

1. Facebook will continue to gain ground as the top social networking site while MySpace sinks further into oblivion
2. Mid-to-large companies will continue to struggle with implementing social media because they aren’t hiring experienced people with the right type of experience
3. Somebody will come up with a better and cheaper mousetrap to track activity across all social media channels
4. Slideshare will emerge as the dominant social document sharing site and will be acquired by somebody
5. Apple will come out with a tablet product, but it will be too expensive for me to purchase

Some common themes emerged across the predictions including innovations around location-based and mobile services, and the emergence of 3D augmented reality and exclusive social media sites.

My favorite predictions came from Seth Godin, Drew McLellan and Charlene Li, who said respectively:

Folks that put in the time and energy to build a foundation over the last 2 years will be rewarded while latecomers will merely whine

Content marketing isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon and many CFOs will prematurely pull the plug on their efforts because the results are not instantaneous.

Social media in 2010 will cease being the shiny new object and instead, become part of the everyday lexicon of business

Here are the predictions of the 30 visionaries, notables, marketing and social media experts that did submit their predictions: