It’s the time of year when seasoned professionals, wannabe gurus and everyone in between look into their crystal balls and try to predict what 2010 will look like for online communities and businesses. We’ll talk more about 2010 shortly (and have already given some insights on content marketing in the new year), but for funzies, let’s examine what people were saying about 2009 and see how that checks out with reality.

Luckily for us, Joe Pulizzi compiled a bunch of these predictions last year in one convenient spot: Social Media and Content Marketing Predictions for 2009.

Predictions tended to fall into these categories:

Optimistic visions of what businesses should be doing:

• An emphasis on ROI (tracking it and focusing on projects with ROI in mind right away)
• Increased transparency
• Personality in content marketing
• Greater human touch in online customer service encounters
• Small business gets more on board with social media and content marketing

Adaptation to a troubled economy:

• Less ad buying, more content marketing and creative (but cheap) digital promotions
• Magazines continue to seek ways to monetize their digital presence and integrate print and / or make online content more engaging for readers
• With more journalists and columnists being let go from traditional media, companies that are keen to hire writers for content marketing now have great talent to pick from

“Big leap” ideas:

• Media, advertising and large agencies will start to collapse
• Twitter will be huge
• Communication will be super customized – you’ll get info you want, when you want it, how you want it.

So, what really happened?

A little of this, a little of that. Change, particularly when it comes to overall habits of consumers and businesses, don’t tend to shift suddenly.

The most accurate predictions revolved around the economy – there was less marketing and ad spending, magazines and newspapers felt the crunch and many a journalist and columnist was let go. Did businesses all turn to content marketing to fill the promotional void? Not quite – but some did. And some of those brands, organizations and companies did the things we optimistically hoped they would.  And a bunch didn’t. At all. In large part, there’s been a lot of trial and error went it comes to corporate use of social media and content marketing.

While exciting and sexy, the bold “big leap” predictions were a little out there. Media, while shaky in many regards, is still here. As is advertising. As are large agencies. And despite Oprah getting on the Twitter bandwagon and nearly every news channel referencing their own Tweets, Twitter has grown but hasn’t been adapted by the mainstream the way Facebook has. As for the customized communication – the 400 pieces of junk mail in my spam filter indicates that hasn’t exactly happened.

What’s most telling about our predictions vs. reality is how we can use them to plan for 2010 content marketing. We’ll let you in on some of those thoughts shortly!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.