The digital landscape changes every year, and 2011 will be no exception. From paywalls and picture sharing to social commerce and social optimisation, here’s Fast Web Media’s guide to what’ll be big next year…
Following the latest trends
According to an Ofcom survey, 16-24 year olds cram five hours worth of media into two hours of actual time per day. These users are tweeting, Facebooking and blogging about events as they happen and that means search is becoming increasingly influenced by real-time trends. As a reaction to this, Google has updated the Google QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) and launched Google Realtime, which pulls results from social networking services to allow users to see live trends. Brands can take advantage of this by spiking searches and trends to keep their presence high. FastWebMedia has a unique product that pulls together keywords within specific topics from social networking sites, blog comments, and Google trends, and integrates the most crucial keywords into the search marketing strategy, all in real-time.
Local to go global
Local advertising will help businesses attract its target audience based on their location, ensuring greater precision and an improved ROI. It’s already huge in the US, and Yahoo! and Google’s (rejected) multi-billion dollar bid for deal-of-the-day coupon site Groupon in the second half of 2010 suggest it will only get bigger in 2011. Groupon has already announced expansion plans for the new year, having partnered with location-based advertising house JiWire to extend their deals across the US and eventually to the UK. Gradually, online is catching up with offline in targeting potential customers based on their geographic location and there’ll be more Groupon ‘clones’ next year, along with an increase in GPS-based services.
Share and share a-like
In 2011 social media presence for UK brands will be more important than ever. Facebook pages and Twitter feeds will no longer just influence their online buzz but could help boost their position in search engines too. Both Google and Bing confirmed recently that they will start taking into account the social authority of a user, and that means the number of likes, comments and shares pages & links have, will take on added significance. So in 2011, creative and consistent engagement with fans and followers will not just encourage existing customers to interact with you, but could also bring in potential new customers.
Payback time?
2011 will be the make-or-break year for the paywall. News International’s decision to charge users for online access to most of its UK publications has not borne immediate fruit; in fact, statistics have suggested that readership of The Times’ website is down by about 87%. However, there’s safety in numbers, and with the New York Times set to go behind a paywall in January, the idea is certainly starting gain momentum. Even The Guardian and The Independent, two of Britain’s biggest supporters of ad-funded journalism, are planning to charge for mobile access to their sites. All UK publishers are currently investigating paywall options, and by this time next year, we will know if the UK consumer is finally prepared to pay for quality digital journalism via a paywall format.
Would you credit it?
With Facebook announcing its 500 millionth member this year, its horizons are expanding in 2011 towards integrating the interactive social experience with online purchasing. Facebook Credits will be rolled out over the next year which will initially allow users to pay for virtual goods such as games, but will eventually let them buy anything online without leaving the network itself. Along with the fact that brands are increasingly using Facebook pages rather than microsites as the hubs of their digital marketing campaigns and mean the union between social media and e-commerce will be truly consolidated in 2011.
Keep taking the tablets
2010 was marked as the year of tablet PC, which was undeniably dominated by the iPad. This audio and visual media aid, which bridges the gap between laptop/notebook and the smartphone, has encouraged passionate debate as to the highly subjective advantages and disadvantages of tablet computers. Yet its astronomic rise in popularity, with an estimated 15.7 million units sold worldwide in 2010, seems set to continue as the reputation of the tablet computer matures alongside technological diversity and consumer familiarity. The conventional desktop or laptop PCs’ position in the technological world is changing from being the primary method of online access, to being part of a myriad of devices that consumers might use to work and play on and off line.
Location, Location, Location
The proliferation of smartphones has provoked the launch of geo-locating applications that heighten consumer experiences by engaging users directly by creating a landing page for every local business in the world. With sites such as Foursquare seeing competition from Google Places and Facebook Places in 2010 in their launching of location-based applications, the ways in which this technology is being utilised is continuously evolving. The difference between Google Places and Facebook Places is that Google’s distribution strategy is based on Search, whereas Facebook’s centres on Social. Owing to the heavy emphasis towards social media in 2011, with the rise of social commerce and its increasing influence on SEO, it will be very interesting to see how power shift between Search vs. Social for places-based will play out over this next year.
Picture this
Online photo sharing services have been around for a good few years, Facebook now has more than 100 million photo uploads every day, and Twitpic and Yfrog see more and more sharing of photos via Twitter. Now the combination of smartphone camera technology combined with social media has seen new photo apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Picplz and Path take us further — where high quality photos are snapped and shared in seconds via your mobile device. Filters and lens options can transform the look and feel of every picture and it’s all at a minimal cost to the user.
This time it’s personal
The web is going to start feeling a lot more personal. Thanks to Facebook’s Social Graph API (The social graph is at Facebook’s core; people and the connections they have, to everything they care about) you’ll get used to visiting sites and seeing which of your friends have also visited the site recently, what they’ve done on the site and whether they recommend it. Your experience on those sites is going to be shaped by the interests of your friends, your own browsing history, your locality, etc. Internet advertising will continue to become increasingly personal.
Morph code
HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard. Currently still under development, but already embraced by digital giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, HTML5 adds many new syntax features such as <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements and will also integrate SVG content. These changes will make the inclusion and handling of multimedia and graphic content much easier for developers. Indeed, HTML5 is more flexible than anything that has gone before it, and developers will be able to use the same code to build sites, regardless of the device or app it is being viewed on. This will, in turn, make browsing much more simple for the user, meaning HTML5 is very much the future of the web.
Rules will rule OK!
Next March the ASA’s CAP Code will be extended to online marketing communications, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children. The new remit will cover: Advertisers’ own marketing communications on their own websites and; Marketing communications in other non-paid-for space under their control, such as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Further sanctions will also apply to the extended remit such as: Removal of paid-for search advertising – ads that link to the page hosting the non-compliant marketing communication may be removed with the agreement of the search engines and; ASA paid-for search advertisements – the ASA could place advertisements online highlighting an advertiser’s continued non-compliance. Digital Eleven for Eleven
The digital landscape changes every year, and 2011 will be no exception. From paywalls and picture sharing to social commerce and social optimisation, here’s Fast Web Media’s guide to what’ll be big next year…
Following the latest trends
According to an Ofcom survey, 16-24 year olds cram five hours worth of media into two hours of actual time per day. These users are tweeting, Facebooking and blogging about events as they happen and that means search is becoming increasingly influenced by real-time trends. As a reaction to this, Google has updated the Google QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) and launched Google Realtime, which pulls results from social networking services to allow users to see live trends. Brands can take advantage of this by spiking searches and trends to keep their presence high. FastWebMedia has a unique product that pulls together keywords within specific topics from social networking sites, blog comments, and Google trends, and integrates the most crucial keywords into the search marketing strategy, all in real-time.
Local to go global
Local advertising will help businesses attract its target audience based on their location, ensuring greater precision and an improved ROI. It’s already huge in the US, and Yahoo! and Google’s (rejected) multi-billion dollar bid for deal-of-the-day coupon site Groupon in the second half of 2010 suggest it will only get bigger in 2011. Groupon has already announced expansion plans for the new year, having partnered with location-based advertising house JiWire to extend their deals across the US and eventually to the UK. Gradually, online is catching up with offline in targeting potential customers based on their geographic location and there’ll be more Groupon ‘clones’ next year, along with an increase in GPS-based services.
Share and share a-like
In 2011 social media presence for UK brands will be more important than ever. Facebook pages and Twitter feeds will no longer just influence their online buzz but could help boost their position in search engines too. Both Google and Bing confirmed recently that they will start taking into account the social authority of a user, and that means the number of likes, comments and shares pages & links have, will take on added significance. So in 2011, creative and consistent engagement with fans and followers will not just encourage existing customers to interact with you, but could also bring in potential new customers.
Payback time?
2011 will be the make-or-break year for the paywall. News International’s decision to charge users for online access to most of its UK publications has not borne immediate fruit; in fact, statistics have suggested that readership of The Times’ website is down by about 87%. However, there’s safety in numbers, and with the New York Times set to go behind a paywall in January, the idea is certainly starting gain momentum. Even The Guardian and The Independent, two of Britain’s biggest supporters of ad-funded journalism, are planning to charge for mobile access to their sites. All UK publishers are currently investigating paywall options, and by this time next year, we will know if the UK consumer is finally prepared to pay for quality digital journalism via a paywall format.
Would you credit it?
With Facebook announcing its 500 millionth member this year, its horizons are expanding in 2011 towards integrating the interactive social experience with online purchasing. Facebook Credits will be rolled out over the next year which will initially allow users to pay for virtual goods such as games, but will eventually let them buy anything online without leaving the network itself. Along with the fact that brands are increasingly using Facebook pages rather than microsites as the hubs of their digital marketing campaigns and mean the union between social media and e-commerce will be truly consolidated in 2011.
Keep taking the tablets
2010 was marked as the year of tablet PC, which was undeniably dominated by the iPad. This audio and visual media aid, which bridges the gap between laptop/notebook and the smartphone, has encouraged passionate debate as to the highly subjective advantages and disadvantages of tablet computers. Yet its astronomic rise in popularity, with an estimated 15.7 million units sold worldwide in 2010, seems set to continue as the reputation of the tablet computer matures alongside technological diversity and consumer familiarity. The conventional desktop or laptop PCs’ position in the technological world is changing from being the primary method of online access, to being part of a myriad of devices that consumers might use to work and play on and off line.
Location, Location, Location
The proliferation of smartphones has provoked the launch of geo-locating applications that heighten consumer experiences by engaging users directly by creating a landing page for every local business in the world. With sites such as Foursquare seeing competition from Google Places and Facebook Places in 2010 in their launching of location-based applications, the ways in which this technology is being utilised is continuously evolving. The difference between Google Places and Facebook Places is that Google’s distribution strategy is based on Search, whereas Facebook’s centres on Social. Owing to the heavy emphasis towards social media in 2011, with the rise of social commerce and its increasing influence on SEO, it will be very interesting to see how power shift between Search vs. Social for places-based will play out over this next year.
Picture this
Online photo sharing services have been around for a good few years, Facebook now has more than 100 million photo uploads every day, and Twitpic and Yfrog see more and more sharing of photos via Twitter. Now the combination of smartphone camera technology combined with social media has seen new photo apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic, Picplz and Path take us further — where high quality photos are snapped and shared in seconds via your mobile device. Filters and lens options can transform the look and feel of every picture and it’s all at a minimal cost to the user.
This time it’s personal
The web is going to start feeling a lot more personal. Thanks to Facebook’s Social Graph API (The social graph is at Facebook’s core; people and the connections they have, to everything they care about) you’ll get used to visiting sites and seeing which of your friends have also visited the site recently, what they’ve done on the site and whether they recommend it. Your experience on those sites is going to be shaped by the interests of your friends, your own browsing history, your locality, etc. Internet advertising will continue to become increasingly personal.
Morph code
HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard. Currently still under development, but already embraced by digital giants such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, HTML5 adds many new syntax features such as <video>, <audio> and <canvas> elements and will also integrate SVG content. These changes will make the inclusion and handling of multimedia and graphic content much easier for developers. Indeed, HTML5 is more flexible than anything that has gone before it, and developers will be able to use the same code to build sites, regardless of the device or app it is being viewed on. This will, in turn, make browsing much more simple for the user, meaning HTML5 is very much the future of the web.
Rules will rule OK!
Next March the ASA’s CAP Code will be extended to online marketing communications, including the rules relating to misleading advertising, social responsibility and the protection of children. The new remit will cover: Advertisers’ own marketing communications on their own websites and; Marketing communications in other non-paid-for space under their control, such as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. Further sanctions will also apply to the extended remit such as: Removal of paid-for search advertising – ads that link to the page hosting the non-compliant marketing communication may be removed with the agreement of the search engines and; ASA paid-for search advertisements – the ASA could place advertisements online highlighting an advertiser’s continued non-compliance. 
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