submit to reddit

Buoyed by the fact that five of my 10 predictions for 2010 actually came true, I can’t help but make some predictions for 2011. And besides, making predictions is so much fun.

1. Social media gurus will be replaced by mobile gurus. Self-proclaimed social media gurus, ninjas, and clowns will be replaced by mobile gurus, experts, ninjas and clowns.
2. Companies will begin to take down their corporate and investor sites. Corporate and investor sites have become increasingly irrelevant. The financial information of publicly traded companies is already public, there is no longer any reason to have a separate site to explain to investors and/or the media who you are and what you do. As traffic to these fossil sites wanes, companies will begin add corporate and investor sections into their consumer sites, as GMDell and Citigroup already do.

3. Google will add social media monitoring to its search tools and put most of the 150+ companies that now monitor social media out of business. By the end of Q1, I predict that Google will announce its social media monitoring platform, rendering as useless Radian6, Sysomos, and others who charge thousands a month for their monitoring software.

4. Apple stock will hit $1000 a share, and split. There’s still no other company so devoted to innovation and great design as Apple. The meteoric rise of the stock will continue.

5. Email will be replaced by a better system (please!) Google’s Priority Mail was a nice attempt, but it’s still dog food. Google or somebody else (not Facebook) will launch a system that really learns as it goes and really does not put Viagra ads in your priority inbox while sending your sister’s emails to spam. Sheesh. Can’t somebody really fix email. It so totally sucks!

6. The semantic web will be the buzzword of the year. The integration of all content into plain English search is what Tim Berners-Lee had in mind when he proposed creating a world wide web based on hypertext that would facilitate sharing and updating of information.

The age of the semantic web has finally arrived, and in 2011 we will hear about it daily as databases, search engines applications, and more are linked and information truly becomes intelligent.

What did I get right in my 2010 predictions?

1-     Big agencies will keep snapping up consultants with social media experience.
2- Customers will begin to be granted the respect they deserve.
Because nothing else matters if your customer service sucks.
5- Mobile Rules
8- Companies will finally realize that using social media effectively is neither free nor cheap. 10- Multi-media e-books will replace the ugly, unformatted e-books of the moment.

Image: Art Cameron