As always, it seems to early to go back to work. But it's also the right time to look ahead and get on with the year. A lot of companies have delayed their market budgeting and planning till the new year to see how the land lies, so now's also a good time to look at the industry environment and what marketing and PR are going to be most cost-effective. Our CEO Ralf Haller recently wrote his predictions for what will be hot in product marketing in 2009, and what not, and I think he's spot on. So rather than making my own, here are three from other industry experts that I found interesting.

1. Business social networking to grow

Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis in a group podcast for Briefings Direct:

The first one for me is vendors tackling enterprise-plus-consumer based social networks, a blended view of those. Enterprise-focused vendors are going to do more than simply sink info from public sites like Facebook. They're going to take that information and build into or out from the enterprise into those social networks and drive information from those. It's going to become a two-way street.

You're going to see folks like Facebook, and most notably, LinkedIn, working in the other direction themselves, and with third parties, to develop enterprise-bound social networks. Look for those to emerge next year.

And from Drupal CEO Dries Buytaert
Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time.

2. Brands get promoted directly via microblogging & social networking

From The Marketing Consigliere:

Brands will use Twitter and some people will tolerate push communication.
Just as the original commercial Internet "pioneers" were eclipsed by corporate suits in regard to the continued development and exploitation of the Internet, brands will become a more dominant player in this tool. While the Innovators and Early Adopters who embraced Twitter may feel their "find" has been violated, this is just another stage in the product life cycle as the Early Majority and Late Majority get on board. Many of these later adopters will be complacent with one-way messaging, just as they have been while using other media...

As B2B buyers become less reluctant to use "consumer" apps in their daily work routine, they will accept this relatively new form of blogging as the primary means of communication with their vendors. (Personally, I doubt we will see Twitter etc. being the primary means in Europe this year, but interesting that it is taking off so fast in the US. )

3. New market entrants make fast impact using online marketing

From Joe McKendrick, also for Briefings Direct:

We are going to see folks -- maybe IT people, or people who work for vendors and have been laid off -- have the ability to start their own business at a very low cost of entry. On the flip side of that, the whole social-networking and cloud-computing phenomena, companies have these tools as well to employ low-cost methods to reach their markets and to interact with their customers. We're going to see a lot more of that as well. A marketing campaign doesn't have to cost $200,000 to reach your customers. You can use the social network, the Web 2.0 tools, to interact and collaborate and find out what's going on in your markets at a very relatively low cost.

Location-based social networks have been a theme for a few years now, but pretty much dropped off the radar until recently. Until iPhone apps, that is. There are different services, but essentially all of them help you locate friends and services the same time and place as you, so you can, for example, see that Joe is shopping in the same street as you right now, and find somewhere to invite him for coffee. Now these apps seem to be making headway, and could be a great route for local publicity, as local as the newspaper and as immediate as local radio - and targeted, too.

The Washington Post did a good review of location-based social networks for the iPhone last week, so here's a very short view of the main players. The early leaders, Loopt and Moximity, came out well before the iPhone, but are heavily targeting it now. Moximity uses your existing contacts from Facebook and Twitter; Loopt has even given TechCrunch its own version so TechCrunch followers can meet each other at conferences. Pelago's Whrrl, for example, is strong on local information, whereas uLocate's "Where" app or the Limbo service, with its own Facebook-style wall, provide the chance to meet new people. Zintin, has a group chat feature, too. All are on Washington Post partner TechCrunch's Crunchbase service for more business background details. Washington Post's view is that none of them is quite a killer app yet, and that it's a matter of time before MySpace and Facebook come in and take over.

What's wrong with this picture? Well, for one thing Facebook was there when the iPhone launched, and that has not stopped others getting the funding or the kudos, e.g. Pelago's recent successful round. I don't think we can be sure Facebook is going to be a winner here despite an early advantage. Location-based services are different from the home social network, because they are perfect when you are not at home, and not much use when you are. "Cometh the platform, cometh the app" could be the story.

It's not just the nature of the service, but the way the market grows. Though Loopt etc. were originally aimed at the whole mobile market, the key platform is now the iPhone, with strong sales, user-friendliness, strong sales, and of course the Appstore. So the market also contains an interesting positive feedback loop that is different from PC sales. The mobile phone is a social instrument at heart, and location-based social networking apps could be as attractive to some users as SMS. If the vehicle is the iPhone, and the app catches on among groups of friends, that will push sales of both phone and app, a from of localized viral growth that depends completely on adoption within particular groups. Perhaps a key to what happens next is how other phone manufacturers will respond to the threat of Apple getting the kind of market traction they did with the iPod.

US marketing and branding company Cone Inc. has just published a survey on using social media to promote businesses, with pretty dramatic findings. According to the survey, 93 percent of Americans believe a company should have a presence in social media, while an overwhelming 85 percent believe a company should not only be present but also interact with its consumers via social media. In fact, 56 percent of American consumers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

When asked about specific types of interactions, Americans believe:

• Companies should use social networks to solve my problems (43%)
• Companies should solicit feedback on their products and services (41%)
• Companies should develop new ways for consumers to interact with their brand (37%)
• Companies should market to consumers (25%)
  

Cone also point out that this is a marketing lifeline for desirable but elusive prospects such as men in general, particularly, young men, and wealthy households. I think anyone would say these figures are high, but a little thought suggests they shouldn’t really be so surprising. In online marketing, the classic AIDA rules, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, are more like:

• Get attention
• Drive to your website
• Encourage interaction
• Move to action

The middle two points can be weak points in the chain, and this is where I think social media make marketing more effective.

Why "driving to your website" is hard

People come online with a view formed already of where they want to go. Particularly, I suspect, men. Most men I know like to (in theory at least) do their shopping with a kind of military attitude – decide on the shop/s, what they’ll buy, how much they’ll pay, and what time they’ll be home again. If we imagine them transferring that mentality to the web, diverting them is going to be much harder than interacting with them where they are, and much easier if you have already started the interaction there.

Really encourage interaction!

People like the feeling that they are the one holding the remote control. No matter how friendly your website is, users don’t normally get that sense, because you decide the content and the rules. Social media offers a “home space”. If users can interact with you there, they don’t relinquish control.

In Europe, too?

Social media sites, YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, Facebook etc, are doing pretty well in Europe. Facebook is apparently having difficulty getting the numbers in Germany, and actually hiring students to introduce them, but I think this reflects their being a little slow to localize, and maybe a preference for local rather than US sites. So with younger people social media are important, and the US experience is definitely relevant. For the rest of the market, we may still be a few years behind the US in using web features, so perhaps there is time to let this develop. But there’s no disadvantage to being on the scene early.

According to a Heise Online article, reporting from the first Cologne Web Content Forum, "Mit Inhalten ist kaum Geld zu verdienen" i.e., the chances of earning money through web content are slim. Some of the figures they discussed were:

LinkedIn: Turnover per member per year > $US 5
Xing: pr Turnover per member per year > $US 4
FaceBook: Turnover per member per year > $US 3
YouTube: Income 2007: $US 20 M against business costs of $US 365 M!

The various reasons put forward for this included slower replacement of mainstream media services than predicted, and the sheer multiplicity of services competing for users' attention.

In a similar vein, an OnlineBusiness-Guide blog Web 2.0: Finding a business model that pays, looks at the difficulty of getting cash out of social network apps, as many assume that numbers will mean ad revenue, even though ads do not necessarily suit each service. He, along with many other commentators, thinks that enterprise apps are the way forward, generating cash for useful social apps through licence fees.

The other way forward could be mobile apps, as Wolfe's Den Blog in InformationWeek suggests in Web 2.0 Expo Reveals: Mobile Is The New Desktop, Social Nets The New Media Companies. That last suggestion makes a lot of sense to me intuitively, because that's simply what I see most, and because users already pay according to the time and services used, making micropayment system probably a more straightforward possibility.

It will be interesting to see if Twitter, who are looking to raise $15M at a $60M valuation, get their money, in the light of this picture.