The Strategy Director at work sent out a mail asking us what our predictions was for digital marketing trends in 2009. That got me thinking and I wrote and email back with a few thing that I could think of at that moment.

The result was mixed responses to the ideas which confirmed some of my thoughts and also made me rethink some of the other ideas I had.
I decided to publish the revised list here. This will allow us to check back later in the year to see how close I was with these predictions.

Here we go:

• I think the gap between mobile and computer based browsers will get even smaller this year with advances with mobile browsers and widely available mobile high speed internet. Meaning that soon we won’t need a mobile version of a website anymore, we will build one site to rule them all. Advances in mobile browsers like Opera Mini and the soon to be released mobile browser by Mozilla (if the rumors are correct) will help a lot in this regard.
• Social networks will keep getting bigger and stronger, but I think the focus of 2009 will be to start squeezing real revenue out of all of these services. We can already see the start of this at YouTube where they recently updated their terms of use to make videos more PG so that it will be better for companies to “associate” with it through advertising. Another reason for this, I think, is the current economic state of the world; it will get harder and harder for online companies to run to venture capital firms to get the money they need to stay online. These companies might also run into opposition from its users with their attempts at monetizing their content. (I have a feeling that online media sites, like YouTube, might be the 1st to suffer as they built their user base on freedom of speech which they are taking away systematically to accommodate advertisers)
• I think “SEO Optimization Services” (I’m not talking about online campaigns and monitoring of conversion rates, because that’s a completely different ball game that tends to be lumped in with SEO by the uninformed) will start declining from 2009 with the new “vote up” service by Google. Getting a user confidence vote on search results will have a lot more value than a traffic farms and traffic equalizer site can ever offer. I also think that it will only be a matter of time before the other search providers like Yahoo and MSN start implementing similar services. (Thank you to digg for coming up with that model… we can only hope that they can get something back from these companies using it)
• Hi-def online video will take a strong foothold in 2009. Sites like YouTube and Vimeo have already started hinting at this and even started rolling this out in some cases. Will this be big in South Africa? Probably not until we have the bandwidth we need at a fair price. This will definitely be a big thing for the rest of the, so called, free world.
• Mobile video (specifically on the iPhone) will be huge too, I think that more and more video sites are getting ready to launch this, and once its launched for the iPhone, the other manufacturers will work hard to get their handsets on par (this entire process might be a little longer than 1 year I think.. maybe a 2 to 3 year time period on this one).
• The Internet in South Africa has potential to become awesome in 2009, fast and cheap… (I say “potential” as the new provider can easily fall into the bureaucracy like other large companies where it takes 50 people to approve new technology and 1 person to execute it half-arsed… I hope this will not be the case… I guess only time will tell) If all goes well people might have to find something else to complain about. Will this turn South Africa into the next India (as far as offshore development goes… our rivers aren’t stinky enough to compete with the rest of India yet)?

That is all I can think of for now, 2 days before 2009…
Do you maybe have anything constructive to add to this? Leave a comment if you do