Like most businesses, you will probably have your marketing plan for 2012 already in place. But have you built your plan so that you’re ready to respond to the latest market trends?

While it’s important to stay focused, it’s equally as important to be prepared for the opportunities and challenges that will come from the latest marketing trends.

Wondering what the future looks like for marketing in the year ahead?

Here are my predictions for the top ten marketing trends of 2012:

1. A broader brand presence across channels

With the range of available marketing channels growing all the time, businesses will start to recognise the value of connecting up their marketing approach across the web, social media and other channels. This will be inspired by the need to better manage business resource in more challenging times – and to create a more streamlined brand presence. Instead of relying on one or two channel marketing approaches, more and more companies will link up their activities to create a truly coherent brand across multiple channels.

2. The rise and rise of user-generated content

User generated content took on momentum in 2011 – and this will continue into the New Year. Whether it is a YouTube video showing a customer using a product or customers sharing their experiences within a selective online community, content that comes direct from the potential or existing customer is likely to grow in value. The key test of this trend will be how successfully companies inspire and facilitate user-generated content. However they do it, it looks like the voice of the user will grow significantly in value in 2012.

3. Mobile marketing reaches critical mass

Mobile is going centre stage. A third of smartphone owners have used their device to buy a product online (Source: EPiServer) and this number is growing. The companies that fully prepare their marketing approach for mobile in 2012 are the ones that will benefit from a potential customer-base that browses – and shops – on the move. This demands targeted, mobile-ready content and a willingness to adapt internal marketing processes. With 59% of UK consumers now in possession of a smartphone and 18% owning a tablet device (Source: EPiServer), mobile marketing is a trend that businesses can’t afford to ignore.

4. The gap closes between business brands and social media

We all know social media is big news for business. But in 2012, it will be even bigger – and even slicker. Companies will start taking social media more seriously as a professional marketing tool. But it won’t just be the big companies using social media to actively connect with customers. Many more companies will start to interact, meaning customer service – and customer interaction – via social media will evolve even further. The gap between social media and the business brand will get ever smaller. Again, the user or the customer will take centre stage with the rise of the brand advocate in recommending, recruiting customers and connecting with companies in 2012.

5. A clearer vision on the value of analytics

Companies will seek to improve their understanding of marketing analytics in 2012. With increased channels and brand presence, businesses will look to clarify and streamline their marketing data. Companies will recognise the value of analytics that allow them to maximise on the flexibility of social media marketing by adapting their content according to live viewer response. Add to this an increasing focus on cost management and online marketing analytics look set to become the vital flipside of business marketing.

6. Up close and personal

Next year is the year that marketing becomes more personalised. Tailored content that is customised to the needs and interests of a specific market or audience will grow in value and popularity. This is for a number of reasons – the increasing growth of content’s role within online marketing and the growing presence of online, niche communities, for example. As people become more and more accustomed to selecting which brands and businesses can join them within their own online community, the value of personalised marketing approaches and content will continue to grow.

7. Content diversifies – again

Content has been big this year – and its role and value is likely to diversify even more in the year ahead. With the increase of personalised marketing, more companies will start to present content that is focused on telling stories about their business and products or services. But this won’t be a top down approach. Companies will need to draw out the stories from within their workforce – and encourage their workforce to share stories. In 2012, carefully crafted, managed and distributed content will play a vital role in successful business marketing.

8. The customer recommendation rules

In 2012, the voice of the user or the customer will get louder. Businesses are becoming smarter at integrating opportunities for customer feedback and response within their marketing approach. Social media word of mouth will keep growing, with people increasingly relying on their own online social circles to advise and comment on their choice of services or products. The companies that actively embrace this shift will be the ones that boost their profile and credibility in 2012.

9. The influence factor takes over

Closely linked to prediction number 9, social media influence will gain critical mass in 2012. Already gaining momentum, a powerful trend in the year to come is the ability for companies to influence, increase and map their influence across the social media channels. The power to inspire users in a real-world, but professional way will make a huge difference to their performance in 2012.

10. Video is centre stage

Anticipated to be big for quite some time, it looks likely that video is set to be one of the leading marketing trends in 2012. The growth of video within business marketing fits naturally with the broadening of social media channels and with increasing customer focus on feedback and recommendations. Expect video to take on some surprising approaches in 2012 – with many companies developing fresher and more user-focused forms of viral marketing.

How’s 2012 looking to you?

2012 is looking like a year where marketing channels and messages will diversify – and where user connection, influence and feedback will rule. Companies can stay ahead by embracing and facilitating how their customers interact with them on social media. Combine this with a more targeted content and better connected cross channel marketing can help grow your leads, customers and revenue in 2012.

Whatever your choice, the New Year is a great opportunity to review what’s been working for you – and what you want to leave behind in 2012. Look back at past marketing activities and at their ROI and other results to see what’s worked best. Then you can move on to make more leads and more customers your New Year’s resolution for 2012. Start with 40 ideas for New Year resolutions now – download this eGuide 40 New Year’s Resolutions for Marketing in 2012.

Guest Author: Sookie Shuen is the community manager at Tomorrow People, an inbound marketing consultancy. Read her Inbound Marketing Blog.

More Reading

• 18 Key Observations about the State of Blogging in 2011
• 6 Social Media Networks to Watch in 2012 [Plus Infographics]
• 10 Things You Must Know about the State of Social Media in 2011
• 7 Top Trends in Social Media
• Is This the Future of Books?
• 5 Insights on the Future of Social Media
• Is Blogging the Future of Publishing
• 30 Predictions of the Future for Twitter
• 45 Social Media Trends and Predictions

Looking into the future is always fun and science fiction writers have had their creative ideas on robots, mobile communications and other seemingly magical devices often turn into reality.

In fact, even cartoonists have predicted the future with Dick Tracy’s phone watch becoming a real device.

Watching technology weave its magic is summed up in the quote by the science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic“.

Who would have thought that social gaming would become a multi-billion dollar business in just two years with Zygna (the creators of Farmville and Mafia Wars on Facebook) now the most valuable games company in the world with annual revenues set to pass $1 billion next year. Zygna has filed for an IPO this year with its value estimated at between $15 billion and $20 billion.

One of the major drivers of changes to society and technology is the evolution of the mobile phone from a dumb device that just makes calls and texts to a web connected “smart phone”.

Trend One:  Social Mobile

The invention and evolution of the computer in your hand, the “smart phone” that is connected to high speed broadband Internet is revolutionizing our communications and society. Facebook and Twitter apps are enabling people to take their social networks with them. The latest change to this ongoing trend is that Twitter is now embedded in the Apple iOS5 mobile operating system at the menu layer. Twitter has seen user acquisition increase by 300% since the launch.

Does this signal the end of the humble simple “text”?

Trend Two: Socialization of Search

Google’s search results are determined by complex algorithms designed and developed  by hundreds of clever mathematicians wearing white lab coats and calculated by computers in dark humming data centers.

Google has started rolling out its “+1″  button that they are starting to indicate will be the start of the rise of  ”social signals” that will be used to determine what content is being voted on as valuable by humans rather than just machines.

Google and Bing have increased the visibility and priority of social networks in search results. You may have noticed over the last 12 months that YouTube videos, Facebook pages and LinkedIn profiles and other social media are ranking higher in search results when conducting an online search.

Trend Three: Geo-Targeting of Social Media Marketing

The rise of FourSquare and Google “Places” has made checking in for specials in your local area a reality…. again driven by the “smart phone”. The mobile web will continue to make a major impact over the next 5 years as the worlds more than 5 billion phones become “Smart” .

Another part of this local social marketing trend is the new development of post code targeting capability in social media marketing on Facebook which is being rolled out in the USA.

The self serve paid Facebook marketing platform is now starting to include postcodes along with the other demographic data that Facebook has in its database about you.

Trend Four: Social Commerce

E-Commerce has been with us for nearly 15 years and is now producing a major negative impact on “bricks and mortar” stores that are not also online. It is predicted that 20% of total retail sales will be online over the next few years.

Over the last 12 months technology has emerged that allows you to take your shop (via “Apps”) to the Facebook “network” so that users do not have to leave the Facebook eco-system to buy their favourite brands. In fact many of the worlds top bands and musicians have their own Facebook store on their “Fan Page”

Commerce is now becoming “Omni Commerce”

Trend Five: Social Gaming

Games used to be played on a field or park, around a board in the middle of a table or with a deck of cards. Gaming has been redefined with the evolution of “Social Gaming” enabled by rich multi-media and easy to use social networks.

Zygna (which was only founded in 2007) has usurped traditional gaming companies by developing Farmville and Mafia Wars that is currently played by 230 million Facebook users every month. In 2010 Facebook and Zygna signed a 5 year agreement on the use of Facebook credits which returns 30% of all games revenues to Facebook.  Revenues will exceed $1 billion in 2012 which is achieved through the sales of “virtual” products.

Trend Six: Global Magazine Super Blogs

Publishing is transforming rapidly from offline print to online platforms with the rise of global blogs that attract tens of millions of readers every month.

Huffington Post which started as a political blog was recently sold to AOL for $315 million. Traffic to these these blogs are driven by social networks and the Huffington Post handles over 1 million comments every month from more than 35.6 million unique visitors. In fact in June, 2010, traffic to the Huffington Post passed the doyen of traditional media, The New York Times.

Blogs on various topics from social media (Mashable) politics, food and technology  are attracting millions of global readers every month.

Trend Seven: Global Micro Niche Business

Niche industries were in the past restricted by geography, technology and the tyranny of distance. Now they are able to become multi-million dollar enterprises with the global reach of social media that is not restricted by place, time and poor logistics.

Examples of this include “AussieBum” (sells mens underwear globally) and “AquaBumps” (which sells digital photography around the world focusing on water, surfing and beach images).

It is not only the revenue of these social network enabled businesses that surpasses the previously location bound industries but the speed at which they scale which is due to the virality of social networks including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

By the way ladies you do have to admire the “WonderJock”!

Social networks and media accelerate the speed and the leverage of the global reach of businesses that have not been seen before in the history of commerce.

The other driver that is essential to these changes is the rise of the mobile enabled “smart phone”.

Expect to continue to see more traditional industries disrupted by young technology upstarts that are social media savvy!

What other social media trends do you think are important and worth watching?

More Reading

• Is This the Future of Books?

• 5 Insights on the Future of Social Media

• Facebook Approaches 700 Million Users: 5 Predictions for the Future

• Is Blogging the Future of Publishing

• 30 Predictions of the Future for Twitter

• 45 Social Media Trends and Predictions

It is a very sad fact about our world that it is most often through conflict and disaster that we discover the most about ourselves and our connections to others.   I have felt this palpably in recent months and years as I’ve watched the ebb and flow of so many conversations, about things both mundane and monumental.  The hardest is the desperation and shock of people in peril and the loved ones that worry about them.  In the eye of these storms, social media emerges as a kind of curiosity:  look at what people do!  Tools are launched and then find their unique purpose. If the founders are lucky, maybe a global phenomenon.  Anyone can have a voice (whether anyone listens is another matter).  We can connect to people in many places.  That’s our power of now.

Is social media about sociality, or something else entirely?

Social media is real-time.  It’s raw.  It’s usually un-edited and un-flltered.  It asks us to make our own decisions about which news to follow, about which voices to promote, and which to marginalize.   The editors of these new media are mostly individuals, each deciding what is relevant or meaningful. Too frequently they forget to think about the audiences they might draw, and instead create from their own passions and inspirations.  This is slightly what makes it special in a culture so inundated with well-crafted brand messages from corporations and governments alike.  Social media can allow the authenticity and connection that we sometimes feel are missing from our heavy-duty lives.  Perhaps even more importantly, social media allows us to connect for a huge variety of reasons, in sometimes quite unexpected ways.

One of my favorite things about the Internet is my ability to connect with friends I have collected all over the world.  I’m one of those people who moves rather a lot.   A lot of us do.  One of my grandmothers, born in 1904, moved to California in the 1920s and used to stay in touch with her Kansas relatives via long chain letters that were passed from person to person.  Each person in the chain read the letters from everyone else, then added their own missive, and the whole process started again.  I tried reading one or two of the letters as a teenager, but they were so full of small, relevant-only-to-the-people-involved details that I quickly put them aside.  Such is also the downside of social media.

A recent meme in cyborg anthropology is a notion called ‘ambient intimacy’.  It refers to a murky soup of connections that we all maintain without paying a whole lot of explicit attention to any of them.  It’s just like scanning headlines in your favorite newspaper (digital or otherwise), like a background process of collecting small bits of information about people’s lives.  Details that no one thinks to share outside of spouses and family are now a personal history viewable by a mish-mash of family, friends, colleagues, ‘Internet friends’, acquaintances and people that I might know.  If only I could resolve their digital identity to a physical one.  Out in the world I find that I notice when people are making eye contact with me, so accustomed am I that everyone walks with eyes cast down, focused on some kind of screen.

This is not a judgment on technology, nor a denial of its potential… I would lump these problems into the category of ‘unintended consequences’.  Social media is ‘sandbox’ software, a category that includes a range of experiences that are highly emergent in nature (think a video game like the Sims vs. games that explicitly guide the player through a narrative).   There are connections and reconnections, supportive ideas and divisive ones.  There are echo chambers of the self-selecting and selected-for-you varieties.  Like a city, the Internet has good neighborhoods and bad ones, vandals and gadflies and crazies, and the most beautiful examples of community that many of us have seen.

If we are all so connected, why don’t I feel connected?

I have been experimenting these last couple of years with not having a cell phone.  Or at least, not having one that is consistently charged, or that I consistently check voicemail for.  I am online a lot, I figure, and if people want to get in touch, it seems easy enough to do.  And yet, so often I have this sense that friends and I are like ships passing in the night (as we often are, especially if many of your friends live in different time zones).  Keeping up with where your friends are hanging out today is tricky…  Should I call them on the phone?  What if they’re busy?  What if I interrupt?  A text?  Can I explain what I need to in a text?  IM?  They’re not on, or they’re invisible or busy so people won’t bother them with IMs when they’re just checking their emails.  Oh, right, no one’s using email anymore… I should check Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Quora.  There I find a trail of digital foot-prints, but at the end of the road, no I’m available icon.  I book an appointment via email or voice mail, so that I can actually speak to my friend.  Feel slightly like a cyber-stalker.

Oh, well, I know a lot of people.  Perhaps I can find someone else to help me think about the sticky situation I am pondering…  but where?  How?  Do I really want all the Quora, Facebook or LinkedIn people I connect with to know this little piece of consternation I am experiencing?  When I was doing online game research, one or two guild members used me as a personal advisor, despite us not knowing each other outside the context of a game and our avatars.  In case you’re wondering, it is uncommon that my various forays online result in physical meetings, unless there are specific goals (dating, couch surfing, conferences, networking) involved.  I certainly don’t invite random Internet people over, yet that is sometimes the feeling I have, that there are poor souls out there who just need some connection.  I wish I could invite them for dinner, but we scarcely do that anymore.

Is the world worse, or are our voices just louder?

It’s very common in difficult times to for people to start believing that we are soon going somewhere very bad, perhaps in someone’s handbasket, perhaps down the slippery slope of simulated realities, or other grim possibilities our physical lives afford.  I mentioned in an earlier post how shaken I was by the recent earthquakes in New Zealand.  And now, a mere handful of weeks later, Japan also devastated.  #PrayForJapan is a constant meme, as are the pleas connect to people in Japan who might have information about loved ones.  We mourn together, because we have become one global consciousness.  Or perhaps we always were, although slightly lacking the communication options that now make these interactions so easy and simultaneous.

What’s the way forward?

It occurs to me that in our discussions about social media we need to be more aware of a few things.

1. These technologies still in their infancies (in current incarnations), though we have reached a certain temperamental pre-pubescence with other possibilities like e-mail and forums.  We probably can’t even begin to imagine the possibilities that will be available even just five years from now.
2. Even if we did know exactly what technologies will be available to us, it is impossible to predict exactly what people might do with it.  This is the beauty of unintended consequences, when humans do things more wonderful and caring than we can possibly anticipate.  That means we’re evolving, and that’s a good thing.
3. One can be simultaneously techno-philial and skeptical about efforts to throw all of our eggs in one or two baskets.  Let’s imagine the future we want and work backwards from there.  Sure, take some inspiration from Facebook or Twitter, but don’t feel like you have to replicate them, or even use them, if you feel like your social and information needs are otherwise met.  There will be more and better options coming soon enough.  We should be crafting some collective visions, and keeping those commitments, recession economics or not.
4. We are reaching a point in our technological evolution where we need to make a massive shift.  For many years passionate people have imagined and created incredible technologies that delight us and show promise of easing and expanding our lives.  However there is a fundamental problem with this approach.  Conceiving technologies and then trying to find audiences for them (build it and they will come) is slowly but surely falling away to approaches that understand people first, then build technologies that adapt to people, rather than demanding that we adapt to them.  Because what happens is that in the technology-centric world, we develop dysfunctions to handle our dysfunctions, and that becomes a big mess of complexity very quickly.
5. Attention and clout are currencies of interaction.  These things have not changed in several centuries.  We will give attention to get attention (online or otherwise). In a data-driven world, our attention will be gathered willingly or otherwise, and we might even be able to monetize some of it, in an expert filtering type way.  Information literacy will allow us to quickly scan for clout (what your social media stats or search engine rankings say about you) separate useful and not-useful, instead of floundering in information chaos.  We do favors (building, writing, connecting, linking) with the fuzzy expectation that some kind of karma might pay it back or forward.  We slightly don’t care as we feel our cause (sometimes just growing the Internet) gaining momentum, and can tangibly see cause and effect in beautiful collective action.

William Shakespeare said that if anyone could look at the seeds of today and accurately predict the future, they should ‘speak unto’ him.  I have a prediction:  there will be unintended consequences than we can’t even begin to imagine.  Some will stick, some will not.  We just have to listen and watch.  Something world-changing might be happening, but we won’t know for a while yet.

In the meantime, perhaps Prime Minister Edeno and others will get some peaceful sleep sometime soon, bolstered by the lullaby that is global love and solidarity.  We connect because we can, we can because we connect.

Guest Author: Lisa Galarneau Ph.D. is a User Experience Researcher (Virtualization) Volt at Microsoft
Web: http://lgalarneau.webs.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lgalarneau

Image by katypang

We are seeing the social web continue to evolve as the access and interface to the internet moves from geeky, private and desk bound to intuitive, social and mobile.

Facebook’s web traffic has now surpassed Google, the Apple iPad provided a mobile computer that is always on and easy to use and Apple iPhone apps have started to become ubiquitous and even available for online shopping on the go while you commute to work. Tradesmen are even taking iPads onto work sites to source information and products rather than wait till they get home. People want “Lord Internet” on the job and on the go, they want it now in real time.

What are some of the major trends in social media and technology that will be felt with more impact through 2011 and beyond that you need to be aware of so that you can take your life and business to the next level and not become an extinct species that is struggling for relevance and survival.

1. Mobile

Mobile phones were something that you used for making a phone call and sending an SMS…. that was it but no longer! The smart phones have now become the web in you hand. This has emerged in just the last 3 years with the introduction of the Apple iPhone leading the charge with a design that took technology from the geeks by designing interfaces that are natural  and intuitive with a usable interface that put technology power in the hands of the masses. The high speed mobile and wireless networks have also evolved to provide the backbone to distribute the data including video and images. It is transforming industries such as music, book publishing, online shopping and newspapers. Mobile makes it even easier to share with your friends with Facebook and Twitter apps at your fingertips.

Actions to take advantage of this trend

• Develop an iPhone app for your business that makes your customers lives easier and provides information quickly and easily. Domino’s developed an iPhone app that made it easy for it’s customers to order resulting in $2 million in sales in just 3 months.
• Start planning now to create a iPad app that provides interactive and rich interactive content that is compelling and addictive so your customers keep coming back. iPad apps will move on from being just fun to a serious productivity platform.
• Develop an iPhone app for your online store to make it easy for customers to buy on the go with a few easy clicks.

2. Social Media Integration

Integration of the social web into everything we do online is continuing to develop and mature. The silos of private and public data that were hidden from view are now being made public and shared instantly and seamlessly in real time. Websites and blogs are including Facebook share and Twitter retweet buttons. Comments are now being accepted as normal and vital for feedback and crowd sourcing of ideas and problem solving. YouTube videos are being embedded in websites providing both instruction and education as well as entertainment. In essence you need to be constantly thinking about how you can continue to integrate your social media channels into your website.

Actions to take advantage of this trend

• Create a blog for your website
• Add Facebook and Twitter share buttons for content areas of your website and blog
• Set up a video channel on YouTube and think of creative ways you can use video for educating, entertaining and instructing your customers and emed these videos in your website and blog.
• Integrate social features and functions into your online store

3. Social Web Democracy

Digital trust, democracy and comfort have been created by social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. People that were previously afraid of technology are now using it with confident assurance and competence. The technology is easy to use and quick to setup. The aging baby boomers are now Facebook fiends that are adopting technology with glee. This  is moving the power into the hands of the individual not the faceless corporation or the nanny state government bureaucracy. The tools now exist for your business or personal brand to not rely on third parties to disseminate and distribute information. The tools, technology and power are available today.

Actions to take advantage of this trend

• Create a personal brand that provides you with power over your career and business instead of allowing PR, marketing and recruitment agencies to be your only owner of your brand. This doesn’t mean stop using them it means that you need to start the journey where you can talk and communicate directly with your clients instead of through a third party.
• Start advertising on Facebook with a banner ad that targets your customer demographic and locations. You don’t need to ring a magazine or an Ad agency you can take control of this yourself
• Start taking control of your own marketing by creating content that is compelling for your customers and start engaging customers with your website and blog.

4. Location

The mobile revolution with its permission based “opt in” location technology is providing businesses with new tools that can provide real time marketing offers and vouchers that will deliver offers to consumers. Foursquare led this and Layar is adding an augmented reality dimension to this landscape but don’t forget Facebook’s “Places” feature as they have the data and the market already in place.

Action to take advantage of this trend

• Start playing with Foursqare, Layar and Facebook “Places” and start thinking about how you could use this for your business

5. Google’s Social Search

You may not have noticed it but Google is continuing to ensure it is relevant in a social web world as it it continues to refine its search capability. You can now search on  Google for Twitter updates including live and archived tweets as well as search blogs and videos. Twitter updates are even appearing in mainstream search along with videos.

Actions to take advantage of this trend

• Create social media accounts on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter that will appear on Google search
• Actively use the accounts so that Google will start ranking your social media channels in its search engine

So how can you use these trends to your advantage and how are you currently involved?

As I was writing this article about Social Media trends I remembered a quote that I had come across a while back from Bill Gates of Microsoft… 

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.”   

So when you read the list keep the trends in mind and prepare for a very interesting web world by 2019.

Some rather influential  Social Media commentators such as Brian Solis’s rather insightful article on his Blog PR 2.0 says that ”social networks will become our Individual online Operating System“ with Twitter and Facebook and Apple amonst others are vying to be your “One” operating system for social networks. The Trend Spotting blog provided the inspiration, along with David Armano’s prediction in a recent post that “Social media will begin to look less social” and kicks off the the first 4 on the list.

1. Corporations will look to leverage their social media efforts
2. Social business becomes serious play such as Foursquare are touted for the focus on making networked activity local and mobile and has a game like aspect.
3. Mobile becomes a social media lifeline with people accessing social media via mobile phone during breaks due companies banning social media access at work
4. Sharing information no longer means e-mail
5. The Social Media  movement will desire to have quality, not quantity, as people cocoon in the face of the economic crisis.
6. Obama-maniacs both for and against will spawn a new age of activism.  
7. Exclusivity trumps accessibility  in Social Media
8. Everyone becomes a marketer 
9.  Facebook’s SocialRank algorithms emerge to drive the open social web 
10. Tools will develop to reduce noise and deal with RSS overload 
11. Friend synchronisation tools will develop
12. Friend list sanitisers will keep your list clean
13. Social Media tools will help you organise people based on location and business 
14. Organisations will continue to grapple with the social human web  
15. Social Media Indigestion will increase
16. Social Media will become more personalised 
17. There will be consolidation and shuttering of Social media businesses
18. Social Media Identity will become aggregated and segmented 
19. The social media gold rush won’t be as lucrative as everyone thought 
20. B2B goes social media 
21. There will be Social Media Multi-Channel Integration 
22. The transparency debate will continue 
23. Google will buy Twitter 
24. Blogger outreach from PR will get better 
25. Companies increasingly crafting content for Social Media SEO
26. Sputtering economy will entice companies into the social media space 
27. Blogging isn’t dead 
28. Social Media mobile marketing takes off 
29. Social search will become increasingly important 
30. Live as it happens content search will become increasingly important 
31. Better metrics for social media measurement will continue to develop  
32. Twitter will continue to develop legitimacy 
33. Online social media video will come into its own 
34. Customer satisfaction driven by social media communities uprising will make companies see the light 
35. Social media will create Ad Agency disintermediation 
36. With the rise of social shopping the ease with which people are able to see feedback .. with confirmed identities will change the eCommerce online shopping game
37. Social Networks Will Flourish As A Result Of The Economic Crisis
38. Social networking will grow to provide social support to victims of the crisis
39. Ranking The Influencers (the engagers) as a measurable tool for new media
40. Twitter Will Get Recognized For Its Social Search Assets
41. Twitter will start to emerge as a relevant and updated information source
42. Twitter evolves as the ultimate human search
43. Influence will be defined by measurable variables
44. Google will “pagerank” and “map” peoples influence
45. People will really become the media.

So what other Social Media trends will emerge over the next 12 months?