Wednesday 19 December 2012

Digital Trends in 2013

Every year, around this time, there are a lot predictions on what the digital trends for the next year will be. They are often produced by Marketeers and therefore have pithy names which are a clever amalgamation of two words which never before have co-existed. In a lot of cases, that is for a very good reason. Some examples from 2012 include: "Idlesourcing", "Eco-cycology", "Flawsome", "Recommerce", "More-ism" sourced from here. ...

This year I decided Tech-Rash needed its own list so I tried to come up with my own trends backed by catchy names. I attacked the problem by coming up with a catchy name first and then thinking how/if it could become a trend. I came up a few but then decided to cast the net out and 'crowd-source' the rest of the content for this post. I got back a range of responses ranging from silly (like mine) to silly, but could catch on, to serious. Thanks to @davidknipeTA, @michael_hook, @jgbibby, @cs_andrews and @ev2000  for their contributions.

As an aside, the idea of silly things turning into something serious and useful has already been coined by Seth Godin (Marketeer Extraordinaire) in his article Ridiculous is the new Remarkable.



Silly

Gleekism - Fasionistas were the cool kids of 2012. They essentially were trying to pervade a sense of geek sheek. In 2013 Glamor and Geek will reach a new level and only Geeks with real Geek credentials can sport next year's hottest look, 'Gleekism'. The prerequisites for Gleeks are 1) must have compiled a program in at least three languages 2) must know the difference between Megabits and Megabytes and 3) must have invested at least a third of their childhood playing computer games.

Vocation Based Services - The advent of GPS enabled smart phones created a boom in Location Based Services. From search to maps to social, your real time location gave businesses a new bit of customer information they could use in new and innovative ways to flog you their goods. In 2013,  Recruitment Agencies are going to exploit this and change the way you apply for jobs online. Soon job seekers will be able to find jobs serendipitously. Ever accidentally taken a wrong turn down an alleyway  on a Romantic holiday in Rome and found it to be just the quaintest thing you've ever seen? You fall in love with it and think 'I could live here?' Well, with Vocation Based Services you can find a job within a one mile radius of where you are standing and begin you new life right away.

Gayification - After a bleak 2012 with the continuation of the global recession, an absent UK summer and yet another year of XFactor, the world needs a mood lift. Making digital experiences fun through Gameification was big this year but next year will see a new trend, 'Gayification'. Online experiences will become more colourful, ostentatious and playfully camp to lighten the mood of gloomy digizens. Expect a lot of re-brands using the colour pink.

Multi-screen Commerce – where you interact and buy your purchases on multiple screens at a time.

Cloud Emigration – where you move your entire life onto the cloud.

Destination Guestimation - Similar to the ‘I feel lucky’ button on google, instead of clients asking for a specific website to be designed for them they will randomly redirect their domain to a selected list of portal websites.

Experience Expedience - User experience is great but it needs to work faster! If a user doesn’t perform and action on the web site destination for over 5 seconds a UX guru will pop up and suggest what you may want to do

Anti-Trend Macro Analytics - So much time is wasted measuring the primary goals on single destinations, macro analytics will take an arbitrary sample of destinations and measure obscure statistics such as number of hamster images in the top 10 most popular sites in the Ukraine.

Silly, but could catch on

DAAS – Desktop as a Service (who needs a real OS after all).

Client University – where we send clients to teach them how to be good clients.

Experience Expedition - Having a well thought out user journey is no longer enough. To truly standout, great web sites must provide their visitors with an 'experience expedition' ending with the ultimate goal of conversion.

Cloud Commuting – Whilst the environment slowly dies, Cloud Commuting will become much more popular in 2013. Cloud Commuting - where people stay at home and use the internet to do stuff - is the antidote to pollution generated from various modes transport used to ferry to and from their homes and offices. If you think about it, why do you really need to come into work when you have the internet, skype and online sofware services for email and collaboration?

Social, life – where you delegate every opinion in your life to a social platform, “hey Twitter is this a good restaurant?”, “hey Facebook, am I allowed to like this book/film/TV show”, “hey Instagram, is this a good view?

Complyfy – the process of complicating a problem by trying to simplify it.

Serious

Social Enterprise - From Sharepoint to Confluence we have had wiki for some time.   Companies are racing to come up with the right social environment for the workplace and we should see some of the big players start to release better alternatives to Huddle in 2013 and beyond to save companies building their own.  (i.e. CoLab) ;)  The level of success they have will depend on their ability to leverage the big social networks while protecting company data and helping employees maintain a separation of their personal/professional social media profiles.

Agency augmentation – where you use an agency to help your in house team, rather than ask the agency to do everything

Digital Ubiquity - The combination of big data, connected everything and social contribution will lead to even more ubiquity of digitally enhanced experiences.  The digital flagship Burberry store being a great example of this. (http://www.wallpaper.com/fashion/the-digitally-enhanced-new-burberry-flagship-store-london/6055)   Augmented / Enhanced reality will be one way of accessing this in the future, but I think we will see more and more mundane devices (like the simple mirror) be enhanced (or made useless) with digital enhancements.   Integrate a way to be identified socially in a real time context and you could have amazing, or extremely scary/intrusive, experiences depending on your viewpoint.

Serious and lacking in a 'catch-term'

3d printing

AR goggles

A backlash against cookie tracking and super targeted ads

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