New Media predictions in 2006?

While I've been taking a break from writing over the holiday period, I've been reading the many predictions and trends for the coming year, and thinking on the events of the last quarter of 2005.  It's clear that there are a number of factors in the shift from traditional media to new media that are accelerating the rate of change, and that means organisations will need to approach their marketing and communications activities in a different way in 2006.  It's also clear that the opportunities for using these new factors for guerrilla marketing are expanding, and that's got to be good for small businesses like mine or yours.  The  blogging phenomenon will become a significant factor in business in the UK, in the way it already is in the USA.  I'll be writing more on that in the coming weeks. 

Podcasting was big news last year, but was reported more in terms of downloading already published radio material, or a platform for the enthusiast.  The ease and cost of production will trigger increasing use of this channel by business and politicians to get their messages across.  As an example, just after Christmas in France (which happens to be the second largest blogosphere after the USA), Nicolas Sarkozy, the law-and-order Interior Minister who wants to be their next President, did a podcast for Loïc Le Meur, one of the country's most widely read bloggers.  I'd heard of Loic from his involvement at Les Bogs 2.0, and his involvement with Six Apart, and so this move in to politics seems quite unusual.  But it has made a big stir over there, with more that 50,000 people accessing the show.  It's making the traditional media in France sit up and take notice. 

In a world of ever increasing content, the ways we use search will become more important.  There will be advances from the three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN), but you will see additional solutions, like Swicki - see how Dennis Howllett has deployed it at AccMan Pro.  For the same reasons, the whole area of information filtering, use of RSS, tracking and web metrics will become much more important, and I hope some better solutions will be developed during the year.  

I can also see that online collaboration will become more and more important and more widely used.  The Microsoft Live products will become available shortly, and there lots of new, low cost solutions that combine the blog and wicki technology to make a collaborative workspace.  As well as the intranet style products, there are a number of shared document and shared spreadsheet solutions available or in beta.  You should investigate and start using them today.

I'll be making some suggestions and recommendations on all of these topics, but 2006 is shaping to be an exciting year. 

Technorati Tags : Blogging, podcasting, LesBlogs2.0, search, RSS, collaboration, Web2.0

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