LimeTree Predictions for 2011

In many ways 2010 was the year that the Mobile Internet really came of age. What will be the biggest trend for 2011?

Contenders are:

Personalisation: This is already happening, but it could get a whole lot more personal in 2011. There are now many sources of information which can identify huge amounts of information on who you are. This information can generally be found from simply your email or IP address. This will lead to some seriously good personalisation of content. Some sites are doing this now e.g.) Ocado gives really excellent recommendations for items I might like on their site when I am using that. But the vast majority of websites still do not pre-filter based on user preferences. Personalisation technologies are increasingly low cost and within the reach of even small business launching their first website. This will help to improve conversion rates of websites and help to target web content at the highest value customers.

Location Based Consumption: In 2010 Four Square and Facebook Places started to bring location to the digital media party, however this has so far not really been exploited by retailers. This will start to happen in 2011 on a large scale. Pew Research Center’s found that less than 4% of people actually use these location services at the moment in the US. I would guess than penetration is even lower in the UK. Therefore this market has a long way to go. I reckon around 20% of people in the UK will be using these services by this time next year. Once penetration is higher you can bet your left leg that entertainment venues and retailers will start to use location-based information cross referenced with other data e.g.) demographic information to sell their products and services. Lets say your cinema is empty. The cost of screening the film does not change. Surely you would want to tell people in the immediate vicinity of a special offer to cut prices by 50%? I think so. There are literally millions of applications for location-based data. Expect to see more by this time next year.

Monitisation Of Data: Back in the late 1990s during the dot com boom websites were often valued by the number of members or users they had. Well some of those valuations were very high, way too high in fact. However, sites like Facebook and Twitter might now be close to the types of valuations the sites in that era had based on number of users. Facebook has approximately half a billion users and its valuation is well into the billions. Does anyone now question that valuation? I am not sure they do anymore. If Facebook was for sale for a few billion, there would, I am sure be plenty of buyers, including the general public queuing up for shares. The reason these values are now justified is that nobody is questioning the value of the data on these community sites. The ability to monitise this data is already here. 2011 will be the year that this concept also gets applied to smaller business who have online communities that have not yet been monitised. If you have a community website of over 10,000 high quality users you can expect to be able to be able to monitise that in 2011.

Social Media Optimisation: OK, so everyone (even your granny) has heard about Search Engine Optimisation by now. 2011 will be the year when business gets serious about Social Media Optimisation. 25% of US page-views are on Facebook already. With that amount of eyeballs on it business can not ignore it as a marketing channel any longer. Social Media will also start to get even more media coverage. It is often more interesting and revealing to check out someones Social Media presence than their website these days. You can often get under the skin of an organisation or a person using social media in a way that you can not do on a corporate website. This is why media references to social media will increase.