My Inevitable Digital Predictions for 2018

For the past 12 years I’ve written a prediction for the next year based on reader trends, my research, and how the digital landscape is developing. Things actually move slower than you’d think. There are curve balls and new platforms, sure, but trends and the digital landscape are technology and user up-take dependent. I’ve never been totally wrong, thankfully, just occasionally ahead of my time by two or three years. So here goes for 2018.

Augmented reality edges more towards the mainstream

With Apple’s newly released technology and the new ARKit framework allowing developers to create augmented reality apps more easily, this is one to watch. I’ve always been a big fan of AR and VR, and with Facebook invested in Oculus and PSVR making VR more accessible in the home, things are looking interesting.

To date, augmented reality has been a gimmick more than a genuinely useful smartphone tool, but things (and adoption) are changing. In the last year users haven’t moved on from the mildly addictive disappointment of Pokémon Go, but finally the technology is catching up (if we can afford it). People are trying virtual Ikea furniture in their home and virtual make up at the beauty counter. Only the other day I was asked to put on a set of VR goggles by a ‘chugger’ in Nottingham. Marketeers are getting wise to it, and I can see more money spent in this direction in 2018.

While Snapchat spectacles weren’t massive they did prove concept, though (unlike a few years ago) I’d suggest you don’t put all your eggs in the Snapchat basket. Make the most of Snapchat – especially Geofilters – while it’s still around (and make way for the Insta-jam).

I still dream of my devices drawing data from my social/Amazon purchase preferences, applying this to real world data, knowing what I’m interested in and directing me to sales or things of interest. “Hey Nik. You have a dog. How about 20% off HiLife dog food over here in Pets at Home. Follow these arrows!” Technically, it’s possible.

More focus on Generation Z

Millennials are SO yesterday.

Generation Z are the folks who were born between 1995 and 2010. These are, at the oldest, 22 and are starting to enter the post-university workplace.

Only a few of them vaguely remember the 20th century. They are used to a high standard of living (in the western world) and total connectivity. They suffer less from the burden of traditional values and their loyalty will come from positive brand experiences over names and legacy – they will prefer brands to reach them socially and are more likely to buy online than in the high street.

Allegedly, they have shorter attention spans, due to the availability of easy-to-consume data, moving media and information. They are connected socially, but sceptical of traditional channels and security conscious - making them sceptical of those they see as hungry for their data. Access to information and connectivity are viewed as a fundamental right. They are arguably more conservative, with values formed by sexual harassment scandals marring politics, brands and institutions trusted by their peers and from Trump-era/austerity politics.

Events like 9/11 passed them by, and it is world events like the Syrian refugee crisis, Brexit, rapid advances in technology and the legalisation of gay marriage that have shaped their way of looking at the world.

They value transparency and personal engagement from brands, something businesses will need to adapt to. Like Millenials before them, they value the power of influencers and referrers over publishers and deferrers.

Generation Z are coming, and bringing their modest disposable incomes with them. Make friends with them now.

The chatbots are coming

Get used to talking to machines and speaking to smart-arsed pizza bots.

It's not exactly Terminator, but better burn it with fire now to be sure.

More ‘disappearing’ content

By this I mean the more immediate and short-lived content that disappears after a user has seen it or after 24 hours, such as via the likes of Snapchat, and Instagram Stories. If your brand is on Instagram and not using Stories you’re missing out on a BIG part of the platform. Storytelling is all the rage, as far as the Gen Z and Millennial user is concerned.

A lot of brands don’t get this kind of disposable, behind-the-scenes, ephemeral content – it kinda scares them – but more and more businesses are getting hip to the power of stories to demonstrate trust and credibility, giving their customers a look behind the curtain, getting followers involved and invested and sympathetically transforming their online presence. Expect to see more. It’s what followers want and the channels that do this are where the B2C audiences are. Celebrity Pages on FB already have this feature. Watch for Facebook rolling this out for business Pages next year - I’ll bet my dog on it.

More and more and more mobile visitors

Take a look at your Analytics data – nearly half your visitors are already hitting your site from smartphones. Do we shop through websites and e-com platforms or do we just go to Amazon and eBay? Facebook will be almost entirely mobile, with 80% of ads being served to mobile devices already. If you’re not ready for this your already WAY behind – get bootstrapped and think strategic and mobile.

The continued influence of Influencers

People trust influencers more than paid advertising or any messaging. Younger customers especially (pre-generation X) look to fellow customers and those with a neutral agenda, who they trust through experience, to inform their purchasing decisions. They don’t look to celebrities, but to personalities. It’s almost word-of-mouth.

If you’re not looking at influencer marketing in 2018 you’re missing out on a MASSIVE revenue generator, and I guarantee your competition will take full advantage of the gap in your campaign strategy.

Influencer marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. It’s measurable and targetable. Finding niche audiences following budding personalities, grateful for sponsorship or for a chance to start in product reviews, can be cash well spent.

Actually, thinking about it, we're probably due for a backlash against influencers - especially those who take sponsorship in the form of goods, holidays, cash, whatever - probably under the umbrella of fake news and celebrity/reality fatigue. Probably one to watch.

Video and live streaming

More of the same, as per the last three or four years, to be honest.

More steaming. More animated cover images in channels. Better audience connectivity. More opportunities. More big live events and launches. More Facebook TV. More unboxings. More moving stuff. Get involved. Facebook is actively paying publishers, from BuzzFeed to CNN, to create more video content.

If you don’t stream Netflix to your iPad in the bath you’re very soon going to be the odd one out. Expect more video advertising in streaming communities from YouTube to Twitch, and easier ways to create your content through social media advertising. Facebook has already tested giving content creators the ability to add 15-second commercial breaks into their videos – hinting at a more TV-style approach down the line.

Crushing fake news and spam

Everyone has a bee in their bonnet about fake news right now, and it’s justified if it’s being used to undermine elections and swing decision making. The Collins Dictionary word of the year for 2017 was actually two words, unsurprisingly thanks to Mr. Trump, “fake news”.

While taking a stand may seem like the influence of the ‘nanny state’, the amount of spam and poorly written hype posted to social channels is just one part of the battle the platforms have in re-establishing trust with their audience. Social channels understand that any channel a user clicks through to reflect on them and the quality of their data, even if it’s posted by others.

Link-bait sites, flagrant misrepresentation and urban myth publishers are being filtered out already by Facebook - through crackdown on linking protocols for publishers, manual peer review and citation from the likes of Snopes. Be ready for more of the same, as well as vetting of our motivation and the quality of our messaging when it comes to paid advertising in platforms. Users want a safe experience and the truth, without it they’ll go elsewhere.

Alexa, Siri and Cortana - oh my.

Have you thought about how you can design for 'smart speakers' or how they are changing query based search? Got an app that'd work for audio? Think about it. The price point is right and they're becoming commonplace in the home, PDQ. Expect to be asked about the possibilities from curious clients in '18.

Other things of note? Watch out for AI in SM, Messenger chatbots and automated customer service chat, more gamification, and something so off the wall and out of left field (probably a new channel) that there's no way on gods green earth we could ever see it coming.

So there you go. No massive revelations, just a collation of what we know already. 2018 promises to be another busy year for us here at Tank (our digital PR agency) and it pays to have an eye to the future of our digital markets – hey, it’s my job.

Obligatory Prediction for Digital Marketing in 2017

For the past 10 years I’ve blogged a prediction about the year to come. Mostly I’ve been right, if sometimes a little too optimistic, so this year I’m gonna calm the hell down and go with what I know f’sure:

Video, especially streaming, is going to be bigger than hip-hop. Get on board or get left behind. Even Twitter released an update this week that’ll let us broadcast live video from its iOS and Android app (presumably powered by Periscope) and have you seen Houseparty (because Generation Z’s on it like Donkey Kong)?

If you’re not streaming Q&As, live events, interviews or product demos then you’re not part of the conversation. Start thinking about this and how you can use it, now. The only obstacles are time (make it), knowledge (that’s what how-to’s on YouTube are for – go crack a book or phone a friend), resources (invest) and budget (find it). Trust me, in 2017 your competition’ll be streaming the b’jesus out of everything, so don’t get left behind.

Fake news is the buzzword right now, and the big boys will have to be seen to be doing something about (I hear ABC and Associated are getting involved) and if the likes of Snopes, FactCheck.org and Politifact start selling their data to Facebook then hopefully it’s pretty much all over for the spammers – though at lot of these stories have their roots in the likes of 4chan and Reddit. Is this censorship? Probably. Did the Russians fix the US election by creating bogus news articles? No idea, but it’s more than possible. The solutions aren't rocket science - hiring human editors, algorithmic checking of reliable sources for citation and crowdsourcing accuracy. Expect this to get a mention in parlement and congrass and it not to go away any time soon.

There’s a chargeable product for the newspapers here, if they’re quick. A paragraph of flavour then a pay wall to read content that's guaranteed-accurate. They’re going to have to do something, with a further growing trend away from both print and online banner advertising.

Everyone’s going to need to at least be seen to address fake news, and social channels (not just Facebook) are going to have to start taking more responsibility for what’s published (instead of concentrating on banning pictures of breast feeding mums) to pacify the users (their source of marketing data, in most cases).

Facebook is still gonna be the daddy. With the development of feature rich messaging bots, with more practical and useful applications, expect to see an easy WYSIWHG creator inherent to the platform soon. Streaming is, obviously, gonna be even bigger.

Social media advertising is growing at 20% a year and the Facebook ad platform is going to get the bulk of any business’s ad spend – with it stealing a massive $1 billion out of print advertising budgets for U.S. newspapers in 2016. It’s comfortably estimated that Google and Facebook will take more than 70% of all money spent on display advertising online in the UK by 2020. Watch out for more video advertising, obviously, and more targeting and ad varients rolled out over the next 12 months.

Other channels, like Snapchat and Instagram, will still be big for the audiences they attract, and will probably still continue to pirate features off each other and from other channels. Something original will come along, championed by an initially niche audience, but god knows if it'll last longer than a month, what it’ll be, or if it’ll be suitable for business – remember Ello and Pokemon Go? The big boys will probably steal the best functionality out of any new channel and make it obsolete fairly sharpish - we may even see the odd legal case tackling such things.

VR is going to hit the mainstream and hopefully garner more acceptance. I’m a big exponent of VR and run a PSVR rig myself at home. I’ve been active in virtual worlds for over 10 years. Augmented is probably where it’s at, however, and we can expect some heavy investment in this area over the next 12 months. Layering digital over the real world has a billion possibilities; it just needs to sell its value to the public at large. A virtual reality version of Google Earth is now available for free on the HTC Vive, and it’s a thing of beauty, but the general user doesn’t yet have access to the kit (mainly due to price point). When it moves to Android we'll see some serious traction.

The AR market will hopefully hit an inflection point in 2017, expect to see more Smartphone integration as standard,  and we’ll see more and more uses of VR for event and stunt marketing. Expect to be handed a headset in the street to demonstrate an idea or product, any day now.

Twitter is (and it pains me to say this) becoming less important. Sure, it’s brilliant for news and publishing, but compared to Facebook it’s not where people are going to be spending their marketing dollars. People are losing confidence in the platform and, unless they pull something unique and of value out of their wazoo soon, the audience and the advertisers are going to be a lot more wary in 2017. I’m already starting to think it has less strategic value for some of my clients, which is a shame as I’m a big fan myself.

We can probably pretty much forget about Google+, unless it’s for SEO support.

In recruiting for social managers and agency employees, the polymaths and generalists will start to get some credit. People are going to be looking for younger brand evangelists and those who can generate passionate content, over those with long-term experience in other sectors.

Every year, for the past six years, I’ve said that companies will start to see the genuine return on investment of social media. Honestly, so few have. So, I think social media ROI will still elude many companies and those companies will get further and further behind – sad but true.

So that’s it. I’m keeping it fairly realistic this year. Obviously there’s a lot of other factors going on in 2017, like Trump and Brexit, but they’re probably best left for another time…

All the best for the year to come, here’s wishing you and yours a very social holidays. J

Can Local Newspapers Still win at Digital?

Originally written as a comment piece, 03/04/09, for www.journalism.co.uk

While writing this post, I had an encounter I'd like to share. Stopping for a cuppa in a local cafe I found most seats full and asked a chap, sat filling in the crossword over a pot of tea, if he'd mind if I join him. He didn't mind at all and moved his papers so I could put down my tray.

"Help yourself," he said, nodding towards the tabloids on the table with a shrug. "They're todays papers, but yesterday's news."

We're living in the Information Age. We all know a local blogger with his iPhone can get a news story out in seconds and to a targeted audience via the likes of Twitter, Seesmic or to their active social group on one of hundreds of social networking portals. 

They can monetise this on a blog with AdWords or Affiliate Programmes, often automatically. The audience now expects content up-to-the-minute and are growing accustomed to having it on tap when it's convenient for them to read it.

A friend of mine made a comment last week: "The midweek Man City v Aalborg match went to penalties, so the paper couldn't print the score. I didn't know who'd won. What's the point?"

Familiarity with the internet, mobile, and the likes of iPlayer and Sky+, is slowly making the evening news a thing of the past. The rise of a tech-savvy new generation, born into an age where they can engage at any time, means we have to look to new ways of delivering our content. 

Plans have recently surfaced in th UK from Sir Jim Rose, former Ofsted chief appointed by ministers to overhaul the primary school curriculum, which said children are to 'leave primary school familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter as sources of information and forms of communication'. All this, and these fresh new consumers are getting used to getting their information for free.

Can we compete with this? Yes, I really believe we can. But we're going to have to seriously step it up a gear. Sorry folks, but things are going to have to change. Today. With the credit squeeze not run its course and readership down, sacrifices need to be made.

Sure, we dropped the ball a bit to start off with, a lot of folks did, but we're going to go seriously wrong and seriously miss the digital boat if we're not careful. I hope we haven't already. As large organisations, often spread out across the country and sometimes lacking those direct channels of communication, many have a certain resistance to change and a poor ability to respond. So do small local institutions. Put simply, we can't afford this any longer. If you sit around thinking about a new idea, you're invariably passed by someone else doing it.

We need to stop trying to sell papers through the internet for starters. Offering partial content and driving users to our print product is just alienating them. The online audience is a sceptical one, and who is going to rush out and buy today's paper when they are already sat at home surfing the net or reading this on the bus on their mobile? 

Digital is where we should be driving traffic, where we can provide the excellent journalistic content we have in abundance to a targeted online audience. Engaging them in debate. Allowing free commentary and inviting opinion. Giving the visitor a sense of ownership in our established and trusted local brands. Giving them resources and information they need to take their community forward. 

Here we can sell our advertising and upsell services. Here we can offer the audience a truly local and lasting experience they’ll want to revisit.

We live in troubled times. Redundancy overshadows everything these days. I appreciate cuts have to be made and the business has to be streamlined for the future for us to survive, but, let's make sure those cuts are happening in the right places.

Much of our industry, print journalism, is lacking perspective in this new arena. Many in print media have such a fondness for their medium and its tradition they're loathed to look beyond it. Many simply don't understand the urgency or the medium. 

We can't all stay up-to-date on what's happening out there in the digital soup and see what new avenues are open to us. Trust me, unless it's a full time job, it's almost impossible. We're dipping our toes in, sure, but we need to commit. We need to dedicate resources to staying informed and to moving forward.

It's important that we have digital teams with the resources they need to respond, fast, to changes and advances in digital media. If you already have one, hold on to it like gold dust. These are not the people you want to be making redundant right now, no matter how tempting it might look on paper. 

Invest: we have to give them good, industry-savvy, leadership. We need to grant these people the ability to control our digital brands directly, to say, 'we are going to make video for the website', and give them the power and resources to make that happen. Don't leave it too late. These people are the new Gutenbergs.

Results are happening, slowly. Internationally, ex-Morning Call editor Roger Oglesby is leading the first major American newspaper to switch from print to entirely online - the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last newspaper on Tuesday, March 17. 

The print world is watching as it maximises resources and cuts print overheads. Johnston Press is making a foray into social media and experimenting with 'embedding its sites at the hearts of communities' through Kick Apps etc; and have a remit to 'make sense of all the information that's bombarding people' on a local level. 

Northcliffe is great at exploiting specific database content (take a look at www.lastingtribute.co.uk for an outstanding delivery system for white-labelled local obituaries) and its slow addition of video and RSS to the 'thisis' network is a good beginning. 

Trinity Mirror has started using Pluck's SiteLife features on its national sites, offering commentary on all suitable articles, the ability to build site profiles and to make recommendations, breeding social connectivity and community. 

It's not fast enough. This is stuff other news brands and the independents were doing two years ago. The internet is awake and generating news and ideas 24/7. We need to look our best and be there, front and centre, now.

Editors have to embrace digital wholeheartedly and journalists have to 'write for digital'. Look to those in your paper who write for digital already and strengthen what they have by giving them the ability to try out new ideas. Be open to those ideas and be ready to respond to what's new. 

Let's deliver our stories from where the story is happening and tell people directly that the information is there to be read. We need to write for online as well as offline. Write for Twitter, and RSS, and Facebook apps. Think titles, keywords, that important search engine optimisation that will bring in the long-tail traffic your advertisers need. 

We also need to let the user in. We need to grant them a platform for their content as well. While offering our own professional opinion, well crafted and respected as it is, we need to place that content shoulder-to-shoulder with the voice of our audience and of the community. 

We need to aggregate other local news and become portals for local affairs and information. We need to engage our communities in new ways, and to make ourselves THE place people come for everything local. 

We also need to present in a clear, concise, and user-friendly way. The search engines will bring us the traffic if we do it right, and right now that's one of the only online sales metrics easily available to us. We have masses of long-tail local content, information, and history - let's get it out there quickly (and monetise it).

To the larger brands I would say that you need to give a general directive to all parts of the business that an online experience MUST happen, quickly, with as little resistance as possible. Experimentation in finding other ways for us to distribute and aggregate our journalistic and advertising content has to be a priority. Nothing is yet written in stone. 

I'm sorry, but our print editors can no longer be expected to stay up-to-date on what's good for their local digital brand. This lack of information can't stand in the way of, basically, making money. Our large organisations move slowly and, at the moment, simply can't react quickly enough. This has to stop, even if (I hate to say) it means taking away the autonomy of local editors to affect what we do with mobile, online, and with our digital information. This is the future of the business we're talking about here after all, and our business is journalism and selling advertising.

We have the best content and well-respected brands. Get your digital team in sync and make sure the people leading them are tech-savvy early adopters who know the industry. Give them the power to react, and the funds to do so. We can still do this, and we know we have to. Let's keep our minds, and resources, open to a digital future.

Wanted. Virtual Kate Aide.

Here's a potentially interesting one.

Sky News is calling on Second Life residents to turn themselves into virtual news reporters and submit videos about our crazy little 3D world. They've joined forces with the video-sharing website SkyCast to launch an SL 'reporters' challenge'.

The idea is for SL residents to create video reports on things they think "...have news value and relevance to the virtual community". Finished reports will be hosted on skycast.com, with the best entries run on the Sky News website.

Potential vid-hacks can collect a Sky News microphone reporter package from the foyer of the Sky's virtual newsroom [SLURL] and then throw together a simple two-minute video piece. The closing date for entries is September 30 so there's bags of time.

Thanks to Patrick, from Hold The Front Page, for the heads-up on this one. I've been talking about shooting some SL docco for ages and this might well be the excuse I need. This could actually be a minor way to paint our little virtual world in a positive, non-sensationalist, sleaze-free light for once ;-)

So. Anyone gonna volunteer to be the feisty girlie voice reporter if I do the rest? I can do all the editing etc. piece of cake, but I look like a big gangly badly dressed beardy geek with a baritone and, well, lip gloss sells. Contact me (Nikk Huet) in-world if your curious. Also give me a shout if you have a cool story that might be worth covering and currently lack the resources to make it happen.