With the upcoming ending of the year, everybody is eagerly struggling to forsee what the future holds as far as the digital landscape is concerned.

Here’s my top 5 trends prediction: 

  1) SEO IS DEAD. AND WILL NOT GET BACK AGAIN

Many companies spent a lot of money in SEO in the past years. Having a good ranking in the “natural” search required experienced teams and skills. And many “web” agencies prospered developing skills that the market asks for.
This made the whole system crash. Too many “experts”. Too many ways to get you to the top of the ranking.
And Google said stop. This whole circus is a threat to the credibility of the BigG. 
They are more and more developing algorithms that are and will be able to actually understand the content of a page. Semantic search is becoming more and more real.
So much for SEO gurus and their revenues. Tricks are over.

    2) VLOGGERS WILL BECOME MORE AND MORE INFLUENT. 

Youtube is the new TV we all know that. Time spent on this medium is growing day by day.

In this competitive scenario, big players can’t see how to turn this trend into business. 
Their model is too old. Their payrolls and costs too high.
And too often their content is not good enough.

During the last year some shrewd video blogger was able to attract millions and millios of viewers and/or subscribers.
One good example is Ijustine (http://www.youtube.com/user/ijustine), a young apple fan that turned into a star gathering millions and millions of views on her channel.

These people will become more and more influent. Their on demand shows will be shared, commented, participated. This is TV reloaded. And wise marketing men will start to get the point pretty soon and try to monetize it.

  3) SPONSORED TWEETS WILL THREAT TWITTER

2012 will be the year of twitter as much as 2011 has been that of Facebook.
But the microblogging platform will struggle to monetize its success.

Its layout and fast-paced rhythm is the key to its success but such an organic harmony could be seriously threatened by sponsored content.

Will users accept sponsored tweets or see them as mere spam? 
Will twitter be able to make a living out of them?

In the beginning of 2012 you might think they can do the job. But as the need for money will grow, the problems will come along.

    4) BRANDS WILL HAVE TO LOSE CONTROL AND TALK HONESTLY.

For obvious it may seems, 2012 will be the turning point for brand communication. The crisis and low budget will push even more money into direct communication channels (aka WEB).

The money brands invest on the web will grow more and more.
And with more investments marketing teams will have to understand that the web is not the place to tell lies.

They will learn that whatever you say on the web can be discussed and that being honest is necessary. That a relation is as much important as a sale.

Are marketing teams within National and International companies ready for this? They will have to be. 

   5) INTERNET OF THINGS WILL BREAKTHROUGH

It all began with a rabbit. 
The Nabaztag was a rabbit connected to the Internet. By holding some RFID stamps in front of the rabbit you could (and actually still can if you own one) get the rabbit to perform some actions.

That was history. 2012 will be the beginning of a new era. 
We will see more and more objects directly connected and speaking one to the other through the cloud.

One example?
One of the most pledged projects on kickstarter is TWINE, a device with a bunch of sensor that can be programmed to perform some actions (send email, tweet…) when some events occur. 

in 2012 we will see many fridges, cars, bikes, bracelets and whatever you can think of, connected to the web; and not necessarily via a smartphone