The team at Neutralize have put their heads together to come up with some interesting 2008 predictions for the world of search.

Social Media
Google will get richer - with the acquisition of DoubleClick their stranglehold on internet advertising will increase. Internet advertising revenues will outstrip all other media.

Facebook will be last year's news - OpenSocial from Google will integrate over a wide network of social networks.  Social networks will become more niche; new social networks will concentrate on groups of interests (music, film etc) with the OpenSocial standard.

Twitter will herald the way to the expansion of mobile social networking, via people's more sophisticated iPhone, GooglePhone and equivalent web capable 3G mobilephones.

Downloads
Movie downloads will explode and become mainstream in a similar manner as music downloads did via iTunes.

Harnessing Search

Search marketing will become top priority for companies and organisations alike with more political parties harnessing its power to gain exposure after seeing the success of Ron Paul in 2007 (the little-known Republican candidate that managed generate huge interest via social media marketing) and Barack Obama's current social media campaign.

Pay Per Click

New PPC Formats such as click to play video ads will take off. Widget ads will become more common with offline and online campaigns crossing over. Mobile ads will be a lot more common as mobile networks lower their data cap charges and increase fair usage policies.

Regulation

We will see more regulation online. Governments will hold people accountable for PCs that are riddled with botnet software; this will encourage people to upgrade to secure software. The biggest consumer of our private information will be our (and various other) governments.

So the social media juggernaut (if in a slightly different guise) is deemed unstoppable and as far as regulation is concerned at the end 2008, could we be welcoming in 1984?

Posted by Lotte Mahon,

Marketing Manager