One thing that annoys the heck out of me about the end of every year is that starting in December, the entire blogosphere becomes Miss Cleo and obnoxiously tries to predict what will happen in the next year in social media/tech trends, fake Jamaican accent and all. (OK, maybe I just read them in a fake Jamaican accent to make them more entertaining and bearable. Try it–you’ll see.)
Yet, seldom do most of those fake-Jamaican-accented, blogging tech prophets actually compare how well their last year’s predictions stacked up to what really happened.
I’ve never been a fan of this yearly tradition of Miss Cleoing*; all it ever does is just stir up more unnecessary noise in the echo chamber. Any idiot can pull predictions out of their butt about what the next year will bring, and few ever do any real research to make educated guesses.
As fate would have it, last year I was charged with doing just that — not pull predictions out of my butt and write a blog post, but researching past and current trends, past and current predictions, what might be under the radar, yet up-and-coming, etc. and, along with the assistance of a colleague, write a big ol’, in-depth paper of educated guesses
predictions for our own “11 Trends to Watch in 2011″ (original, I know).
Unfortunately, because of some situations beyond our control that we could not have predicted, our paper was never published.
However, I’m a pack rat when it comes to research (both digital and hard copy), and upon cleaning my desk a week or so ago, I came across my printed-out research for this shelved project, an inch-thick stack bound together by a binder clip which must have been magical because it seemed to defy the laws of physics. (I should have taken a picture.) Practically every end-of-the-year Miss Cleo post and whitepaper I could find in the blogosphere, printed out, hand-highlighted, notes written in the margins — it was enough for me to basically say to myself, “Holy crap, I did this all in vain.”
Or maybe I didn’t.
I’d like to not think that all of my research and efforts were futile. After all, I did subject myself to combing through everybody’s Miss Cleoing, which not only fueled my disdain for end-of-the-year predictions posts, but was enough to unconsciously get me reading everything in a fake Jamaican accent for the next three months. (It’s funny when you do it in your head but when you accidentally do it out loud … well, I digress.)
Anyway.
Even though it was never published, I wanted to see how I did in my educated guesses
predictions compared to what actually happened. So I dug up the outline from my files and took a look. I didn’t do too bad. I was WAY off on a few things, but you know what? Very few end-of-the-year blogosphere Miss Cleos revisit their last year’s predictions and compare them to reality (or, at least not publicly). But I will.
So here it is. The outline for the unpublished paper, my own attempt at Miss Cleoing last year and predicting what 2011 would hold. I haven’t modified it except to add the preface at the top, and clean up a couple typos.
About the beginning…
From everything I read of everybody else’s, I noticed that there was a LOT of what seems to be a common problem in this field — stating the obvious. In December 2010, many people were “predicting” what was already happening, things that were already a given. Saying that people will use a lot more apps for their every day needs (whether on tablets, phones, in browsers, etc.) is hardly prophecy. It was already happening. Saying “search will get more social” had been happening, too. Growing concern for privacy? That too.
Things that are obviously becoming (if not already) omnipresent do not count as “trends” to “predict.” That’s called practicing your superpowers as Captain Obvious.
So I acknowledged these things and moved on. After the jump, I’m going to attempt to examine each of these and whether or not they came true. As I said, I know I was way off on a few of these. Some of them I was right, but others, I’m honestly not sure and maybe you can help me out to let me know if it happened or not.
[Note: This ended up being a much longer post than I originally anticipated, but it reads quickly, I promise.]
I’ve personally always advised my clients, regardless of what kind of entity they are, that they needed to “own” their presence on the web and not rely on other platforms such as Facebook, though those are a nice complement to your online presence.
There are plenty of resources out there to buy domains and host a site. I personally prefer 
When this started becoming a pattern, I decided to just avoid having that awkward “that’s really not cool” conversation with perpetrators and threw everybody in my “music world” into a list of people who can’t see my other friends. Maybe I was lazy, maybe I just didn’t want to have to keep having that conversation. Either way, it seemed like an easy fix. Many people in that world of mine simply AREN’T social-media-etiquette savvy. They don’t know any better, many are all about the “friend collecting,” and Lord knows I get REALLY sick of being on this soapbox.
But this raises a couple questions.
I really thought I was done writing about “social media.” I’ve been bored with it for a long time, over saturated, jaded, stick-a-fork-in-me done. Yet recently I had a conversation with a new online friend of mine that reminded me of one big reason why. (And in my usual ironic fashion, I thought I’d write about why I’m done with writing about it. However, consider this the last post before a big shift.)
It’s no secret that I am one of the many people on Twitter who HATE automatic direct messages (“auto dms”). In fact, I despise them so much that I put right on my background “I auto-unfollow all auto-dms.” I think they’re extremely annoying. But a lot of people and companies still auto-dm, and it appears that they’re doing just fine on Twitter. So if it works for them, who am I to tell them not to do it?
Wild Thing by X
What they said: