Six top trends for business in 2011

What will 2011 bring for business? What are the significant trends that may influence the fortunes of companies during the coming year, for better or worse? Two questions on many people’s lips; whether you call it ‘predictions’ or ‘trend spotting,’ they provide myriad opportunities for crystal ball-gazing or metaphorical weather-forecasting into the coming twelve months.

We’ve just done some of that at WCG. Yesterday I posted the latest episode of the WCG ThoughtLeaders podcast on the WCG blog. It’s a conversation with my colleague Bob Pearson, WCG’s Chief Technology and Media Officer. In our discussion, Bob gives a retrospective look at how things worked out for some of the ten trends that mattered to every company in 2010, the subject of a similar conversation we had a year ago. That retrospective serves as a backdrop to Bob’s informed predictive view of six top trends for business in 2011, focusing discussion on:

1. The dawn of the Content Highway
2. Blogs now equal websites
3. The real tipping point for e-commerce is just around the corner
4. Business-to-business apps are the untapped frontier
5. Gaming will become mainstream for business
6. Within two years, smartphones will out-ship PCs

Our 20-minute conversation concludes on pre-commerce, a concept Bob has embraced in his book Pre-Commerce: How Companies and Customers are Transforming Business Together to be published in March 2011 (and launched at the SxSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, in March). Bob explains what pre-commerce is and argues that companies need to be very good at it if they are to become leaders in e-commerce. (Follow or join in online discussion with the #precommerce hashtag.)

• Download the podcast (MP3, 9.1Mb, 19:48)
• To automatically receive future episodes of the WCG ThoughtLeaders podcast as they are published, subscribe to the RSS feed.

Finally, take a look at some credible and imaginative thinking about social media and 2011 by others, such as this selection I’ve been reading:

• Six Social Media Trends for 2011 by David Armano
• Eight Social Media Trends for 2011 by Gini Dietrich
• Five Social Media Trends for 2011 by Stephanie Schwab
• 5 PR and social media trends for 2011 by Eb Adeyeri
• 10 social media trends for PR and marketing in 2011 by Drew Benvie

Related post:

• Ten trends that will matter to every company in 2010

(Disclosure: I work for WCG as Head of Social Media Europe, based in the London office.)