As always, it feels too early to go back to work. But it’s also the right time to look ahead and get on with the year. A lot of companies have delayed their market budgeting and planning till the new year to see how the land lies, so now’s also a good time to look at the industry environment and what marketing and PR are going to be most cost-effective. Our CEO Ralf Haller recently wrote his predictions for what will be hot in product marketing in 2009, and what not, and I think he’s spot on. So rather than making my own, here are three from other industry experts that I found interesting.

1. Business social networking to grow

Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis in a group podcast for Briefings Direct:

The first one for me is vendors tackling enterprise-plus-consumer based social networks, a blended view of those. Enterprise-focused vendors are going to do more than simply sink info from public sites like Facebook. They’re going to take that information and build into or out from the enterprise into those social networks and drive information from those. It’s going to become a two-way street.

You’re going to see folks like Facebook, and most notably, LinkedIn, working in the other direction themselves, and with third parties, to develop enterprise-bound social networks. Look for those to emerge next year.

And from Drupal CEO Dries Buytaert
Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time.

2. Brands get promoted directly via microblogging & social networking

From The Marketing Consigliere:

Brands will use Twitter and some people will tolerate push communication.
Just as the original commercial Internet “pioneers” were eclipsed by corporate suits in regard to the continued development and exploitation of the Internet, brands will become a more dominant player in this tool. While the Innovators and Early Adopters who embraced Twitter may feel their “find” has been violated, this is just another stage in the product life cycle as the Early Majority and Late Majority get on board. Many of these later adopters will be complacent with one-way messaging, just as they have been while using other media…

As B2B buyers become less reluctant to use “consumer” apps in their daily work routine, they will accept this relatively new form of blogging as the primary means of communication with their vendors. (Personally, I doubt we will see Twitter etc. being the primary means in Europe this year, but interesting that it is taking off so fast in the US. )

3. New market entrants make fast impact using online marketing

From Joe McKendrick, also for Briefings Direct:

We are going to see folks — maybe IT people, or people who work for vendors and have been laid off — have the ability to start their own business at a very low cost of entry. On the flip side of that, the whole social-networking and cloud-computing phenomena, companies have these tools as well to employ low-cost methods to reach their markets and to interact with their customers. We’re going to see a lot more of that as well. A marketing campaign doesn’t have to cost $200,000 to reach your customers. You can use the social network, the Web 2.0 tools, to interact and collaborate and find out what’s going on in your markets at a very relatively low cost.

According to a Heise Online article, reporting from the first Cologne Web Content Forum, ‘Mit Inhalten ist kaum Geld zu verdienen’ i.e., the chances of earning money through web content are slim. Some of the figures they discussed were:

LinkedIn: Turnover per member per year > $US 5
Xing: pr Turnover per member per year > $US 4
FaceBook: Turnover per member per year > $US 3
YouTube: Income 2007: $US 20 M against business costs of $US 365 M!

The various reasons put forward for this included slower replacement of mainstream media services than predicted, and the sheer multiplicity of services competing for users’ attention.

In a similar vein, an OnlineBusiness-Guide blog Web 2.0: Finding a business model that pays, looks at the difficulty of getting cash out of social network apps, as many assume that numbers will mean ad revenue, even though ads do not necessarily suit each service. He, along with many other commentators, thinks that enterprise apps are the way forward, generating cash for useful social apps through licence fees.

The other way forward could be mobile apps, as Wolfe’s Den Blog in InformationWeek suggests in Web 2.0 Expo Reveals: Mobile Is The New Desktop, Social Nets The New Media Companies. That last suggestion makes a lot of sense to me intuitively, because that’s simply what I see most, and because users already pay according to the time and services used, making micropayment system probably a more straightforward possibility.

It will be interesting to see if Twitter, who are looking to raise $15M at a $60M valuation, get their money, in the light of this picture.