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It’s the time of year when everyone starts doing predictions. In theory, it’s an easy blog post to write, and one which brings with it several benefits.

1. Predictions make good lists — everyone likes list posts.
2. Predictions are easy to crowdsource — even without Twitter and Facebook, it used to be pretty easy to email a list of one’s industry friends and get them to do the heavy lifting.
3. Crowsourced material is fairly easy to promote — drop in the names of a few of one’s more heavily-followed contributors, tell them, then see if they can resist tweeting and linking one’s post.
4. Predictions are good comment-bait — everybody has an opinion about the future.
5. Predictions are the lowest investment path to becoming an expert: if a prediction comes true, then one may howl in triumph. If it doesn’t, who will remember?

As far as I know, David Armano is the first person to post his Six Social Media Trends this year, and it has prompted a rash of similar articles. Never one to avoid jumping on a slowly-moving bandwagon here are my predictions for 2010.

Going Up

1) More audience activism.

The recent successes of the Trafigura/Carter Ruck/Guardian story, the Jan Moir/Stephen Gately/Daily Mail story, and the London Underground Bully story are only adding to the audience’s feeling that they have a perfect right to get involved in, express an opinion on, and eventually become a part of the stories that they read.

Because it’s so easy to express one’s outrage on Twitter and Facebook (when compared – say – to the difficult and time-costly business of organizing a protest march) we’ll see more and more stories hijacked by the twitterati. Everyone likes to see their name in print and now (thanks to the magic of social media) everyone can.

2) More traditional media agencies reposition themselves as social media agencies just as clients take the social media function in house.

Quite a long and confused prediction this, but that doesn’t prevent me from making it. You’ll see more and more kinds of agency reposition themselves for the social media battleground just that little bit too late to join the fray. At the same time, we’ll see more companies emulate Zappos, Ford, Comcast and (rather wonderfully) BT and realise that not only are their Customer Services departments ideally placed to handle their social media needs, but that they should be paid for out of their marketing budgets…

3) Someone comes up with (yet) another name for social media.
And we all start using it, and we all start looking down our noses at people who still say “Social Media.”

4) Business models begin to emerge. Look startlingly like old business models.
Sub-prediction: saying “Twitter is all very well, but it has no business model” not only stops sounding clever, but a test case confirms that it’s justifiable cause for a public spanking.

Going Down

4.5) Twitter will move from the headlines to the body copy.

Like Second Life, MySpace, and Facebook, Twitter too must be cast to the side of the road as journalists strive to keep their otherwise trite and workaday stories looking shiny and up to date. In 2010 every journalist — no matter what their beat — will have written every Twitter-related headline that they can stomach, and will be looking for a new, even more exciting hook on which to hang their stories. Stories like “[Stephen] Fry rescinds Twitter quit threat” will no longer lead the international news agenda.