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It’s that time of year again, when the future-gazing bandwagon kicks into full swing bringing a mass of end-of-year roundups and predictions for year ahead.

We’ve ploughed our way through them, weeding out the far-fetched and over-hyped and bundling up the finest to bring you a rundown on what you can expect to happen across digital in 2010.

Simply put, we’ve searched the best of the web so you don’t have to.

10 web trends to watch in 2010

Pete Cashmore, CEO and founder of leading Social Media Blog Mashable shares his thoughts on clear trends in web innovation for the year ahead.

Social Media Top 10 Predictions for 2010

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” says Marketing Magazine of Social Media in 2010, “Partially fueled by mobile internet usage and partially by new tools such as Google Wave, the surge in social media user numbers we have seen recently will go nuclear.”

Tools of the trade: new year devices

The Guardian flags up their top 2 tech trends to keep tabs on this year. Social TV is marked as their one to watch and we’d have to agree. Always ahead of the trends, click here to see how we championed this technology earlier in 2009 for the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing show and made TV more interactive.

Mobile 2010

NMA reports on what’s in store for Mobile this yeah and well,  let’s face it…no  self respecting 2010 trends list would be complete without a nod to the proverbial “Year of the Mobile.”

Enterprise Trends to watch in 2010

Mash-ups, the Mobile Enterprise and more…brought to you by the good people at ReadWrite Enterprise.

Predictions 2010: The Future of Twitter Google and everything else

“Smoke blowing but they’re blowing such specific smoke.” Based on conversations from TechFlash this Wired Blog entry certainly makes for interesting reading.

This visual representation of social media by Kyle Studstill sums it up pretty well

Social Media Explained

In the red corner, the latest X-factor cyborg flashes a Colgate smile as he churns through an achy Breaky Brat’s tired ballad. In the blue corner is a soap avoiding anarchist and a preachy song largely notable for its profane repeated catch phrase in a temper tantrum climax. Old Smelly from LA won.

The victory was celebrated and decried. A triumph of popular groundswell movements over the soul less corporate machine. A cynical denial of a poor Geordie teenager’s reward for rehashing last years song in a pretty wrapper. As Jimmi Carr says, you can’t polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter. People are attracted to familiar pretty baubles and well crafted spin. Find the right dog and sheep can be herded in surprising directions.

What this event illustrates is not how popular the X-factor is, or even how many people hate Simon Cowell. What is interesting is that it demonstrates how much untapped potential there is in the music market. The vast majority of the people who downloaded Killing In The Name are not hard core fans but merely disillusioned by their exclusion from a contrived process that often rewards mediocrity and paints the airwaves in coats of beige. He who controls the airwaves controls the purse strings, or at least used to. The ability to control the channels is diminishing fast.

Analogue product has become intangibly digital. Controlled distribution became peer to peer sharing. The rich media promotion machine with its expensive barriers to entry, high production values and smug presenters; is increasingly being undermined by web cams, compressed content and word of mouth communication through social networks. The barking music industry watchdogs, chained to their infrastructure kennels by increasingly inefficient chains of production and distribution; are being overwhelmed by a flood of nimble cats. As everyone who has attempted knows, it is very difficult to herd cats. RATM manged to do it but unifying events such as this are difficult to engineer without appearing contrived.

So what does this mean for web marketing in 2010? There will be a mad rush into social media. Someone will try and engineer a similar download stunt. It will fail miserably. Smart music marketers will target offers into social media via pay per click ads targeting profile preferences, or the friends of those users (hence Facebook’s recent “Privacy” changes). Exclusive content will increasingly be delivered into social media rather than the current practice of rehashing archive material. Social media will become an active part of “live” presentations through traditional media, and there will be more paid download opportunities than you can poke a stick at.

Social media is a tsunami but just having a board is not enough if you don’t know how to surf. The X Factor has a Facebook group with nearly a million fans, a dedicated YouTube channel with over 230 million views and enough tweets to bury the London Eye in pigeon poo; but, they still got their butt kicked by a couple of amateurs. The lesson is it is one thing to have a fast car but another entirely to drive it around the track. Social media optimisation and targeting will be the big discussion point and service offering next year… and yes we can provide it. Thanks for asking.

So Rage against the Machine have done it. A track originally released by the band in 1992 (original chart position No.25) pips poor old Joe to the much coveted number spot for Xmas 2009.

But let’s be honest, how many of us had heard the Rage Against the Machine track before? How many of us know what the band look like? Where they’re from and what their favourite colours are? Not many (Not that we care).

Now Joe McEldrey…..

The song -  “The Climb”.

What’s he look like? A cheeky Geordie chappy with a Hollywood smile.

Where’s he from? South Shields.

Favourite colour? Anything that Cheryl likes.

So how do a band that relatively few people have heard of make it to Xmas number 1 toppling the behemoth that is X Factor with it’s massive television audience, huge publicity machine and endless marketing efforts?

Simple – Facebook.

Let’s be honest, it wasn’t the great song or the love of the band that got RATM to number 1, it was Facebook. To be more specific, it was a brilliantly orchestrated social media campaign by Jon and Tracy Morter, a couple fed up with the domination of the Xmas number 1 spot by X-Factor winners.

Their campaign highlights the phenomenal reach and influence social media channels can have. Zach le Rocha (RATM lead singer of course – c’mon guys) summed it up perfectly, “It was incredible organic grassroots campaign”. Indeed it was. A campaign started by a couple wanting a change, rapidly joined by 486,781 fans and quickly becoming the hottest topic on Facebook culminates in delivering the UK an alternative Xmas number 1 and delivring a crushiong blow to the slick marketing and publicity machine that is X-Factor.

So the platform that brought the Whispa back to our shelves, returned Monster Munch to the cupboards of children of the 80’s now has an ever greater feat to its name. A new Xmas number one.

At the risk of repeating a previous post. Social Media – Powerful stuff.

We’d like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and what better way to do that than to serve up a little slice of Christmas merriment- right to your desktop.

Thanks to Augmented Reality (and those clever bods in tech) our modern day take on a traditional pop-up Christmas card let’s you watch and interact as the festive scene unfolds before you. And since we can’t always rely on the good old British weather to give us a white Christmas, we’ve even brought you snow.

If you want to play along, all you need to do is follow these simple steps:

1. Visit www.pancentric.com/xmas
2. Print the downloadable AR patch (you’ll need it for step 4)
3. Plug in your web cam
4. Point the Christmas Tree shape on the AR patch (printed at step 2) at the web cam.

But I don’t have a web cam I hear you cry. Well fear not my Christmas comrades, just click here to watch the demo and see what you’re missing.

And that’s all folks. Just grab a mince pie, sit back, put your feet up and watch the Christmas scene unfold before you…Enjoy!

Merry Christmas from all the team here at Pancentric Digital.

Q: What happens when someone on Twitter with more than a million followers recommends your website?

A: Your website traffic goes through the roof

But you only know this to be true if you track your social media mentions properly…

Burger King recently launched Singing in the Shower, the digital extension to their breakfast re-launch campaign (which just so happens to have been built by Pancentric Digital).  If you’ve not seen it yet, you’re missing a treat take a peek.

The site, featuring a bikini clad shower girl “shaking her bits to the hits” was recently spotted by celebrity blogger Perez Hilton who decided to “tweet” about the site.

@perezhilton

What happened next? Perez’s loyal followers duly flocked to the site, increasing traffic by 3000%, voucher downloads by even more and it helped create a great online buzz about the site with hundreds of re-tweets and blog posts.  All this within 24 hours of dear Perez’s post.

So the question is, are you tracking your websites & brand across social media platforms the way you could be?

Perhaps somebody is talking about your brand right now, sending waves of traffic to your website or creating a powerful online buzz about your latest initiative but you just don’t know it.

There are a number of great tracking tools for Twitter & other social media platforms, Viralheat, Twitterfall, and your trusty Tweetdeck to name but a few. Setting these up and tracking your brands mentions across social platforms is as important as your web analytics and your email tracking.

Don’t miss out on your brands social media exposure, as Perez has proved, social media can be powerful stuff.

The lovely yourstables.co.uk website we designed & built for Petplan Equine is up for an award. After bagging a VMA award and an Allianz i2 award for the most innovative campaign earlier this year we’re happy to say the site has now been shortlisted for a CIM Marketing Excellence Award.

It’s a cracking website (even if I do say so myself) that takes users on an impressive 3D tour of a virtual working stables yard. Not just a pretty face, interactive how-to videos, anatomical guides and heaps of info and advice, make it a one-stop-shop for everything horse owners, riders and enthusiasts could ever wish to know about horse care.

We’re, of course, hoping the site will triumph when winners are announced in the New Year but in the meantime we’re giving the fab team who worked on it the back-patting they deserve.

It is all pretty zen really. Forget your profound metaphors of trees falling in the forest and the sound of single hands clapping. If you are on the web and can’t be found then are you really there at all?

Sure your website may well be the design statement of your generation. The flash interface worthy of a Pixar showreel. Your mission statement inspirational and your prices unsurpassed. But, and it is a big but, who the hell is going to know if you are hidden away in some dark corner of the dubya dubya dubya? Your mum was right. If you’re not prepared to blow your own trumpet then no one else will. Hide your site and unless you have very deep pockets to plug your URL to the world it will never deliver any meaningful return on investment.

Unfortunately many bean counters take this as a failure of the medium rather than of its application. Better to throw money up against familiar walls than think through the issues. Web marketing is still just basic marketing.

The place of importance is not a post code but rather a placing on the search results screen of a Google or Yahoo. For many it is indeed page one or oblivion. It is important to remember that these things rarely happen by accident.

Let’s face it the vast majority of bricks and mortar companies are not going to be turned on their head by e-commerce. For every Virgin Atlantic there are a hundred widget manufacturers. It is not just about getting seen. It is about being found by the right people. Delivering motivated window shoppers to be exposed to your sales pitch and convinced to pick up the phone, walk in the door or send in an email enquiry.

Search engines are the key. What key terms are your potential customers searching for and how well does your site attract them? It is important to remember that for most companies the product of their web site is not the inventory in their warehouses. It is the information about that inventory and the provision of a convenient means of accessing it. Amazon is an online giant not because its books are bound better than anyone else’s or the stories contained within are better than the same title from the discount bookseller down the road. It is successful because it delivers its information product so well. If you doubt the importance of search engines in this process try typing a book title into Google and viewing the results. Smart marketers refine and update their optimization strategies for new products, brands and opportunities.