Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

This is Part 10 of a personal look back at the sites, tools, behaviors, platforms, and technologies that have changed my life in the past 10 years. Please add your own thoughts and memories in the comments. Read Part 1 - 2000, Part 2 - 2001, Part 3 -2002, Part 4 - 2003, Part 5 - 2004, Part 6 - 2005, Part 7 - 2006, Part 8 - 2007, and Part 9 - 2008.

Most brands started taking the ideas that we had to argue for in 2007 and 2008 for granted in 2009. The idea that you need to go to where your consumers are, not just get them to come to you. The idea that you have to participate in the conversations, not sit back as a spectator. The idea that building meaningful relationships with people who care about your brand is the best thing that you can do with this stuff.

As Clay Shirky has said, "this stuff doesn't get socially interesting, until it gets technologically boring." It's not until the technology is so familiar that we take it for granted that we start to actually find some innovative uses for it.

My own online presence and my collecting, sharing, and publishing habits also became more dispersed. I now push found links and content out through 9 active chanels: here, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Reader, Delicious, Buzzfeed, Foursquare, and Slideshare. Back in 2008 I had 4.

I think that there's actually something to this. I think that if you want to be well known on the web, or if you want a lot of people to be exposed to your ideas and thinking, then you will be well served by spreading yourself across many platforms - as long as you can maintain an active and social presence there. And I plan to embrace this approach even more enthusiastically in 2010.

Maybe 2009 didn't turn out to be the long-promised "Year of Mobile", but for me 2009 was definitely the year when I started to finally try out some pretty cool mobile experiences first hand. We saw mobile social location-based platforms in their infancy: Loopt, Gowalla, and Foursquare to name a few. We actually started to take our internet-learned behavior of sharing the places and experiences that are most interesting to us and our friends to the physical world around us. It's a natural evolution of digital living. When we are in constant communication with our entire social network, then we will constantly be making choices about what we want to share, and everything we see, hear, and do is a potential candidate.

I finally got an iPhone in 2009. And along with it a real taste for a future of personal location-aware and motion-sensitive mobile computing. Mark my words: within a few years, our mobile devices will become our primary computing devices (if they aren't already). And if I have one prediction to make about this new part of the digital world, it's that Google will replace Microsoft as the most-used Operating System. But, Google's sneaking in through the back door that is the mobile device. They have very quickly gained market share within the mobile space; as that mobile space becomes the dominant computing space, Google will become the dominant computing system.

The one other thing I spent a lot of time trying to figure out in 2009 is how brands should measure the effectiveness of their investments in the social space. This is a big challenge that we're only beginning to figure out. I'm looking forward to the next year in which brands demand tougher answers. What does a new Facebook fan or Twitter follower actually do for business? How much are they worth?

For the past couple years most brands have been chasing the numbers that are easiest to count: number of fans or followers. In 2010 I think we're going to get better at knowing how to count the numbers that are the most meaningful for helping to achieve core business goals.

But, enough about me : )

Thanks to everyone for sticking with me on this little bit of navel gazing.

Now I'd love to hear your thoughts about the decade gone by, where you think we've arrived, and where we're headed. Please add your thoughts and comments below.