It is the time again when you can read “smart” predictions for the coming year. One risks being wrong more than correct but “no risk, no fun”, I guess, so I am putting my thoughts into it too; so here are three quite safe bets:

• Apple enters the e-book reader game and might well kick e-books into the mainstream. I hinted about this quite some time ago but with the Apple tablet rumors getting quite concrete one target market seems the e-book and with that a new category, the multimedia e-book. To use e-ink readers with b&w only always seemed dull.

• social communications for the enterprise is a hot new subject. What Apple is for consumers, salesforce.com is (a little bit) for enterprise. Constantly trying to innovate, in salesforce.com’s case more re-coining the same buzzwords (SaaS, cloud). But with its latest announcement, to offer social collaboration capability starting some time in Q1 2010, this will get high visibility, and enterprise CIOs, productivity experts, online channel experts as well as marketing&communication departments will have something to talk about and do.

• the mobile Web will grow even more. With Apple’s iPhone the whole mobile phone industry dramatically changed. Suddenly the mobile Web was not only talked about but became a reality. Fast mobile data networks are becoming a necessity to be able to serve these power users. Blackberry e-mail push like services have worked with simple GPRS quite well for a long time already but mobile Web surfing not, and that requires fast mobile network infrastructure. Interesting to see that also here Apple is shaking up an industry that they have not served at all in the past. Nokia and all other mobile vendors will come under tremendous pressure and with Google entering with its own phone (selling it directly and via a few operators) this will only intensify. But most importantly with the growth of the mobile Web (eBay had record Christmas sales for mobiles) enterprises need to make their websites mobile ready and keep them up to date with new mobile browser developments as well.

Ooops - you might wonder how this headline goes together with our very own services for social communities? In fact it goes very well, as the point I want to make here more or less concurs with this article in Business Week back in May 2009. Gene Marks, who is a bestselling author for small business topics, makes this point there:

We’ve been misled as to the benefits of social networking sites. Many of us are finding that these tools do not live up to the hype, especially for small business. Once we start digging deeper, we’re finding a lot of challenges. Are you thinking of using Facebook, Twitter, or the like in your business? Before you go any further, consider the following myths:…

Most of the marketing departments who start using social media marketing think that they need to get onto Facebook and Twitter first. Actually, there is a much better way, which also makes use of the social community advantages for your market ecosystem: private social communities. Of course many might also mistake social media marketing with Facebook, StudiVZ or Twitter only and see - rightly - no point for their target audiences engaging. Marks also makes this point here (which I also agree with except that I don’t like the examples he has chosen):

Where, then, should a small business owner go online? Often the best social networking sites are specific to business owners. For example, Intuit’s (INTU) social media people are on their own small business community. Another good one is Bank of America’s (BAC) small business community.

The reason I think these are not such good examples is that they start out with the idea to create “small business communities” when in fact there is no such thing as people looking for small business advice but they are looking for accounting, investment, IT, etc. advice. Both do that in effect, of course, but should change their headings I think.

To make the same point less controversial sounding he could have asked “when to use public social media services and when to build your own?”.