Some Pundits Social Media Predictions for 2010

I am the principal and owner of buhlerworks a consulting service providing vision, strategy & innovation solutions for travel & tourism web marketing, with a focus on destination marketing organizations (DMO) at the national, regional and local level. In addition, I work as Senior Destination Marketing Analyst for PhoCusWright an independent travel, tourism and hospitality research firm specializing in consumer, business and competitive intelligence and producer of high-profile executive conferences. For more on my background, visit the about page on my blog. I am also a Partner and Executive Vice President of Level 9 a web development company providing innovative software solutions to the financial services industry and with past experience in building websites in travel and tourism. My main interest and what I blog about is Marketing on the Smart Web, the next phase also called the semantic web. This will have an even greater impact on consumers and their product research and buying behavior across all industries than we have seen so far. Social media, networking and user generated content (UGC) are only the first manifestations of what is today called web 2.0 but will rapidly further evolve as new technology is introduced at ever increasing speed. Marketers are only now starting to face up to these challenges of radical transparency and customer control. My blog serves as a catalyst to raise awareness for these key issues that marketers need to address if they want to be successful tomorrow.