The dawn of a new year is an opportunity to look ahead and
guess what will happen next. Some of these predictions might seem obvious, some
reflect by own perspective or pet peeves and others just might catch you by
surprise. Thanks to Sherie
Anderson who helped with research and front line analysis.
These 16 predictions and prognostications are offered with
wishes for happiness and health in 2010.
The Recession Won’t Go Away. 2010 will be as
challenging financially as 2009.
Credit and employment will be tight. Every expense will be scrutinized
and delayed if possible. Temps will trump full time players and everyone in
every sector will be looking for a deal. Downward price pressure, enforced by
bean counters eager to save their own jobs, will rule the marketing sector and
probably the entire economy. Emphasis on new customer acquisition will change
slightly to retention because it’s cheaper and has a much greater ROI impact,
though since so few marketers are good at retention, expect more propaganda than
productivity.
Traditional big ad spenders – banks, automotive, retail,
airlines and CPG – will spend cautiously, flap their lips about CRM, experiment
with social media and find a hundred new ways to package and promote discounts
and deals. B2B marketers will hunker down and stick to stuff that works with an
occasional foray into social or mobile media to establish bragging rights
behind a steady beat of plain vanilla efforts on the CRM front.
Facebook Will Flourish or Flounder.
Everything turns on their ability to maintain momentum, avoid more
ham-fisted privacy flaps and show marketers how to engage and interact with
members in ways that don’t feel like advertising. MySpace, with 70 million
users, and Friendster have considerable reach and assets even though they’ve
been eclipsed by Facebook’s fast march and PR blitz. But frankly no one really
knows why Facebook has stormed ahead and in the absence of a sustainable
formula, that growth and popularity could disappear as quickly as it come
about. There are no doubts that Murdock’s minions and many others are gunning
to get back in the game not to mention non-US communities and vertical
communities which have begun to show substantial growth.
Look for a horse race in terms of new applications, new
features or new functions and new ways to integrate or manage Facebook and
other social media accounts into common work and life flows. People want to participate but are
having difficulty managing different accounts or dealing with the time suck
that social media quickly become. A bunch of tools, possibly modeled after TweetDeck, will emerge to organize, manage
and connect different social media applications. Along with the tools, expect
best practices to evolve for linking your profiles and friendships to achieve
specific goals like finding a job, finding a love partner, generating leads or
seeding vertical conversations.
More brands will use social media as standing research
panels by asking questions, soliciting opinions or conducting polls and
surveys. Some gut checks and qualitative research will move online because you
can gather a carefully composed crowd quickly and cheaply and can target
advocates, neutrals and competitive users easily. Expect an explosion in A/B testing
and even product development testing to take place online and on social media
platforms.
Social Monitoring & Reputation Management Will Grow. In the same vein, everyone will license a
data-mining tool like Radian6 and collect
the “sentiment” in social media. Interpreting this data will be tricky because
the software was built on assumptions and filters that may or may not reflect
users reality. But acquiring a tool to mine social media will be the must-have
new toy among marketing and IT types in 2012.
Individuals will soon start agitating for similar tools to
monitor their presence, their reputations and their vulnerabilities online.
Partly privacy or security driven and partly vanity driven, people are beginning
to understand and worry about how they are presented and/or exposed online. The
combination of identity theft and phishing threats plus the need to present an
appropriate image to potential employers and/or partners will create a need to
check what’s online, align what is searchable with who you want to be and fix or delete the stuff you are unhappy
with.
Sort People In.
The explosion of social media
reveals an underlying psychological reality – people want to believe, want to
belong and want to be connected. We are social creatures and we want to believe
that our lives have meaning, that our actions matter and that we are
contributing to something bigger than ourselves. Brands who understand this
articulated need and can respond to it or channel it will attract followers,
fans, advocates and customers. Brands who can speak passionately about things
customers care about can do amazing things.
Marketers Will Refine Applications for Social Media. Fans sign-up to get deals according to the
RazorFish FEED analysis. What isn’t clear is exactly how brands can enter the
conversation and display their wares without offending the sensibility of
“friends” and others seeking just to connect and communicate. People don’t
click on the ads in social networks and they resent brand messages that are
artificially shoehorned into their conversation streams. There have to be ways
to do it beyond offering to turn on new friends to a discount, but few have
been reported.
Beyond collecting friends, the value of conversations for
intelligence gathering, creating content or managing customer service issues is
still in its infancy. 95 out of 100 Twitter members never tweet. Looking at
pictures seems to be the most popular online activity. And we are beginning to
understand dramatic differences in Web and social media usage by gender. Social
media is as much about voyeurism and feeling part of things as much as it is
about actual participation. Marketers will use all these trends as launching
points for campaigns next year.
Brands will experiment across social media platforms. Some
will create major gaffes others will generate viral attention that just might
pay off in terms of awareness, preference or sell through. Now that the social
channel has been firmly established marketers are eager to understand whom it
connects them to and how to use it to achieve business results. The social
network that helps brands figure this out and builds creative guidelines and
media packages that agencies and clients can understand and sell up the food
chain will win massive cash investments.
Apps Will Shake Out.
There are 100,000+ smart phone apps. Most are novelties or crap. Those with
scalability, utility and genuine value will be talked about and heavily
downloaded. The rest will rot. Given the large number of developers and easy
accessibility to APIs, look for a steady stream of ideas that range from even
more varied and refined fart sounds to very useful personal utilities to emerge
as winners.
Brands will create endless numbers of apps seeking either
first mover advantage or virility. Both will be very hard to achieve. Very few
people have sustained needs for single brand or product applications so look
for mash-ups and aggregations to appear to super serve vertical needs. Imagine
a single app with all the known diabetes drugs on it or an app that searches
the net for all the shoes in your size reflecting your style and price
preferences.
Mobile Media Will Putter Along. Strangled by the technology, policies and pricing
of the big telecommunications carriers, mobile media will not break out in
2010. Instead a few more brands will attempt to manage the Rube Goldberg-like
configurations necessary to mount a mobile campaign that connects online and
offline media and/or distributes coupons or discount codes. At this point
mobile media is too much effort for too little pay-off for both marketers and
consumers. Look for lifestyle brands to try the hardest but don’t expect
inter-carrier compatibility, micro-payments, location-based campaigns, trigger
promotions, live event interactions or other phone-based utilities to come into
being at any scale in the next 365 days.
We Will Feel the Need for Speed. The Web has gone mobile and increased smart phone
penetration will create monstrous demand for mobile bandwidth. WiMax and other
bandwidth solutions will soar as we demand more, faster access to sites on the
go. This will also require more memory, more agile devices and will require
marketers to optimize sites for mobile access and usage. I’d invest in
mobile-enabling software because 2010 will see a great shift from static sites
to those configured and designed for mobile use. In a year no one will look at
sites that break up, look bad or load unevenly on iPhones, Blackberrys or
Droids and everyone will expect to view videos, listen to music and quickly
search and download data from everywhere.
Search Will Get More Specific. As people demand specific answers not just websites, search will
become more refined even as it expands to include video, images and social
media postings. Anticipate that vertical search engines will begin to deliver
faster, better more accurate results that begin to challenge Google and siphon
off search dollars in selected industries. Look for advances in data mining and
in the way search engines process huge volumes of information. AI and natural
language advances will begin to make themselves known, though the hype will
continue to outpace the results. Keep your eye on Wolfram Alpha, which is breaking new
ground and lighting a fire under search experts in many ways. Don’t be
surprised if someone emerges out of nowhere with a completely different
approach to generating search results that turns the market on its head.
Analytics and Integration Will be Endlessly Discussed. But no
real progress will be made because both topics are directly related to
organizational design and politics. Both topics are intensely threatening to
the status quo. These topics are perennial strawmen for all manner of gurus,
executives and advertising specialists to debate. In reality there is little
real appetite for attacking either subject among marketers or ad agencies,
though both devote massive amounts of lip service to the cause. 2010 will
produce some new products and some new evangelists; another round of sound and
fury signifying nothing.
Email is Old Reliable.
E-mail continues to reign as the most accepted and effective digital marketing
medium. Privacy, opt-in, deliverability, formatting and creative best practices
have bred widespread consumer acceptance accompanied by decent sustained
click-thru rates and purchase ratios. Widely understood and widely used, there
is research indicating that heavy social media users are equally heavy e-mail
users, even though social media has begun to replace e-mail for personal
communications among some (mostly younger) consumer segments. E-mail opt-ins
routinely grow as do the full range of responses and interactions from
consumers. E-mail lists are becoming more available and easier to merge/purge
or match back. Expect the e-mail
barrage to continue with increasingly sophisticated segmentation and
personalization.
Grab Your Video Camera.
Video is the meme of choice online. It seems that everyone has and uses his
video camera to upload all kinds of content online. In 2010, if you can’t be
found on YouTube and its competitors you will be invisible. Look for
considerable competition among sites vying to rank second. Watch vertical video
sites attempt to increase their visibility, if not their utility or viewership.
Video will move between and among channels. A YouTube video can easily appear
on TMZ or Access Hollywood and visa versa. News organizations and reality shows
will mine online video routinely.
Also look for new ways to emerge to tell stories in video.
There appears to be a very broad tolerance for homemade videos and video with
very modest production values. Videos will get shorter and be better tagged.
Many will be clickable and some brands will try to create (or re-create) a
branded online serial aimed at their psycho-demographic target. The Holy Grail
is still the video that achieves altitude and is virally passed to zillions
around the world.
Syndication Trumps Destination. Expect brands to seek out syndication opportunities
to distribute fully produced videos and to peel off segments and share them
with a wide array of sites both to intercept audiences and to improve search
disposition. Content and the distribution of content will act like media luring
in new customers and validating existing clients. Brands will re-purpose,
de-construct and mash-up assets like videos, images, copy blocks, polls,
quizzes, white papers and other key assets and seek out venues to distribute
them elsewhere on the web with link-backs to corporate and branded sites. This
will tactic will simultaneously increase the trolling area for prospects and
customers and positively impact on natural search results.
Get in the Search Game.
Natural search has nothing on Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft for
mystery, suspense, competitiveness and unpredictability. In fact the best
practitioners are the same guys. Search is the most intriguing marketing game
by far where brand strategy meets technical prowess influenced by intuition and
aggression.
The semantic web, policed by Google, is still the Wild West
where fortunes are made and lost in a nanosecond and where skillful
manipulation rules the day. But the business impact of search is not frivolous.
Given the widespread use of search and its relationship to brand awareness,
preference and purchase, mastering the semantic arts, understanding the need
for careful tagging and operationalizing the “taxonomy is destiny” mantra is
critical for every brand.
Brands Demand Orchestration. Going to market is no longer a matter of crafting messages and buying
media. Brands need to craft communications strategies that take into account
the channels, the media and the target mentality then plan, design, parse and
orchestrate the messages over time, geography and channels in the face of
competitive activity and increasing noise-to-signal ratios. We live in an always-on 24/7 mass
media culture where the number and variety of stimuli is too many to count and
where everyone has set their personal filters to filter out the vast majority
of messages, offers and ideas. Technology has enabled both the flow and the
filtration, so marketers have to have a keen sense of the environment and the
audience mindset in order to identify, reach, engage and persuade customers.
This is an act of composition and orchestration that is fundamentally different
than before and which requires a much broader view of audiences, media and
creative assets.
Deeper Data Dives.
It is finally occurring to brand marketers that a broad range of things can be
predicted with accuracy on the basis of data and behavioral modeling. The
recession has forced consideration of these “black arts” heretofore practiced
only by direct marketers and data wonks that have developed a science around
CRM and behavioral targeting. The types, quality and richness of consumer and
B2B data collected legally and in compliance with privacy laws is staggering.
Used for good by skilled data guys, these terabytes can dramatically improve
customer engagement and satisfaction. Look for more brands to try deeper data
dives in 2012 yielding better business results, though the number of true
believers will remain the same.
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