14 ExaTrends of the Decade

15 Social Media Marketing Trends to watch out for in Australian Marketing in 2012

2012 Edition: 15 Business & Marketing Trends That Matter

Top Ten Marketing Trends for 2012 | Business 2 Community

Top Ten Marketing Trends for 2012 | Business 2 Community.

I recently gave a presentation to an MBA class at the Simon School of the University of Rochester.  I told the students that this was the most exciting time in my lifetime as a marketer.  And I wasn’t just blowing hot air — I really believe it.  If you look at my top marketing trends for 2011, several have changed significantly and this is exactly why marketing is so much fun; there’s a lot happening and it’s keeping us on our toes.

So here’s what I see in store for 2012:

1. The customer is still king. This one is left off many of the lists that I’ve seen, but, as good marketers, we should remember the customer is behind all of these trends.  We have to get rid of our “campaign mentality” and learn to think about engaging customers with meaningful dialogue and relevant, timely information.
2. Big data is getting bigger. I said last year that the line between technology companies (a.k.a “Big Data”) and marketers is blurring.  We have all heard that the amount of digital data is doubling every two years.  What is important is looking at these customer interactions over time.  But it doesn’t have to be just big technology companies that can harness the data and use it for marketing.  New technologies and cloud computing have opened up all sorts of possibilities for smaller marketers as well.
3. SoLoMo – a new and powerful combination. You might think I’m being overly inventive by getting social, local and mobile combined in one trend. Google’s Matt Cutts coined this term but it’s probably better explained by a recent example on Black Friday of this year.  The New York Times reported that advertisers lured customers away and stole competitor sales while they were waiting on line to make a purchase – an awesome combination of social, local and mobile all being used together.
4. Cloud computing helps marketers too. I recently wrote a blog post describing this trend in more detail. Cloud computing helps marketers by giving us more accessibility to new technologies, reducing costs of marketing infrastructure (like servers and storage), easier scalability and low barriers to entry, which enables a more uniform playing field.
5. Show me the money. Dave Frankland from Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) recently called the tight budgets we’re seeing “post-recession austerity.”  I look for this trend to continue in 2012 as marketers face tight budgets and increased demand to show ROI.  That’s especially true with emerging media like social, which has matured and now needs to be evaluated for return on investment just like other channels.
6. Email’s death is greatly exaggerated. Spam filters and the threat of an opt-out registry haven’t dampened the growth of email.  In a recent interactive marketing forecast, Forrester predicted that email spending will continue to grow by 10% during the next several years, but marketers will focus the campaigns more using analytics.  Our B2B clients echo this forecast as we continue to see more dollars earmarked for email and lead generating programs.
7. The world has gone app crazy. The proliferation of smart phones and tablets has made us (and me) go app crazy.  And it’s not just applications like Facebook, Twitter andAngry Birds; people are using them for business applications.  For example, I used the app Evernote to store clipped data and emails in order to write this blog post.  George Colony, the CEO of Forrester, recently proclaimed that the internet was dead and that applications are taking over.
8. Attribution is the holy grail of marketing. Last year I took a bit of a leap by including touchpoint attribution as one of my top trends.  When I explain to marketers that attributing success to the right channel or channels is key to effective use of marketing dollars (especially with more and more multichannel campaigns), their eyes light up and the quest for more information on attribution begins.  In a recent study by Unica, marketers said their top two priorities are “turning data into actions” and “attributing success to marketing.”
9. Content marketing takes off. We’ve known than relevant content has always been important to drive web traffic, but blogs, case studies and white papers are now being considered an important part of the marketing mix.  As social media matures, marketers will need to provide visitors to Facebook or Twitter with meaningful content to get fans to return.
10. Right touching – right time multichannel marketing. This is a bit complicated to explain in a cursory fashion, but conversations and customer interactions that are taking place in social media are being harvested by social listening platforms.  These dialogues are being turned into campaigns that drive the right offer to the right buyer at the right time.  Sounds simple, huh?

So there you have it: my take on 2012.  While these trends may or may not be around next year, I can assure you that the changes we’ll see in 2012 will make our lives as marketers very exciting.

Resources:

Research for this article was gathered from Abnormal Marketing, Seattle pi, Business 2 Community andCMO.com.

10 Event Trends for 2012

How Will Digital Change Small Business in 2012?

How Will Digital Change Small Business in 2012?.

Over the course of 2011, we witnessed social media and location-based services really take off for small businesses — the mom and pop shops of the world continued to getmore digital and more mobile.

As this year wraps up, we look back at the technological advancements that small businesses have benefited from and predict how those technologies will affect entrepreneurs in 2012.

We spoke with a number of small businesses to get their thoughts on how the market will continue to adapt to changing technologies as we move into the new year.

Based on those discussions, here are our seven small business predictions for 2012. Read on and let us know what you’d add to the list in the comments below.

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1. Businesses Mine Big Data

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Many of the small business owners we spoke with pinpointed 2012 as the year of big data. “Companies are realizing that they have a lot of information on their hands and will need tools to mine it, make sense of it and monetize it,” says We Are Cloud CEO Rachel Delacour.

“What will really matter for SMBs in 2012 is the fact they can, for the first time, mine their own business like the big guys, and do so quickly and cheaply,” Delacour syas. “SMBs can use powerful, high-end tools delivered via their desktop browser or onto their tablet for just a few dollars per month to see what’s happening with their HR, their sales, their social media engagement. Those SaaS tools give a one-man shop or a 50-person outfit almost instantly the same firepower as a whole department with its own IT staff inside a multinational.”

Jeff Judge, CEO of Signal, agrees. “According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created daily, and 90% of the data in the world today was created within the past two years. 2012 is the year when small businesses start to bring together data from their website, customer purchase behavior, digital marketing campaigns and social media activity around their brand to drastically impact the quality of their digital marketing efforts.”

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2. Websites Optimize for Tablet Commerce

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Forrester Research predicts mobile commerce will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 39% through 2016, and Infinite Research forecasts that tablet adoption will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 56% per year through 2015.

Alex Schmelkin, co-founder and president of Alexander Interactive, believes that 2012 will bring an explosion of tablet commerce. “Widespread adoption of Apple’s iPad has made it imperative for retailers to optimize their websites for tablet usage,” he says. “While companies will continue to develop native apps for the device, web browsing is the number one activity, and most t–commerce will continue to occur in the browser. Small businesses should review their sites to optimize for touch and fix any usability issues.”

Lisa A. Shorr, vice president of marketing at PC Troubleshooters, would go as far as to say that 2012 is the year that tablets take a stand in the small business arena. She explains, “Since its launch in 2010, the tablet has been used not only as a browsing mechanism, but a true mobile business tool as well…Our clients are demanding more mobility and integration of mobile devices for document sharing, emailing, social media and more.”

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3. Brands Become Publishers

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“Content is King.” That’s an Internet mantra we’ve all heard way too many times, but there’s truth to it — and next year, small businesses will start to see the light.

“2012 will mark a surge in businesses not only being the publishers of their own content, but [being] disseminators as well,” says Affect Strategies‘ president and founder Sandra Fathi. “Whether it’s a company blog or a corporate e-newsletter, small businesses will focus on creating the content and developing their own publishing vehicles to get their messages to market. They will bypass traditional media outlets and go directly to their target audiences by creating branded niche media properties.”

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4. Loyalty Programs Go Digital

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Who doesn’t love free stuff? Small businesses have been accommodating that love for decades — each year, loyalty programs just keep getting better and easier to use.

In 2011, Foursquare and other location-based services were huge inflencers in taking loyalty programs digital.Small business certainly played their part in the game, making check-ins all the more fun for consumers.

Next year, though, we’ll see greater adoption of digital loyalty programs. “Punchcards are a thing of the past,” says Doug Hardman, CEO of SparkBase. “Businesses will start transferring their loyalty reward programs into the digital space. This is a twofold trend to keep up with bigger businesses such as Starbucks and Subway, who have digital reward programs, and also to compete with daily deal sites. Small businesses want to differentiate themselves and offer special deals without having to work with Groupon or LivingSocial. Mobile digital loyalty programs allow them to do this.”

“The shift to mobile shopping is accelerating as nearly half of all shoppers use their mobile phone to scout deals and compare prices,” says Hardman. “Mobile coupon redemption is forecasted to exceed $43 billion globally by 2016, and merchants need a way to connect with shoppers [on their mobile devices].”

CEO Jeff Judge of Signal agrees. He says, “The next wave of loyalty programs for small businesses will leverage customer databases of purchase history, marketing campaign response rates and social media activity like check-ins and brand mentions to customize rewards to an individual. One only needs to look at companies like Bellyflop, Stampt and SpotOn — and Google’s acquisition of Punchd — to see this emerging already.”

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5. Websites Integrate Social Login

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Ian Aronovich, CEO of GovernmentAuctions.org, believes that more small businesses will integrate social login on their websites in 2011. “Social login is where you can use your Facebook, Yahoo and Google IDs [among others] to login to various websites,” he says. “It’s quick and easy to use. Social login is great because people don’t need to create dozens of new usernames and passwords every time they find a site that they want to use.”

Because Facebook is the most popular social network and Internet users’ top choice for social login, small businesses may want to focus initial efforts on the platform. “A study by Social Labs shows that 50% of ecommerce visitors are logged in to Facebook simultaneously,” says marketing manager Alanna Francis ofBlue Fountain Media. “This means that with Facebook Open Graph integration, small businesses can show customers recommendations and Likes from their social circles. Since many retailers have shown that social reinforcement increases sales, small businesses will want to consider this strategy in 2012.”

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6. Businesses Pull Back on Daily Deal Spend

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Daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial brought lots of excitement in 2011. While we saw a lot of small businesses success stories in the group buying space, we also heard of a number of disasters, including the story of a baker who almost went out of business after running a Groupon deal. For small businesses running on low margins, daily deals aren’t worth it.

“The daily deals tallies on customer retention and profitability continue to be ugly for merchants,” says Tarek Pertew, co-founder of Parrut. A recent Rice University study suggests that nearly half of all merchants are making money on deals. And with Groupon’s own data suggesting that only 22% of customers are coming back, we [at Parrut] assume that a significant pullback is due. That said, the daily deal business is evolving, and it’ll certainly be a major outlet for lead gen spend going forward. At the same time, we think small businesses used daily deals as a ‘gateway’ to social marketing, but will now focus on their own content and other technologies which give them more control over sustainable growth and profit.”

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7. Scheduling Continues to Go Cloud

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Jerry Nettuno, founder and CEO of Schedulicity, may be a little biased, but we like where his head’s at. “The appointment book is dead,” he says. “The business sector as a whole has seen a shift to automation. The success of sites like Schedulicity, OpenTable and ZocDoc only reinforce the idea that the traditional pen and paper appointment book may see its demise in 2012. The number of online appointments is growing exponentially, as Schedulicity alone has seen nearly 7 million appointments booked online since mid-2009. Over the next two to five years, the physical appointment book will be gone altogether and replaced with online counterparts.”

Trends in Social Media – 2011 / Razorfish

Blogging Innovation » Five Major Trends to Watch Now

Blogging Innovation » Five Major Trends to Watch Now.

by Ric Merrifield

I spend a lot of time looking at and writing about disruptive business models (many of them are discussed in my most recent book, Surviving a Business Earthquake, and lately I have been talking about a handful that I think are really meaningful that will continue to mature over time and work their way into lots of other industries.

1. Friending

No, it’s not new. At all. But the friend trend that I have noticed is that the practice has jumped the social networking fence and is becoming useful as a function in not-so-social industries. A company that I have blogged about before, doxo, is the one that really opened my eyes to this. What doxo figured out is that it’s OK for us to have to log on to our credit card site and our utility site, and our Fidelity site with our passwords and what not, but it’s better if we can do that from a single place, and effectively “friend” the businesses that we interact with on a regular basis. Call it a handshake or friending or something else, but now that we have gotten so familiar with it through places like Facebook and LinkedIn, we understand the definition of “friending” and “connecting” from these sites, and now these terms and their actions are primed to jump into other places that are not social, but where certain levels of trust need to be established. This is big and the companies like doxo that figure that out, there are some great new businesses to start. And for already established organizations, now’s the time to put on your thinking cap and figure out where friending may play a role for your employees, customers, and partners.

2. Getting nothing, but paying for it

Farmville from Zynga is probably one of the more familiar examples of this, though Icelandic gaming company CCP is another great example. In a gaming environment, if you want your farm to do something more or in Eve online you want your spaceship to be cooler or faster and you don’t want to have to do all of the hard work to make it happen, you can pay for it so that your gaming experience is better. With Eve, you are already paying a monthly fee to play the game, and you can also pay a lot more to personalize it faster. So you are paying for something and you don’t get anything tangible for it. I predict that as people get more familiar with this notion, like friending, we will see this bleed into other industries. To be clear this isn’t like buying a ring-tone that is intellectual property, and I am clear that you can argue that this is just paying more for the entertainment you are already paying for, to be more entertained, my point is simply that as people get familiar with the idea of paying and not really getting anything tangible for it, we will see this proliferate.

3. Getting something, but not paying for it

This is a subject I have blogged about before as well, most notably with alice.com, the online merchant that sells goods at cost with free shipping. They make their money by charging huge rates for ads and coupons because they provide the age, gender, and ZIP code of customers that respond to the ads and coupons in real time. Now I still think that’s a huge idea, but when I found out Coinstar (dump your coins into a big green machine and out pops cash you can spend) was no longer charging a 7% fee for the service they provide, and now the service is free to the customers (you can still pay the 7%, but if you choose to load up all of your cash on a card for a specific merchant, like amazon, then it’s free to the customer, and amazon pays Coinstar a fee). Costco is actually another company that doesn’t make any money selling their products, they make their money from their membership dues. The monster trend I see here is companies figuring out how to not make the customer pay for their costs – so the customer gets a better deal. Back to Zynga, I am not an expert in their games, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them selling bottled water for the farmers and the user getting the choice between Dasani (from Coca-Cola) or Evian and then selling the data of age, gender, and ZIP code back to those companies about who chose which product, for example.

4. David beating Goliath

Historically, a tiny company beating out a monster company has been rare, for really obvious reasons. Amazon took out Barnes & Noble before becoming a monster company in their own right, being way more than just a book store, but that’s not the kind of trend I am talking about. The poster child of this new trend is Rovio, the makers of the crazy-popular game Angry Birds. It has been a top free and paid application in the iPhone store for a very long time. What I love about the story is that it’s still a company with less than 20 employees based over in Europe. So the Rovio’s of the world can stay tiny companies and create markets that we would expect someone like Microsoft or EA Sports or some other massive gaming company to own. Will someone buy Rovio? It kind of doesn’t matter. The point is that with the platforms of smartphones and the internet in general, tiny agile companies can have a very real,very large global footprint and be very successful. I am not saying that Rovio is going to put EA Sports out of business, I am just saying that they are competing in a space that is way bigger than they are, and they are winning big. I think we will see a lot more Rovio’s soon, and that’s the trend.

5. Adding a third party to two party transactions

This borders on sounding like a repeat of #3, or a nuance of it, but I felt it an important enough nuance to give it its own bullet. In most traditional business models, there is the merchant and the customer (and these days at least one middle man). Companies had to charge the customer enough to cover their costs and make as much profit as the laws of supply and demand would permit. The fact that Alice, and Costco, and Coinstar can get their costs covered by someone else, that is massive and I think it’s the biggest trend of all. Yes, it’s great that the consumer wins by getting a better deal (point #3), but taking the basic two party transaction, and adding a third party is a pretty incredible thing to be able to do. Per my Dasani water comment in #3 above, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Zynga get more into this space (if they haven’t already – as I said -I am no Zynga expert).

Conclusion

So those are the really big trends that I have been seeing and talking about lately. I’d love to hear your feedback (and corrections).

L’iPad 2 dans les rayons aux Etats-Unis – lesoir.be

via L’iPad 2 dans les rayons aux Etats-Unis – lesoir.be.

Le nouvel iPad d’Apple est arrivé dans les magasins aux Etats-Unis. Il sera en vente en Europe à partir du 25 mars.

Apple a commencé dans la nuit à prendre des commandes par internet pour l’appareil, dévoilé par le PDG Steve Jobs la semaine dernière, et il sera disponible dans les 236 magasins du fabricant aux Etats-Unis à partir de 22H00 GMT.

L’iPad 2, un tiers plus mince, près de 15% plus léger et plus rapide que le modèle initial lancé en avril dernier, sera en vente dans une vingtaine de pays à partir du 25 mars.

Autre amélioration majeure par rapport à la version précédente: l’ajout d’une caméra arrière et frontale, qui permet de prendre photos et vidéos et aussi de tenir des vidéo-conversations.

Apple a vendu 15 millions d’iPad l’an dernier, générant 10 milliards de dollars de recettes et établissant les tablettes comme une nouvelle catégorie de produits électroniques grand public, là où les modèles existants auparavant n’avaient qu’une audience confidentielle.

Des dizaines de fabricants informatiques ont emboîté le pas à Apple pour lancer leur propre tablette, la plupart s’appuyant sur le système opérationnel Android de Google.

Mais, à l’exception du Galaxy Tab de Samsung, ils n’ont pour l’instant pas remporté un fort succès. Le cabinet d’analyses technologiques Gartner prévoit que 55 millions de tablettes seront vendues dans le monde cette année et son concurrent Forrester estime qu’Apple ne devrait pas être inquiété pour l’instant par les nouveaux venus.

“Nous nous attendons à ce qu’Apple domine au moins 80% du marché américain des tablettes en 2011”, estime Forrester.

L’iPad 2 a reçu des critiques élogieuses des influents chroniqueurs technologiques du Wall Street Journal et du New York Times.

“Bien qu’il représente une évolution plus qu’une révolution comparé au premier modèle”, l’iPad 2 “laisse Apple largement en tête de la course” sur le marché des tablettes, estime Walter Mossberg, du Wall Street Journal.

Le spécialiste critique toutefois la qualité des photos prises et l’impossibilité de visionner les vidéos fonctionnant avec le logiciel Adobe Flash.

Ce dernier point est “une décision délibérée d’Apple et désavantage ses appareils par rapport aux tablettes Android”, ajoute ce spécialiste pour qui l’iPad 2 n’est pas un achat indispensable quand on possède la version précédente.

David Pogue du New York Times a également déploré l’incapacité de lire des vidéos Flash, mais il estime que l’appareil devrait “toujours dominer le marché, car il tient déjà la corde sur les plus importants critères: finesse, poids, intégration, beauté et applications”. Il a notamment qualifié les caméras de “régal”.

L’iPad 2 est vendu au même prix que l’iPad 1, soit de 499 dollars pour une version 16 gigaoctets à 829 dollars pour le modèle le plus haut-de-gamme de 64 gigaoctets.

L’iPad 2 sera disponible le 25 mars en Australie, Autriche, Belgique, Grande-Bretagne, Canada, République tchèque, Danemark, Finlande, France, Allemagne, Grèce, Hongrie, Islande, Irlande, Italie, Japon, Luxembourg, Mexique, Pays-Bas, Nouvelle-Zélande, Norvège, Pologne, Portugal, Espagne, Suède et Suisse.

 

La note de tendances 2011 par vanksen