Digital Next Year
So…a friend of mine recently asked me what are the next up and coming trends in digital. i.e. what do marketers need to pay attention to. Here’s what I told him:
2010 will be the year of the extended experience
-We’ll see a rise of MID’s(Mobile Internet Devices) Right now if we look at China for example… 23% of the people experience the internet from a device that’s not a browser. We’re a bit behind in the States - but it will happen. Marketers in the digital space need to look hard at their target personas and understand where and how they’re involved in the space. The browser might not be the right place for a digital investment.
-MMOs will emerge a marketing tool. Foursquare is only the start of this. Combine the things we do in the Social Media space already with gaming. Earn points and rank for the things we do…The possibilities are endless. I elaborate more in another post.
-AR(Augmented Reality) So there are a lot of people already doing things in this space….but it’s a bit buggy and there’s some hardware restrictions - especially on the iphone. Look for niche campaigns that work with your cpu browser and new experiments in mobile.
-Social media standards are here. So we’ve messed around in this space long enough to see that some things work and some things don’t. That’s not to say those things that work will change…tomorrow…but we might actually see some real Social Media experts and more successful business strategies in the space. As long as marketers understand how to use marketing as a service.
-Live Collaboration. I’ve been saying this for three years and I’ll say it again Live collaboration is something to look out for. Google wave looks like it might be a big pillar in this…but from a marketing perspective - think of flash mobs online. Annoying….but it might work.
(That’s not everything - just some of the cool stuff)
Save the newspapers
Newspapers are dying and not making any money. The model needs to be changed. Here is one way. Very high-level. Develop and article exchange and distribution model for hyperlocal and national communications that pulls in the combined copy from local writers, national writers, blogs, microblogs and other disparate news sources together in one web portal. Enable 3 main methods of distribution – mobile, web and Print-on-Demand. Each method would have a unique revenue model. Mobile and Internet users will have access to all national news for free, but hyperlocal news would be paid for…There would be continued advertised support, and progressive integration of news into everyday life through emerging technologies(i.e. person walks by a location and news is displayed from the past 3 days) Print-on-demand licenses would sold to resellers. Local resellers would customize the newspaper content for their local area, print (x) number of copies then mark them up and sell them earn revenue. Resellers might also sell app licenses for targeted news items as well. A dual exchange of classifieds / a bazaar for selling items might also be created. Not all that different from craigslist…but resellers would be required to include (x) number of pages of classified. There may be some revenue sharing opportunities there as well…
Here’s a quick illustration that puts forward a very rudimentary social media architecture that contains 4 big contributors to a plan or strategy - really the areas that you might want to manage. They are as follows:
Input: This is the message/messaging/persona delivered through/as a ‘persona’ somewhere online. This might be delivered directly to one of the aggregators or to an individual blog, hub or something else and pushed through.
Feeder: Feeding and seeding the networks seems to have become the acceptable terms used so basically at some point in social media marketing there will be feeding that takes place whether it’s through syndication, direct submission(i.e. twitter, etc.)
Connector: Maintaining regular communications is a must so connetions through more tradiotional means such as chat,direct email and email neweletters or more progressive means such as mobile, webinars, ustream, following, etc.
Receiver: Listening is arguably the most important part of any conversation. There’s plenty of tools out there that allow for feedback such as commets, ratings, survey, tweets, etc.
This is definietly not new and not a one size fits all solution. There’s going to be multiple areas kept in and left out. But this is where my head starts out on projects that have a social element prior to digging into detail on the conversation…which is the result of what happens when you start moving forward with these elements all together.
