viral&buzz

Last year was riddled with economic hardship, the success and phenomenal growth of Twitter and Facebook, and with the downfall of existing economic models. But right now it is the time to reflect on what opportunities, threats and trends 2010 will bring.

This post is a kind of a detailed summary for the year to come; a compilation based on market changes and insights. This text aims at not just sharing trends, as everybody else does, but at these trends driving forces.

1. Social presence on the web will be more important than ever!

50% of US citizens spend more time online than on any other media. Of this percentage fewer and fewer people engage with brand sites; these people prefer to spend their time in growing numbers of social networks.

Of those social networks, Facebook will undoubtedly continue to enjoy the bigger share of traffic. In December 2009 Facebook hit 350 000 000 members and is expected to reach between 600-700 million by the end of 2010. Facebook is right now a threat to Hotmail and Gmail, even Google – on average, 50% of users spend about 20 minutes per day on Facebook and still most of its content escapes indexing.

In Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore) Facebook has already dethroned Friendster and will surely dethrone Flickr if they improve their photo storage service.

What is more important for Facebook’s current state is that it needs something like a CMS with analytics that advertiser and agencies can use to build, track and manage advanced Facebook pages. While Facebook neglect this, the cottage industry fills this void – just check Sprout, Involver and Wildfire.

Having over 22 million unique visitors per month, Twitter will most definitely continue to develop – in two main directions – differentiating itself from Facebook’s news feed and monetization strategies. A sale to Microsoft or Google may also take place.

And as long as Myspace and Skyblog refuse to reconsider their disastrous interfaces, these particular platforms will never stop losing marketshare to much worthier rivals. In the end, it will be the sites that evolve in response to users’ feedback that win the prominence.

YouTube proves to be a fair alternative to television, enjoying over 100 million members from US alone, and contends with Hulu, PS3, Xbox and iTunes, all of which seek to be THE monetizable platform for video.

The majority of social sites are developing and launching APIs that aim at enabling other websites and applications to connect to them. This results in better integration between various media. Despite efforts to remain transparent, these services are also confronted by the rage of advertisers and agencies when at the end of the year their APIs eventually fail to support their load or worse, change suddenly – resulting in major bugs or even in making applications unavailable, bringing down whatever integrated marketing efforts they were part of.

Considering that, over a long-term period in time, we’ll all be connected and thus “social”, this will result in the phrase “social media” having less and less relevance.

Social Games such as Farmville, Habbo, The Sims or Rolando and FieldRunners are going to explode, revealing new and interesting monetization channels that advertisers can start to comprehend. Adspace inventory is still growing exponentially, but average prices for CPM are not expected to rise, unless of course their impact on sales improves.

An inevitable outcome from the growing number of social networks and their usage is that it will get harder and harder for people to stay connected and active at all of them. This is why syndication and aggregation tools, such as Posterous, will help users to keep their activity on all sites updated in one click. Facing this, users will start using social networks to filter information that is modified and personalized based on their profile pages upon which it will appear, as well as previous activity (behavioral targeting) and centers of interest (sponsored links). Facebook connect is already used by more than 80 000 websites to support essentially that.

Our world is now regulated by the tyranny of ultra-transparence and near-instant recommendations – positive and negative. The web will soon become the primary determining factor in purchasing decisions – online and offline. The role of an expert/influencer will be more important than ever, and consequently, personal reputation.

We will also face the professionalization of the blogosphere, a blogger-driven movement to demonstrate their influence, as well as the quality of their audiences, to both advertiser and agencies. In the market, merely being connected with other blogger is insufficient to be considered influential. Having a lot of followers or traffic is no longer enough.

Further, brands that use blogs for their campaign activities will want to measure the audience that actually sees their efforts; that is to say, they won’t necessarily be interested in measuring a blog’s total audience (good-bye non-converting traffic). To track and measure user sentiment, they will likely use appropriate tools, like Radian6, being aware of the fact that such tools will help them avoid the occasional awkward media catastrophe (consider Honda or Belkin).

Promotional interest in networks is growing phenomenally and the European Legislature as well as the United States’ Federal Trade Commission are keeping a closer eye on brand participation and sponsorship on blogs and social networks. Proper disclosure (such as “This post is sponsored by…”) is now mandatory (and great).

There will most likely appear a relationship between blogosphere/web and traditional media. We will rediscover bloggers, vloggers and podcasters on TV or in the press – not merely as guests, but as editors or active contributors to the storytelling process. Moreover, certain net-based influencers already have such a significant audience that they do not need to play it nice with other media; they have effectively become their own.

Finally, social media will see a huge rise in prominence of content produced by minorities – which can hardly be called minorities anymore.

Statistics show that the influence of women in purchasing decisions is 75%. Women also represent more than 50% of all social media users, meaning that their talent for relationships and communication is a key asset to the 2.0 world. The popularity of bloggers in the beauty and fashion industries hit boiling point in 2009. We have also witnessed the arrival of websites targeted to tough-to-access niche populations (Black Club, AZN Community and the like).

The barrier between our real and virtual lives is now blurring. We surf the internet while watching television, we run searches from our mobile devices, even common objects are getting connected. In 2010 everything will be digital – a single medium, a single machine, proliferated in access. We will also see growing numbers of sales outlets outfitted with interactive screens, innovative interfaces, holograms and augmented reality features.

2. Offline or 1.0 approaches will no longer work in a 2.0 world.

The majority of agencies, consultants and advertisers still have a long way to go in terms of developing complete digital fluency. Most of them content themselves with having learned and using 1.0 techniques such as cross-linking, direct mailing, banner ads, but 2010 will force them to update their know-how in a manner both fundamental and profound – that is, of course, in case they want to stay relevant to consumers. It is impossible to ignore the potential of the web; basic approaches like CPM based banner campaigns have begun manifesting glaring limits.

Further – instead of stacking new techniques onto existing ones, brands will have to completely reconsider their basic in-house marketing strategies. This is due to the fact that broadcast advertising – bombarding users with messages that merely talk at them instead of engaging them – is becoming less and less effective. Conveying a message to the right target market is no longer the matter. The matter is influencing an ecosystem and building solid online reputation. The social, increasingly semantic web is now enabling users to filter information, remix it, create it, relay it or merely respond to it – by comments, status messages, and by other various feedback channels.

There are many brands (and agencies) that make the mistake to believe that they are popular when they did little else, but buy and exploit user attention. Alas, people need to look at the web as an attention-driven economy, where the audience is worth much more to advertisers than the sum of what they have purchased (earned media VS paid media).

Moving forward, it will be imperative to offer client value-added content and services that essentially “grant” us access to their lives. Experience and engagement-based marketing will definitely take precedence over the currently canonical reach-and-diffusion methods. Creating buzz is by a necessity tied to a relationship with the user – either positive of negative, so plan and think strategically about what kind of collaborative structure you will be looking to create between users and your brands. Seth Godin asserts that social media is difficult to comprehend – and thus to penetrate – for brands because they are composed of “processes, not events”. Brands that are offering the best experiences, the best services, or the best content will not only attract attention of users, but utterly transform them into evangelists who are ready and willing to pass their message to their friends. Think about it as you would think about karma – to build credit within a community, and thus solicit the aid of its members, you must make positive contributions.

Here is a question for you – why bond exclusively to interruptive advertising while engaging media like advertainment – adver games, video games, responsive branded content – are so much more effective at delivering a well-articulated message?

Whether you want or don’t want to seize the opportunity of the social web, users are already sharing their real opinions – positive or negative. Refusing to participate in their conversations means that you are granting them a 100% authority to define your position and identity to people. This transition will be very difficult for high-end brands, though some of them are already making efforts into this (right) direction. For example, Uniqlo have long incorporated digital and social characteristics to the core of their marketing efforts.

All of this represents a shift from using long-term campaigns centered to a single “big idea”, to creating and managing long-term customer relationship supplemented by multiple creative ideas, approaches and experiments. And the best part about this is the proven fact that the total budget you or your clients spent exclusively on TV annually often feeds three or four quality digital executions.

Creative work by the online community, brand Facebook pages, brand blogs, branded content, banner ads, affiliate marketing, viral video seeding, social applications, personalized viral videos, widgets, virtual goods, advergames or social referencing, will represent the majority of efforts from which ROI will have to be gauged. Flash-based subsites, display banner ads and faux “social” sites without real engagement components will be relegated to the dustbin.

The primary obstacle to this evolution is advertisers’ resistance to change due to a lack of competence or familiarity with these new tools. Brands as well as agencies will be obliged to make significant investments in development and experimental programs in case they want to remain competitive in their markets tomorrow.

But how do you teach your clients to develop their social relationships when the vast majority of 2.0 websites are blocked within their walls? Such approaches towards protecting employees’ productivity make brands less equipped for changes in sentiment, or updates in trends, than the average online user! In his Post Capitalist Society, Peter Druker argues that one of the most important challenges for organizations in a knowledge-oriented society, will be to build systematic practices to manage auto-transformation. Seventeen years later, the truth in this statement is beginning to manifest itself.

Also, we underestimate the resistance of most offline-oriented senior-level professionals in the advertising industry. It is very difficult to make them understand that their work no longer lies in directing movies or shooting gorgeous photos, but in developing a skillset in interactivity, experience-based multimedia and ergonomic technology. If they continue to refuse their knowledge deficit, these so-called “experts” will find themselves falling behind young upstarts, no matter how many years of experience they have clocked in or how many Lions they have collected.

To prove my opinion – take a look at the majority of agencies that have led digital over the course of the past ten years – there are just few major advertising agencies among them. Sadly, as Publicis demonstrated this year, they content themselves to purchase “pure-player” agencies, ostensibly to maintain contemporary relevance – but continue to prioritize traditional marketing. Few years later, the spirit and uniqueness that made those small agencies worth buying are stamped out. Why? Because traditional agencies simply can not do digital, at least according to a recent study released by Forrester Research: 23% of advertiser surveyed admitted they don’t think traditional agencies are capable of conquering digital; worse still, 46% don’t even consider themselves competent in that area. It is not problem of their mindset; the existing organizational and cost structure of traditional agencies is simply incompatible with the rhythm and responsiveness that the digital requires.

A possible solution for this problem lies in recruiting digital stars, but their limited number and high demand makes them very difficult to attract. In any case, bringing a handful of experts to an organization that does not, at its heart, want to evolve – is totally insufficient. At the recruitment level, many advertisers and agencies will also find themselves mislead and disillusioned by the number of self-proclaimed “2.0 experts”, glorified bloggers whose “influence”, however significant, ultimately does not transform them into marketing experts equipped to work with large accounts.

On the other hand, the offline world remains an inseparable element to the overall marketing picture. Digital agencies will have to adapt beyond a 100% web-based approach. We will even start seeing some digital agencies develop their offline chops more quickly than the traditional agencies manage the inverse. And it is a pity, considering that the latter have had ten years to catch up. Few of the innovative digital agencies worth observing are: R/GA, Barbarian Group, FirstBorn or BigSpaceShip also follows in the steps of the incendiary Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The latter has managed to navigate offline, digital, buzz-generating and social media scenes with great dexterity and a markedly transmedia approach.

Crucially, social media and other digital efforts should not be managed by one specific department; there is no such thing as strictly online or offline consumers. It is more advisable to develop an approach that is both global and agnostic in terms of media (absolutely contrary to the efforts of traditional agencies, whose marketing mix often results in internal political wars between siloed departments for bigger cuts of the budget, instead of researching for the best solution to allocate resources for the client).

It will be very important to focus more energy on incorporating nuanced metrics and overall measurement of ROI. The numerous digital analytics tools available today have created us the habit of stocking up tools without actually using them, or even investing time in learning their capabilities and limitations. There is a very important question that remains unsolved for most of the brands that have invested valuable resources in winning more fans, followers and RSS subscribers – where is the return of investment? – and how do you even measure it?

In the very near future, analytics tools will adapt the Postrank model, measuring both the audience of a website as well as the popularity/propagation capability of social media. Towards that end, bit.ly recently announced a Pro version of its service. Observing the usefulness of the bit.ly model in 140-character world, Google launched its own URL-shortening tool, which will most likely be integrated into Google Analytics and Feedburner. It is only a matter of time before Facebook release their own tool for more sophisticated tracking.

How many brands take into consideration statistics from their own websites (on the occasion they have analytics implemented at all)? Just taking the time to do this would better equip them against many media agencies, which in my experience are among the least professional web “experts”. A short summary of their stock characteristics include inflated claims of expertise, “turnkey” recommendations (this is, proposing options that have worked for previous clients without adapting it to your unique brand environment), loose and shady negotiations, junior staff in constant rotation, and imprecise, misguided advice – all of which culminate in a completely ineffective media strategy for unwitting brands that have often been locked into a contract.

In 2008, print media received 20% of ad dollars for only 8% of time spent; in contrast to that, digital investments charted 8% of ad spent despite garnering 29% of media time. Oddly enough, advertisers continue to pay for display ads positioned in non-visible areas, like the bottom fold of a webpage – added to that, the process of launching a banner campaign is far less efficient than the effort is worth.

3. The transition of offline budgets to digital media will amplify… 2010 opens into a whole new era of transmedia marketing strategies.

According to Forrester, 59% of US advertisers plan to increase their digital budgets at the expense of offline executions. As a result, online marketing spend will hit $55 billion in 2014. In addition to ZenithOptimedia, JPMorgan and others, Forrester also predicts a rise in online marketing spend exceeding 10% for 2010 alone. Foreshadowing the gigantic shift that will move marketing priorities from offline to online, Pepsi preferred not to purchase TV media time at this year’s Super Bowl, opting instead to focus on online investments. In the UK, the internet was the premier medium on which advertisers focused their budgets in 2009 and thus beated TV!

Video ads are also coming into their own. E-marketer says they will enjoy a 40% rise; there are video podcasts that already attract over 240,000 visitors per month. Live video use will also increase and will be supplemented by services like uStream and Vokle. Use of the video format will also be stimulated by the development of 3G for mobile, not to mention proliferation of simple devices for recording and publishing videos – such as Flip Cam and iPhone 3GS.

Buzz-monitoring and e-reputation management will be among the hot topics this year. The number of monitoring and analytics tools dedicated to social media will explode, leaving hundreds of tools to choose from in their wake. To name a few – Radian6, Sysomos, Linkfluence (personally, I am a fan of Radian6). Eventually, however, the market for these tools will consolidate itself; few will be the contenders that will be able to make the necessary financial commitment in indexing, storage, multilingual capabilities and crucially – semantic analysis, in order to stay competitive.

The majority of brands will seek solace in a solution for buzz measurement and ROI and many will be disappointed by what they find. But it is PR agencies – those that have not acclimated to the net and social media – that will actually see their days numbered, especially given the real-time speed of social media.

Among “influential bloggers” we’ll begin to see tools for quantifying their influence and the quality of their audiences. Over the long-term, it’s only a matter of time before Google sets the world yet again by releasing its own solution, most likely free, and conveniently integrated with Google Trends, Google Adplanner and Google Analytics.

It is important to mention that it is not so much monitoring, but brand management that is key – the art of positioning yourself to respond proactively or reactively to either promote or defend your reputation, like Best Buy does on Twitter with its Twelp Force.

Many brands will get their hands bitten for leaving the matters of digital engagement to a trainee, so some will start recruiting true community managers, Heads of Social Media; and over time, begin using social CRM tools like SalesForce’s Chatter. Having experimented a little, in 2010 advertisers may start integrating the web and social media into their efforts in a scalable, strategic way – and with real budgets. We can all agree that the majority of 2.0 technologies are financially cheap, but the costs incurred in terms of human time spent cannot be taken lightly if you want to compete seriously in this arena.

4. 6 million competitors! The power of the consumer and of crowdsourcing will challenge and lead brand innovation.

As technologies continue to democratize, the so called consum’actor will continue to challenge and even compete against brands and enterprises.

It is simple – if a brand refuses to respond to users’ demand, users will band together to find better options, improve existing ones, tear down existing barriers, or use their networks to acquire things for free (P2P downloads for example). Now they also have savory options for producing and selling their own goods, including Etsy, Ponoko, Spoonflower or CafePress.

In R&D, brands that not only open their ecosystem (consider API releases), but also find a way to motivate users to contribute to their platform will benefit from the creativity and inventiveness of an army of volunteers – which can essentially be considered a boundless department of outsourced experiments. Projects like Dell’s Ideastorm or My Starbucks Idea also create veritable “focus groups” for soliciting ideas, critiques and suggestions from clients. This can result in the improvement of a product or creation of many new ones. The network effect results in a strange paradox for players with little-known brands: developers have little interest in working on platforms with too few users, and users have little interest in visiting websites with too few options.

5. 2010: The year of mobile … AND social: geolocalization, applications, social networks, recommendations

After over 10 years of claiming that the “year of mobile” has finally arrived, we can now say with confidence that in 2010 mobile marketing will mature in ways we previously only dreamed of. Forrester claim that this sector will absorb over $390 million; for its part, e-marketer is claiming $593 million. This spend is expected to increase an average of 27% yearly for the next five years – this is an enormous figure. Even more, mobile marketing spend in 2010 is still 24 times lower than expected expenditures in 2014.

Moving forward, the number of users with a mobile phone shall remain greater than those with a TV or even a PC. In 2010, they are estimated to total over a billion at the global level. Some studies even claim that mobile will outweigh the importance of wallets. The growing significance of China, with 500 million internet users, and India, where inhabitants surf the web more often via GSM than via a PC will also boost mobile development.

And it is not just iPhone’s ergonomics or functionalities that created this seismic boom in the mobile world, but the ecosystem surrounding its applications – of which 20 billion will have been download by 2014, versus 2.3 billion in 2009. Revenue-sharing certainly helps lubricating the creativity of developers. iPhone users alone represent 33% of web traffic on mobile, even though they represent a mere 10% of the smartphone market. And while Nokia have produced 10 times more GSM-wise than Apple have, by 2009’s third trimester the latter still enjoyed superior profits – $1.6 billion versus $1.1 billion for Nokia. Apple’s economic model has thus proved itself more valuable and it has also challenged Nokia in the smartphone sector, where the margin is the largest. In terms of leveraging the network effect to rival Apple’s formidable number of mobile apps, one can only wish good luck to Blackberry and Nokia (with its Ovi service). The only serious contender in this regard has been Google, whose Android platform holds promise in case the varied – often incompatible – version of OS doesn’t hinder its development. Even social networks like Twitter and Facebook offer mobile apps, which enjoy considerable success: Facebook’s Lite version for mobile now hosts 65 million members – already 18% of users regularly update their profiles from their mobile devices.

The acquisition of ad network AdMob for $750 million, and the absorption of the VOIP company Gizmo5 by Google proves that major players have developed a decidedly ambitious appetite for mobile marketing. In the US, Volkswagen created a sophisticated iPhone app to promote the launch of its new GTI model.

But it is not just big brands that can go into this direction. Creating iPhone apps democratizes access points and thus access to information, even for lesser-known brands, because time will prove it a cheaper alternative to developing a website. Adobe have developed a Flash CS5 app exclusively for iPhone. The challenge for Apple will be to provide an efficient way to help users identify and locate the best apps for them in their marketplace, which is now growing at an almost exponential rate.

Innovation will primarily derive from social and geolocalized mobile components, resulting in the creation of promising augmented reality applications. To see this in action, check out these applications and websites – Yelp, Gowalla, Loopt, Foursquare, Brightkite, Yowza, Shooger, Twitter 360, Google Latitude. In such cases, geolocalization weaves a truly “new layer of the web”, as Pete Cashmore (head of Mashable) suggests.

Moreover, imagine a combination of Yelp addresses and reviews, not just of internet users, but of your own network of friends, available on your phone and localized specifically to where you are. Your social network effectively goes mobile, connecting your real life to your virtual one.

Augmented reality will transcend its position as a novelty hype for gadget lovers, making it possible to transform the screen of your mobile device by adding a virtual layer to whatever you are looking at in real-time (check out Layar). Like in the movie Terminator, imagine that you are able to hold your camera up to a facade of a building and then immediately extract useful information right on your screen – apartments for rent, hot offers in stores, etc… An example of exactly this already exists in Japan and it is called the N Building. Removing technical obstacles will also promote development, particularly in marketing and sales.

I am convinced that in the future applications will get even crazier, like the SixthSense technology presented by Pranav Mistry at TED, where mobile manifests in the form of a personal interactive projection. Imagine a kind of portable screen like in Minority Report evolving with every new interaction and context. Microsoft are actually working on that, you can check a video of their vision in an older post (Microsoft envisions the future).

We hardly have to wait anymore for mobile payments to come real – iTunes, Paypal and Square, the latest startup by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, are already working on closing that loop. ABI Research valued m-commerce at $750 million in 2009; E-marketer predict it will surpass a billion dollars easily in 2010. Amazon recently purchased Snaptell and operators and platform developers are finally adopting a standard for QR codes, of which, in Japan, Skuyou.com have already made 120 million.

Conclusion:

2010 brings with it a true convergence between the real and the virtual – something that will force advertisers and agencies to reconsider their marketing, break down silos and integrate real-time social media into both offline and online efforts. At this term, evolution is urgent for those that do not wish to fall behind their own consum’actors, particularly because technology is changing so swiftly. And in addition to everything else keep an eye on the inevitable arrival of nanotechnologies. The way technology is today ultimately absorbed into the mainstream will also drastically change demand and thus business models. Just consider how film, music, telephone and publications industries have changed over the past few years. We have passed from static broadcast communication (sending a message to a target demographic via a given medium) to an attention and reputation economy (nowadays consumers decide if they want to listen to your message, repeat it, modify it or respond to it).

Brands that are most receptive to evolution and reinvention will come out on top; those acclimated to the comfort of their acquired dying habits will hit a wall and be submerged. In this revolution, creativity and innovation, coupled with the capacity to measure and extract sense from the vast amounts of data now available to you, will be key.

To wrap it up and get inspired, you can watch this video featuring Kevin Kelly, who, after studying the last 5000 days of the web and search, imagines the 5000 days to come. I find it fascinating.