futurechat

Over the course of the last few weeks, there have been many posts that have talked about 2010. Here are some thoughts that I found interesting. If you are aware of more, please do share some links too.

5 Non-Obvious Marketing Trends To Watch – Rohit Bhargava

• The Importance Of When.
• Rebirth Of Usability
• Marketing With Customer Service
• The Rise Of Voluntary Ambassadors
• More Businesses Find Their Personality

How Enterprise Applications Will Change – Esteban Kolsky

• Business Functions – You have to embrace a new model, and you need new business functions for that.
• Communities – You will no longer build communities to control, you will participate in ad-hoc and impromptu communities.
• Experience – Or are you trying to do the “online experience” or the “brick-and-mortar experience”? The disconnect is what’s causing you to fail.
• Convergence – You will need to converge your Enterprise 2.0 (internal) and Social CRM (external) strategies (first), initiatives (second), and implementations (third).

Three Enterprise 2.0 Themes You Should Be Watching – Hutch Carpenter

• Impact of SharePoint 2010
• Enterprise 2.0 Becomes “Like Air”
• Enterprise 2.0 Market Stratifies

10 News Media Content Trends to Watch - Vadim Lavrusik

• Living Stories
• Real-Time News Streams
• Blogozines
• Distributed Social News
• News Goes Mobile
• The Year of Geo-Location
• Story-Streaming
• Social TV Online
• Marketers as Producers
• Social News Gaming

Consumer Trends Influencers

A Resolution to Fix Morale – Kelli Schmith

• Simply pay attention to your people – Give your employees thoughtful attention.

The New Way to Work – Top 5 Trends to Watch – Contagious Ideas

• Organizations will embrace Design Thinking
• Women will play a more important role in re-defining traditional notions of work
• Small business owners will become the new stars of economic growth
• “Happiness” will become a way to measure economic prosperity
• Personal branding will become the buzzword of talented workers around the world

Four Ways Consumer Mobility Will Reshape Digital Advertising – Dave Courtney

• Audiences Will Replace Channels
• Mobile Evolves Beyond Devices
• Contextual Location Emerges
• Engagement as a Metric

Landor’s 2010 Trends Forecast: Market Trends and their impact on Brands

Media Predictions – Pat Kitano

• Community Engagement will become the Driver of Local Media
• Mobile + Local advertising = Penny Saver 2.0
• Mobile + Advertising + Pubsubhubbub = Alert systems
• Advertising as Content
• Everybody becomes a marketer, and some will become sales closers
• Virtual socializing and Webinar ubiquity
• The grass roots Web
• The stream is more important than website
• Curation is the new syndication
• A new era of open social media

5 Social Media Implications for Brands – Sienna Farris

• Social media marketing will finally transition from “nice to have” to “must have”
• Location-based social networking is here to stay  ( Also read The Future of Geo-Tagged Marketing )
• Experimental social media budgets are key
• The division between the virtual world and the physical world will continue to blur
• Crowd sourcing will turn social media into a direct sales channel

The Top Trends That Will Shape Social Entrepreneurship – Nathaniel Whittmore

• Online Action Moves Away From Just Donations
• Coworking and Startup Incubation
• Sector Blending
• Innovation Ecosystems
• Creativity in Seed Stage Funding

The Year Marketing Dies… – The role of the new marketer:

• Won’t be simply to focus on outbound messaging but to consult with sales, customer service, and human resources on how the brand must be communicated in every consumer interaction, every tweet, and every touchpoint,
• Won’t be merely to imagine creative messages but to fashion programs that are seamless with the actual product and service experience,
• Won’t be to plan bursts of communication on a yearlong calendar but to respond to and be part of the ever-changing dialog with consumers,
• Won’t be to count friends, page visits, eyeballs, readers, or viewers but to measure changes in consumer attitude and intent,
• Won’t be merely to talk at consumers but to listen and engage one to one,
• Won’t be to build campaigns but relationships,
• Won’t be to create impressions but experiences, and
• Won’t be buy media but to earn it.

The 10 TENsions That Will Define 2010 – Ross Dawson

• Optimism – Fear
• Institutional work – Independent work
• Hyperconnected – Disconnected
• Openness – Privacy
• Youth – Experience
• Death of Media – Birth of Media
• Immigration – Borders
• Climate Activists – Climate Doubters
• Innovation – Copying
• Me – Everyone

Digital Trends

• Social media fatigue
• Real-time search and social search
• The end of the Intranet … as we know it
• Content leaves home
• Augmented Reality (AR)
• Service on demand
• User-friendly collaboration tools
• The new interface
• iPhone-killers

Some Next Big Things – Faris Yakob

• Gestures – Gestural interfaces are the future of human computer interaction, at least until we find a way to connect something straight into your brain
• Banners – Thinking about banner networks as ways to distribute samples of interesting content to your audience might lead them to earning their own attention
• The socialization of mainstream media – new media do not displace old media. They simply change what it is for.
• Content – To get in on the spread requires content strategy, and the lack of media scarcity online means we need to “think like a dandelion” – produce as much content as possible and see what catches the breeze.
• Hyper-connectivity and transmedia

Penny for Your Thoughts – Don Tapscott

Four Big Ideas Influencing Marketing – John Moore

• Word of Mouth isn’t always Spoken, Sometimes its Visual
• Clear is the New Clever
• Social Media is about Solving more than Selling
• Word of Mouth Marketing Begins First by Listening

Consolidating Strategies – Wim Rampen

• For 2010 I wish all the Customer Centric strategies to consolidate, on a company level

12 Digital Marketing Predictions - Lee Odden

• Hybrid Plans that Combine Subscription Fees with Advertising
• More Transparency on Websites Could Undermine Online Ad Efforts
• Social Plus Search Will Equal Better Results, More Ad Opportunities
• Mobile Commerce’s Time Has Arrived
• Retailers Grapple with Measuring Social Commerce
• Mobile Is Moving Into the Mainstream
• Earned Media Takes Center Stage
• Social Ad Networks Will Expand
• Twitter
• Online News Content
• Digital Video Convergence
• Look to the 55+ Age Demographic for Internet Usage Increases

Technology Forecast & Predictions – Jack Uldrich

Future of Advertising

BtoB Marketers Predictions – Paul Dunay

• Facebook Advertising will take off – Should try it out for recruiting or even brand advertising
• Mobile Marketing – Experiment with Location Based Services especially at live events
• Social will leave Marketing – It starts to transform the rest of your BtoB organization from Product Development and R&D, to Billing and Finance, to HR and Recruiting, to Customer Service and the Contact Center
• Corporate Websites will become less important – More consumption of content off of the corporate website in places like Facebook, YouTube, and relevant Communities and Forums
• Lead Generation tools must combine with Social Media tools
• Listening tools will also get much stronger
• How to handle Advocates will become more important
• MicroVideo shops will start popping up
• Businesses will demand Intelligence not Social Media

Ten Trends

Also explore the Insights and Ingenuity List

Consumer Trend Report from TREND HUNTER

Further Updates : Jan 6, 2010

Top Digital Trends : The drive for content at scale ranks among the developments set to make waves by Brian Morrissey

• Content at Scale
• The End of the Digital Agency
• Social Gaming
• Demand-Side Platforms
• Engagement Pricing
• Augmented Reality Grows Up
• Social Media Morphs into Digital

Top Ten Digital Trends – Simon Mainwaring

• Where You Are Is Who You Are
• THE Customer As Advertiser
• Real-Time Search
• Selling The “Why”, Not The “What”
• Overcoming Overload
• Content Is King
• Augmented Reality
• Measuring Engagement
• Crowdsourcing For Everyone
• Your Brand in Their Hands

Predictions: Conscious Capitalism, Vertical Learning – Raff Viton

• The integration of Conscious Capitalism will spur long-term growth
• Vertical learning will be of increasingly high value

Five Predictions on Collaborative Computing – Rob Howard

• 2010 will be another year of growth for the industry
• Engagement analytics will replace Web analytics
• Platform, not application
• Collaboration will replace social
• Enterprise search technology will grow

Customer Experience Resolutions – Bruce Temkin

• We shall put in place a robust voice of the customer program
• We shall stop playing with social media and put it to good use
• We shall treat customer service as a loyalty-driver, not a cost center
• We shall go beyond just fixing problems and inspire brand promoters
• We shall establish clarity in our brand, internally and externally
• We shall identify a senior executive to lead the transformation effort
• We shall help new customers get value from us faster and easier
• We shall improve the usability of all self-service interactions
• We shall communicate more clearly with customers across all channels
• We shall make our culture more customer-centric

A Look Forward – David Polinchock

• Authenticity continues to be a critical
• As SM grows, people will demand much more from brands
• Brands must learn that they start the conversation, people amplify it
• If you don’t give me information, I’ll go to someone who will
• We need to expand the Experience Continuum
• To expand the Experience Continuum, we need to start creating Oneline experiences
• We’ll start to understand the importance of Location Based Branding
• AR & QR codes will become mainstream
• Physical retail needs to adapt or face the consequences

5 Marketing Principles Brands Should Embrace – Frank Striefler

• Create better realities
• Don’t be design blind
• Be “brand led”
• Think 365 — not 360
• Be interesting

The Words You are Going to Hear a Lot

• Spurned Media
• Mobilenecking
• Jack Ripper
• Wiki Wart
• Oedipost Complex
• Deciprocity
• Faux Post
• Appfusion
• Brand Tease
• Shelf Storm
• Apptosterone
• Buck Sucked
• Trust Lapse
• Runway Rebel
• Blog Dodger
• Tweet-Shifting
• Curbcasting
• Twitstop
• Digital Detox

The Future of Social Media

The Mobile Internet Report – Summary

10 Things – Bring Work to Life – Krishnan Chatterjee

• Impact Not Transaction
• A piece of You. Not You as a piece
• Run the race against yourself
• Knowledge and Skills are irrelevant without Insight
• Earn a Seat at the Table
• Think Outside In
• Leadership is the art of self-redundancy
• You HAVE to push the envelope
• Detail, Detail and Detail
• There is no trust without being yourself

Seth Godin says “Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant…” more...

Michael Erad summarises ” So this is what it’s come to: when an attention gift economy seems more practical and sustainable than an exchange economy for information commodities, which is being rotted by the gift’s ugly negation: the free.” more...

Meanwhile Jay Galbraith discusses the CMO’s Role and summarises “These roles of thought leader, transformation leader and matrix manager are probably the biggest challenges for the contemporary CMO. Like many leadership roles today, there is no one individual who can play all of them simultaneously. Instead, the CMO will need to lead a team to execute customer centricity.” more...

George Colony in his blog quotes ” As Peter Drucker, Lafley’s guru, stated: “The CEO is the link between the Inside that is ‘the organization’ and the Outside of society, economy, technology, markets, and customers. Inside there are only costs. Results are only on the outside.” more...

So the question one asks, Is there something that the CEO needs to know or do, given these thought streams ?

Agreed!

“This will require marketers who can truly use both sides of their brain–on the one hand fluent in the language of business, and deeply connected to the decision-making frameworks of that business. On the other hand, fluent in the language of customer, and driving the kinds of innovations that will lead this customer.” more...

If you want people to talk, you have to give them something worth talking about – ie Something Brilliant or Terrible more...

Interactive video based story telling based on mobile and location in an interesting concept developed by the students at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

It would be interesting to do a concept for learning and obviously marketing new experiences. I will write another post on my experiences with creating a location based learning experience. What would you do ?

Absolute power corrupts. So does Absolute information.

There are enough examples of breach of policy and that there needs to be oversight to ensure things remain in control.

There is already enough about information collection practices that is worrying. Should the customer not have a way of knowing what Google, Facebook, or any other provider has collected?

Should the customer not be aware of the data sharing practices of an organisation ? Specifically who has it been shared with and for how long ?

If the information is likely to be misused or is being misused, what is the recourse of the individual ? After all a “free” service does not mean that information can be freely used or there is no recourse.

The damage caused to an individual can be irreparable by an “inadvertent” mistake of the company.

I recently finished reading Brands Under Fire by Ivan Arthur & Kurien Mathews. Simply put, it is a must read. The discussions and essays are insightful and thought provoking. This is not a review of the book but instead  consider the comments , extracted from the book , as my notes for further deliberation or action. 

Advertising Agency

• “And I think its rather unfair to condemn the advertising agency. Most of us do make a thorough study of what products we are going to advertise and to the best of our knowledge and belief, if the product is safe we do the advertising. And this happens in all forms of communication” – Roger Pereira

Regulatory Standards

• “One of the things that does strike me as salient is how murky the whole issue is-the debate or crisis about lack of regulatory standards, and so on.” – Rama Bijapurkar

Responsibility to the Customer

• “Surely the responsibility of an organisation is to its customer. All these facts are actually making me quite annoyed because a company has to see to the well-being of its customer as a crucial responsibility” – Dr Gita Piramal

Brand Loyalty

• “All of us are familiar with the phrase, brand loyalty. And brand loyalty has always been seen as a unidimensional thing where the customer is loyal to the brand. We are increasingly approaching an era where the brand has to be  loyal to itself; the brand being  loyal to its meaning, the brand walking the talk.” – Kiran Khalap

Managing Risk and Responsibility

• “And all these brands are coming under fire because at some level they were not managing risk and responsibility.” – Kurien Mathews

Integrity of the Brand

• “So, how committed are you to the integrity of the brand ? The number of brands that you see which are being built without a shred of communication is phenomenal. ” – Kiran Khalap

Language of the Brand

• “No, I think the language of brands, by itself, is inadequate to capture the stories. I think over time brands will be absorbed  in a new way and will need to reflect these new resonances of organisation, technology and integrity.” – Prof Shiv Visvanathan

Responsibility

• “We have confused responsiveness with responsibility.  Responsiveness is about speed. Responsibility is about owning up to a community in the future that has’nt happened.” – Prof Shiv Visvanathan

Brand Whistle Blowers 

• “The changing world gets brands into trouble, we need whistle blowers and the whistle blowers are already coming up, great. Thank you very much.” – Kurien Mathews

Hear the Customer

• “But if we believe that customers count, then we must hear them – seriously, deeply, and from within their world.” – Rama Bijapurkar
• “I think marketers need to see how they can set up a ‘murmur’ track to understand the unsaid issue that a brand may face in the future.” – M. G. Parameswaran

Delivered Experience

• “Brands will need to attract believers and for that they must first believe in something. Advertising cannot remain a statement of hallowed intent and will need to become a vehicle of delivered experience” – Santosh Desai

Brand Loyalty

• “Brand loyalty is mistaken for loyalty of consumer to brand. Well before this happens, the brand needs to be loyal to itself” – Kiran Khalap

Social Responsibility

• “As a result, the social responsibility of brands has not yet  been elevated to a strategic marketing decision” – Pranesh Misra
• “In a sense we are seeing unique expressions: brand as a social contract. the brand is created by the marketer, but is actually nourished and owned by the larger populace. And as we move towards a borderless world of interconnectivity, we will see consumers becoming an active player in putting out or starting new fires.” – M. G. Parameswaran
• “We need to move from this to a point where the social as well as the physical environment is seen as a necessary contributory part of the total system (ecology if you will) in which the large corporation, by virtue of the economic power it wields , acts as the responsible custodian. It owes a debt not just to the debenture holders but also the rivers and the forests and the very air it breathes along with the people who live around it who may or may not have a buyer/supplier/employee/service provider role in the business.” – Late Prof S Ramchander

Trust

• “At the core all of successful brands lies that big T word – TRUST. When that trust is violated, the reaction is one of hurt and suspicion that can easily turn to anger and rejection.” – Shekar Swamy

Knowledge System

• “Where does advertising as a knowledge system stand vis-a-vis science, theology, law, politics, ethics and philosophy? Eventually the future of brands as a cognitive aesthetic system will depend upon their interdisciplinarity as a knowledge system.” Prof Shiv Visvanathan

Think about it. Make changes to factor the above and more. 

Will write more on this shortly. 

This image says it all. You can find this and more of David Armano’s writings on Logic+Emotion .

“My decision to take up this franchise was not just about the money. The need for something more was deep within me and when this opportunity came along, I decided to quit my job and start being an entrepreneur. I was done being a partner manager and managing office politics. I love what I do now and hopefully my team does too, because I have made a conscious effort to make them feel comfortable.”  This is a conversation I had  recently,  at an experience session for franchisee partners of a client. It is a good time to be an entrepreneur in India considering the consumer boom. To set up the business most franchisors provide the standards, processes and training as these form the core of the customer experience. However. to deliver something extra, there is more that the franchisee needs to look into. This is because the franchisee is setting up a new organisation that blends the characteristics of the franchisor and their own.  
Strong Partnerships
Shared values and mindsets that work towards a common revenue goal tend to make stronger partnerships. Simply working with partners on the basis of a single parameter ie revenue potential is not conducive to a long term mutually beneficial partnership between the franchisor and franchisee. A partnership that is crucial in delivering the extra is the one that binds the franchisee and the team together. It is again shared values and then jointly working towards delivering that extra for the customer .  
A Caring Culture
Would you want your team to take care of customers ? The answer is obvious but does the team that cares get looked after as well. A culture that respects and encourages each member to grow not just in terms of skill but aptitude will also result in higher retention. All too often training, recognition and rewards are forgotten and the result is lost team members and customers. 

“I don’t care .. i want you to ……” is a statement often heard in work environments. In a caring culture I believe this line has no role to play. It is the leader’s responsibility to care and understand why a situation has developed and take steps to resolve it. “Being Real” creates the best platform to connect. Understanding and learning from mistakes by self and others goes a long way in making the team feel as a single unit.

Engage your Customers

Each business has systems that track customer comments, complaints etc. Monitoring performance of your organisation is a good start. To do more, it is important to know the barriers that are being created by the organisation towards its customers. It could be long wait times on call, store etc or something more. There is a saying that if you want to really know how you are treating your customers , “stand in your own lines” . In doing such a simple thing , one would be able to gauge what is the actual experience at various moments in time and how the organisation treats different kinds of customers.There are moments when the experience may have slipped. 
In moments such as these, knowing how the organisation responds is critical. Being engaged with the toughest customers provides an opportunity to not only come up-to their expectations but also to enhance processes and other related aspects. The details of an experience normally get shared in the social circle of the customer. Increasingly this social circle is also available online. It could be on blogs, social media sites and other forums. Keep a track of comments about your organisation on these sites. This information travels fast and can impact your organisation . 


New Marketing 

The blogger is a clear example of a new of way of communicating with customers. Businesses are finding it increasingly difficult and expensive to attract the attention of customers with traditional tools. In such a situation, word of mouth feedback by existing customers play an important role. This has now been extended to social site such as orkut, facebook and others. 

Tools such as mobile phones, emails and social media sites are increasingly being used for for reaching customers though care should be taken to send messages only if the customer has permitted the same. Have you considered using Google Maps , Adwords etc ? If not , try them.

One of the most interesting ways of communicating with customers and engaging them in a dialogue is a blog. Blogs are an inexpensive way of explaining services, sharing perspectives , learning something new and regularly updating subscribed customers through RSS feeds. 

An avid blogger with fairly regular readers wrote about a service experience that was not so good. In normal circumstances , the organisation would not have even known the customer was dissatisfied as no complaint form was filled. However , since the franchisee was a regular internet user, this blog post was noticed and immediate action was taken to resolve customer concerns. The customer comments were addressed in less than six hours of the post. The customer was delighted enough to post another comment , this time praising the organisation. Not only that , this bloggers comments were picked up by a regular reader and put in a forum of enthusiasts who then visited another store and blogged about it and even put up photographs.  It was positive feedback on the blog that generated more opportunities for the organisation. 

The service and the experience that an organisation provides is the only real differentiator and this is now tracked not just internally but by current and future customers on the web.  
Have you done something similar or do you know someone who has ? 
Do try these tools and see the impact on your business. Share your thoughts ….