One of the most interesting parts of my job is working wirth each January to curate what the firm sees as the key trends that we think our clients and teams need to think about in the year ahead. This is the second time Steve and I collaborated on this effort. What I really like about our 2011 effort is that we don't just gaze into the crystal ball but we provide actionable insights along with recommendations on what you should be doing.
For this year’s installment, we identified eleven trends. The first five are Steve's and the remaining six are mine. If there’s a common theme that runs through it all it’s that there will increasingly be a lot of information coming at us, yet the same amount of time to digest it all. This, as Auggie Ray from Forrester notes, will make standing out more challenging.
In the deck above you will find the same recommendations we are sharing with our clients and helping them bake into their strategies. Client examples in this deck include eBay, HP and Qualcomm. The others are best practices from around the industry.
The 11 curated trends are summarized below:
- Attentionomics - Marketers begin to realize the value of attention and not just reach in driving conversion
- Digital Curation – The plethora of content will give rise to digital curators who can separate art from junk
- Developer Engagement – Marketers typically don’t try to court developers, but that’s all about to change
- Transmedia Storytelling – If there’s one constant it’s that humans crave stories. Technology creates new expectations
- Thought Leadership – Companies recognize they must activate credible individual expert voices who can create content
- The Integration Economy – Social media efforts can no longer exist in fragmented, non-formal initiatives. They begin to integrate
- Ubiquitous Social Computing – As competition heats up mobile devices, consumers closer to being socially connected anywhere
- Location, Location, Facebook – If 2010 belonged to solely Foursquare, it’s likely that Facebook will rain on their parade in 2011
- Social Media Schizophrenia – Social overload is no longer a problem for tech mavens, but a broader population
- Google Strikes Back – Google proves that the best way to beat Facebook & Twitter is to do what they do best: index them to pieces
- Viva La Social Web Site – Businesses realize that integrating social functionality into their existing web sites is what users now expect