Digital Marketing Outlook for 2011

As we enter to the first weeks of 2011, we are frequently asked what folks here at Clout expect for the marketing world in 2011.

Here are some facets of the industry that we are closely watching for our clients.

Google Me

We are big fans of Google’s products: our start-up has achieved great things using their Apps suite; we are all on their mobile platform, Android, for seamless integration; and, the prospects for what they have in store in the cloud for we clients is tantalizing. Add to those recent successes a batch of recent rumors about its upcoming “Google Me” social network and what results are a lot of questions to folks like us for predictions and inside scoops.

Image: Luigi Diamanti

Social networking has been one of the few, though large, shortcomings of Google’s products to date. They clearly now own the search, mobile and video traffic on the web. Any attempts that they have made to date in creating and maintaining social activity have been “incomplete successes” (as the Pentagon have taught me to say): Google Buzz, Google Wave and Orkut have never achieved what they’d intended to. (YouTube doesn’t count as it was an acquisition, not their own R&D per se).

Google Me, their upcoming solution in the space, has already been met with in-fighting and delays, and lack of a unified purpose, value or case. Most who have seen leaked snapshots of the service are unimpressed. As such, most are predicting that Google Me will be a failure.

Our position is, that with all of Google’s major successes, we inevitably have to wait and see if Me will have uptake. As with Buzz and Wave, which were amazing conceptually but lame in practice, we had no idea in the early days of Gmail and Apps if they would succeed to the degree that they have. Google faces a lot of challenges with Me and the odds may not be in it’s favour; however, considering the stake in those odds, we are hedging our bets and preparing ourselves for a scenario in 2011 wherein Google Me is a significant addition to the Google universe and the entire social media landscape.

(We’re rooting for them, as always).

Facebook

We are preparing for a few exciting changes to Facebook in 2011: many updates to the site will be technical, back-end type stuff that our developers and engineers know more about that I do; aesthetically, expect some changes to facets of the site akin to the recent layout of your profile.

From what we’re reading and seeing, we do not expect Facebook to become a public company in 2011. The value of becoming an IPO just doesn’t seem to outweigh the hassle for Facebook.

Twitter

Not much happening with Twitter in the year ahead, it seems: continued growth of its users base and advertisers; and, a refining of the vapour and B.S. and noise that has come along with its growth to date.

Otherwise, it ain’t broke, they ain’t fixin’ it. The recent redesign has made the site more of a Web App than website. New features will continually allow it to have more “social network” facets, to find and connect with people, making the culture slightly less unilateral than it had famously been.

We predict that Twitter will keep most of its focus for 2011 on its monetization schemes: selling promoted tweets, accounts and the like.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is less and less being seen/experienced as a buffet of salesmen and the unemployed; it is increasingly, rightfully, being seen as the principal social network for professionals en masse.

We are expecting some more mobile developments from LinkedIn in 2011. With it, we hope to see more advertising and promotions opportunities and channels on the site. We expect that the growth trajectory the network is currently seeing will grow through the New Year: as the Great Recession loses steam, the labour market will see increased activity which will find itself on LinkedIn, if it hasn’t already.

Location, Location, Location

Location-based marketing channels have our attention in 2011.

We see continued growth on Foursquare in direct competition to Facebook Places. We love both platforms but see the release of the new Facebook Points scheme to be influential: the monetization of check-in’s on Facebook, being able to earn loyalty-credits that can be used within the Facebook economy, is an attractive model for marketers.

All of this is being driven, of course, with the widespread growth of the “smartphone” market: all phones are now “smart” and the footrace between Apple’s iOS devices and Google’s Android devices is more aggressive than ever. Chances are, if you buy a new phone in 2011, it will use one of these two operating systems (sorry, RIM). As such, chances are, you will find yourself immersed in ecosystems spurred by mobile location marketing.

This, coupled with services that we’re offering in proximity marketing (using Bluetooth, QR Codes and other technologies to create touch-points with mobile users on-site or at POP) makes our iniatives and innovations in the location sector top of mind for us in 2011.

The Landscape

In closing, we are seeing a major resurgence in the popularity of user-generated content. This is being made possible by all of the fancy, new phones that we own. Most new phones now shoot HD video and high res pics. With the push of a button, they are uploading heaps and heaps of media to the web, more and more each day, around the world/clock.

This will inevitably lead to continued growth of Facebook and its Photos/Videos facets, Flickr, Picasa and the like.

We think that email will have a “2.0″ resurgence as marketers realize, or remember, the simplicity and reach of the medium (as evident by all of the new email-based services and lists that have taken off as of late like Groupon).

As well, social media marketing has hit its stride and matured as part of the media landscape: with every study, report and research piece we’ve seen leading into the new year, we’ve seen evidence that all of you are making serious reallocations of your budgets for this year unto the space. People now realize the necessity and value of exploiting social channels for their advertising and promotions, marketing and communications: whether you’re a small business or major corporation, the value and productivity of Facebook advertising (previously seen as a niche risk), for example, is now alluring for any media buyer.

With this maturation, sentiments and philosophies of professional marketers will start to permeate throughout the industry. The numbers, data and analytics will suddenly have meaning again: people with look for insight from the results, tea leaf reading, like we used to do; success and ROI will not, and cannot, continue to be measured in rhetoric, impressions and follower numbers. Deeds speak. Conversion is King again.

As I say to my clients every day, “the popularity contest is over, no one cares how many followers you have”. I often follow up with an adage a friend in the industry always offered up when looking at a campaign, idea or tagline: so what? “You made a Facebook game? An App? You Tweet a lot? So what?”

If conversion is King, transparency and straightforwardness will take the reign as Queen of 2011: no more BS’ing ourselves or each other. Social media, in and of itself, is rought with stigma and cyncicism because it attracted so many “gurus” and “experts” last year (who were in fact just the funemployed having a good time killing time). This is one of the reasons I founded Clout Marketing: the need for professional solutions, to hire companies that are actually businesses, like ours.

The fourth-wall between producer and consumer, between your brand and your market, is falling with each step we take into the 3.0 era.

The aspiration of a “socialized” media is now a reality: no one wants your propaganda, your pitch, a strapline; they want to talk to Tom at your company, the guy down the hall who’s on Twitter all the time, who can talk to them like a person using the media and language that they use.

As many have said with me for the past year, the term “social media” may lose buzz but the realm itself has and will permeate all platforms: all media is, or will be, social, bilateral.

And so, your brand is now a content creator, a media producer, a merry maker and a conversationalist: who you are, what your brand means, what you are really selling is now more at-hand for us than ever before.