Over the last twelve months many people have asked me I was concerned about the pending recession and how I thought our industry will fare. I’ve watched a lot of changes happen in the digital marketing world both from the perspective of a boutique shop and now as large publicly traded organization. I can tell you what I know:
It will be challenging for smaller shops that are dependent on advertising agencies. Traditional agencies are attempting, in most cases unsuccessfully, to build out their own interactive teams or are working with the agencies that were recently purchased by their holding company.
In my dealings with clients I don’t get a sense that there are any radical cutbacks except perhaps with companies in the financial market.
A year ago I predicted that if the recession did kick in that budgets would continue to shift towards digital as it had one of the most clear methods of tracking ROI
Over the last couple months I’ve run across two brilliant examples of cutting edge media. They could be used for a brand with potentially profound results in terms of the online buzz that could be created around it if released with a world class PR team. Each time I see one of these I get excited at it’s potential, but I struggle to find clients who are willing to take the risk to try something new.
The two I’d really like to share, and I hope they get your imaginations going involve a video wall revolving around interactive water and a new holographic 3D technology that will leave almost any crowd with their mouth open. Read More »
Rob made some great points in his blog post “A Review of Social Media in 2008“. It’s been an exciting year and amazingly we’re just barely half way through.
He’s absolutely right in his predictions regarding the de-centralization of social media sites. Social network functionality is becoming commoditized as the functionality is integrated into more and more sites. In my opinion we’ll stop talking about the social web in less then five years. It will just be considered a phase as we’ll assume that all of this functionality needs to be a part of any great web experience.
Google will lead this pack of the other big players like Facebook and Myspace don’t keep a close eye on the prize. Google’s Friend Connect software will allow for any website to add social network like functionality using a shared infrastructure and registered user base. This will make it very easy for a user to join a community and even work with gadgets/widgets that are familiar to them via the OpenSocial platform.
Your kid’s football team could add this functionality to their webpage with some cut and paste code and it would be easy for parents to join and build a small tight knit community using technology around the team. This same technology could be applied to a brand website and then, with the low cost of entry and the massive pre-registered user base of the OpenSocial platform, it does make sense for brands to build social network functionality on their primary brand sites.
This will completely change the game. I recommend you visit the Google Friend Connect page and sign-up to view a preview as soon as it’s released.
UPDATE: Based on a great comment by Phil Hellary I want to be clear in saying that I’m not implying Facebook is going to go away – It’s a great community that people have built in one centralized location. I’m implying that you will see hundreds of thousands if not millions of new communities popping up around very small sites. This process could lead to a cumulative number of user installations that could rival even the biggest social networks.
"Take Me To Your Leader" focuses on trend watching in consumer behaviors, marketing, technology, and social media, but is often led astray by its eccentric authors and their love of music, traveling, random thoughts, and pirates.
