10 Ideas for a digital decade

Continuing on blogging about trends for the upcoming year/decade I just stumbled upon a paper by Edelman about ten ideas for the new decade.

Steve Rubel has an embedde scribd in his lifestream, as well as a short video about 4 of the main points underlying the 10 ideas mentioned in the paper:

  • Global (technology, consumers, applications, etc.)
  • Mobile (mobile devices, use cases, etc.)
  • Companies (can’t stand on the sidelines any longer)
  • Data (driving everything, smarter decisions, data privacy).

Using Menu Psychology to Entice Diners

Not quite digital marketing, but similar rules surely apply to creating well selling online web pages. The NY Times has a piece on how restaurants are trying to improving their menues. Things like highlighting the most profitable items on the menue via putting boxes around them, display prices without a dollar sign, etc. Some restaurants seem to be continously testing how to best design menues so that revenue and profitability increases.

“If admen had souls, many would probably trade them for an opportunity every restaurateur already has: the ability to place an advertisement in every customer’s hand before they part with their money.”

Very true. An inspiring read: Using menue psychology to entice diners.

Campaign sites vs social media: the shift is starting.

There has been a lot of talk about the end or decline of the destination sites. Mainly about the big portals as well as brands sites – the decline in daily visitors happens at the same time as visitors to social media sites are steadily increasing. Here is a blogpost that nicely visualizes this effect for a few famous brands and social media sites.

Coca-Cola and Unilever now announced that they’ll start shifting their online campaign activities from dedicated microsites to sites, profiles or channels on social media sites. Makes sense, considering the users are already there and they can tap into a ready community:

The FMCG giants are moving away from sites created on a campaign-by-campaign basis in favour of investment in existing communities.

Coca-Cola: “We would like to place our activities and brands where people are, rather than dragging them to our platform,”

Unilever: “You’ll see fewer brands creating a site for one campaign and then throwing it away. Certainly we won’t do that at Unilever any more. It’s natural online to go to the place where people are already consuming media,” she added. “It’s less effort to ask people to leave an environment they’re already in.”

They won’t do that for all campaigns, and certainly not immediately, but given the current change in the media landscape it does make a whole lot of sense for some brands to move closer to where their customer are.

Some new years social media resolutions.

Happy new year (almost „belated“, since I haven’t posted anything in two weeks…). First post should hence be about new year resolutions. But not mine, which do in fact include the obvious (more sports, loose weight, etc.), but some listed by the viralblog:

1. Make Social Media marketing line budget item (so that it gets its proper place in the marketing mix)

2. Generate ROI using Social Media (prove the added value of social media tactics within the marketing mix)

3. Start listening to the audience (they are already talking about you, and they know what’s best for them).

4. Develop Social Media Strategy (don’t tinker from one tactic to another).

5. Always remember the 4 C’s (Content, Context, Connectivity, Continuity).

They are, obviously, not resolutions for me as an agency person, but they are nevertheless my resolutions when advising my clients this year. Let’s see how social media develops this year.