thefunnel

Where are the exciting marketing opportunities in the future? Let’s look at some trends.

• Social Media is here to stay and no longer just an experiment. For many B-2-C companies’ Social Media is already driving more traffic than search! What is the next Face Book? The short history of social media has already shown that no matter what, applications have a limited life, so what’s next?
• Wireless and Mobile Applications. Wireless everywhere and embedded computing are driving the “always connected” concept, and mobile handsets (phones) are just scratching the surface. The applications for convergence or voice, data and video through the mobile internet are endless. What is the next killer app? In the past content has always been the king, but will the trend continue?
• Semantic web and geo targeting. You’re already part of this, whether you like it or not, and it’s going to get a lot more advanced.
• Privacy related concerns are a real issue, particularly in the world of “collaborative” social media sites, where it’s sometimes unclear who really has access to your data.
• Open source, interoperability, both on the system and the application side. Just like we mash up content, we will now start to mash up whole systems and applications. Time to market is the key.
• Cloud computing and SaaS (software as a service). Why invest in your own infrastructure when global systems are already available? But, what about security?
• Emotional branding. A concept that was written about already many years ago, but not well understood. Well, it’s happening today in social media – is your company part of it?

Time to move on. The next wave is approaching, or maybe it’s already here. Start embracing semantic web and web 3.0 – “the intelligent web”. With 3.0, the information overflow will be history, information control is the future, and now we can all experience the web as a cloud that provides actionable insight, a web and search which is contextual and can predict what we want, where we want it, and deliver and tailor information based on our preferences. In addition it’s open and platform agnostic, provides a level of interoperability that is unheard of, and works on any device, anywhere (always connected – wireless anywhere). No more large systems, instead it’s all about small pieces of a large puzzle, which all work together, it’s all viral, and it’s (mostly) free. We’re already seen bits and pieces, such as semantic search, cloud computing and open API’s, but that’s nothing yet, compared to the unlimited mashup of dynamic information, all portable and tailored to your preferences.