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?

I’m currently evaluating various (inexpensive) tools for enabling an easy way for users to to give website feedback / feedback through the web site.  The ideal is a tab based approach available on each page. Hard to find something that’s just right. Not too heavy, not too light and moderately customizable. So far I’ve looked at getsatisfaction, uservoice and suggestionbox. Getsatisfaction didn’t really fit because it was “too community” oriented and I think our customers would have had a hard time figuring out how to leave anonymous feedback or felt frustrated having to log in twice (separate logins for the site and the satisfaction tool, in the case they didn’t use their face book account the register). Uservoice in play -looks promising.

I found this quite amazing. 760 different twitter tools and considering that this information is almost a year old there’s probably a lot more out there today.  http://thesocialmediaguide.com.au/2009/05/30/the-ultimate-list-of-twitter-tools/