metarand

The Seggr Top Eight Predictions for 2010

The team at Seggr spends a lot of time talking to key influencers at the nexus between technology and business from around the world.

From our unique position, we use our pattern recognition skills to detect and track emergent trends. As we move into the season of giving we wanted to share with you what we see as our Top Eight focus points for 2010:

1. Influence emerges as the universal currency.

2. Personal privacy gets redefined by forces like locational tagging and the intention web.

3. More mobile social business, more game mechanics.

4. Exclusive, velvet rope social networks emerge from the shadows.

5. Augmented Reality begins to move beyond its cool cache and provide real value.

6. Digital curation takes social deep and narrow: laser focusing the firehose.

7. Enterprise speeds up: brands unshackle themselves from ad agencies and get proactive in real time, through microtargeting and deeper, contextual engagement.

8. Social media monitoring standardizes and commoditizes through the emergence of dominant, open platforms and become actionable.

[Picture courtesy of tomhide]

Tags: 2010, Augmented Reality, Brands, digital curation, Enterprise, game mechanics, Influence, mobile social business, Privacy, Social Media, social networks, velvet rope

Marketing Is Simple, Right?

Identify target. Engage.

Think about this imperative statement set from the perspective of a marketer. Marketing is simple, right.

Now factor in the myriad methods for identifying targets. And overlay that with the exploding number of ways to engage with identified targets.

Whew! I know how you feel – seems overwhelming doesn’t it?
Where do you start?

OK, step back for a second and repeat after me” “Marketing is simple, right.”

This is the message being preached by Emmy award winner, Brad Jakeman. Take a look at the landscape.

There have never been more communications channels, yet it has never been harder to connect with consumers.

Brad believes marketers have become obsessed with the channel and forgotten about the content.
Consumers want brands to participate in their conversations, they want to engage and be engaged. For them the medium is peripheral to the experience.

Now let’s go back to our opening statement.

Identify target. Engage.

Flip this around and think about it from the consumer’s point of view. Given all the ways they could connect it’s also a question for them of which device, program, solution they decide to engage with.

Do I use my iPhone to twitter through twinkle, do it via my desktop on twhirl, dive into one of my browsers and send a message in 140 characters through a Facebook app or on Friendfeed?

The point is that the process of identifying and engaging is a dialogic one. It is two sides of the branding coin, one for marketers, and one for consumers.

To quote Brad, marketers need to create things people want to SEEK out, not SCREEN out. And the key marketing word of the moment: ENGAGE.

[Pictures courtesy of mleak]

Tags: Brands, Marketing