Influential Marketing Blog

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

Let me tell you a little secret.  I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked.  This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year.  I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday. 

 

A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:

1. Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
2. Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and  strong ability to use design to engage people.
3. People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.

Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com.  Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

What You Should Know About Google For NonProfits

This afternoon in front of a packed room of nearly 200 nonprofit communicators in Washington DC, Google announced their most innovative and ambitious set of tools to help nonprofit organizations to succeed yet. Promising to offer $10,000 in free keyword advertising credits, branded channels and other extended premium features, the announcement of the Google for Nonprofits program divided the ways that Google could help into three core areas; reaching more donors, improving operations and raising awareness.

There is a great description of the program available at www.google.com/nonprofits - including answers to all the basic questions anyone interested in the program is likely to have. If you are wondering how to apply, the specific services that Google offers, what types of organizations are eligible or what the specific terms are, please do check out the site.

Once you do, here are a few observations about the most interesting aspects of this program and how your nonprofit might best take advantage of it:

1. Get the right technical support. You may be tempted to think that Google making lots of technical resources freely available means you will be able to get by with internal less technical support ... actually, the opposite is true. To get the most out of many of Google's services, you need a smart and savvy technical person who can understand how to integrate all the free tools and really leverage them. If don't have a great technical person, do everything you can to find one.
2. Prioritize creating video. Whether or not your nonprofit is actively using video right now, Google's announcement should provide you with the motivation to start immediately. Extended features on YouTube that corporate brands pay tens of thousands of dollars for will be free for nonprofits - and taking advantage will be a great way to spread your message through a medium that people are more and more likely to engage with.
3. Move fast to become a case study. While Google's announcement is new, they will be looking for success stories to feature. As a result, the quicker you can move to be part of the program, the more likely you are to get featured. This is one of those situations where being an early adopter will almost certainly pay off.
4. Start with "citizen cartography." One of the best buzzwords to emerge out of the session at Google was the idea of "citizen cartography" - a slightly sexier way of describing the act of adding geographic information and context to Google Maps or Google Earth. Whether you use some of the newer digital cameras which include GPS tagging of images or input data about the locations that your nonprofit serves, there is a way to add your data to the global archive of geo-specific information that Google has which can be an easy way to start adding your mission and content to the global collective of data.
5. Visualize your data. One of the hottest trends of the year, creating a more visualized way to share your data should be high on your list of priorities because chances are you have data that is underleveraged simply because it is hard to tell a story around it.  Google's new "Fusion Tables" service will allow you to upload your data and turn it into a visual that can help to tell a more cohesive story. Grab your best spreadsheet, upload it and start to visualize your data now.

Overall, Google's announcement is exciting news and is bound to lead to more innovations and smart tools to help nonprofits. During the session, I asked the question of whether there would be more ways for nonprofits to collaborate with one another to help each other leverage the platforms and share both success stories and failures. The short answer was that there will be.

Ultimately, focusing on that may lead to Google tackling the biggest problem in the nonprofit world today ... duplication of resources. There are dozens of organizations all fighting to raise HIV awareness. Another dozen focused on homelessness. And the list goes on and on. It is inefficient. If anyone can enable collaboration on a global scale around the key issues, it is Google. Imagine the impact that a global network of nonprofits could achieve if they were able to efficiently work together to build on one another's successes.

Enabling that kind of collaboration really could change the world.

7 Predictions For How Healthcare & Our World Will Evolve By 2020

Most trend predictions that forecast beyond a year into the future are doomed to inaccuracy simply because of the pace of change and unpredictability of innovation. The rightfully skeptic among us are therefore likely to condemn a report that promises to predict how the world might look in 2020 as a work of optimistic fiction at best, and an exercise overstretched vanity at worst. That was the lens I brought to a report that some colleagues of mine at Ogilvy CommonHealth recently shared with me called 202020 VISION, a digital-health report outlining 20 scenarios of what digitally driven healthcare might look like in 2020. The report is surprisingly brilliant.

Reading through the scenarios, it was easy to imagine a distant future where technology and healthcare finally begin to work together to create a better world of care for us all. Though we cannot share the full report here (see the bottom of this post for details on how to get the full report), this post highlights seven of the most powerful ideas from the report along with some potential implications for anyone in marketing and communications:

1. Exhaustive Behavioural Targeting Transforms Health Messaging.

In a world where nearly everything will become measurable, marketers will have exhaustive behavioural information about each of us, including our lifestyle behaviours, or how often we walk past an enabled sign will all be stored with the purpose of targeting more messages to each of us. This higher level of behavioural targeting will require regulation to prevent abuse, but it will also create the ability to create targeted offers to customers in real time that are based on that customers individual behaviour.

 

2. "Auto-Triage" Aids More Efficient Care.

In an emergency room environment, significant time is wasted trying to identify where a patient needs to go and what type of treatment they require. In 2020 this information will be handled by computers and automated based on data input into the system in the field by ambulance and emergency teams. Electronic medical records will be sent in advance of a patient, and this automated system will allow patients to be prioritized and seen more efficiently and quickly by doctors.

3. Supermarkets Become Centers For Healthcare.

Local supermarkets are already hubs for everything from groceries to pharmacies to banks to gas stations. In the imagined supermarket of the future, the food items we buy will have assigned "health points" and these points will be used to incentivize people towards healthier food choices. Combined with smart data delivered through home appliances such as connected fridges, supermarkets will be able to make real time suggestions on products to buy based on what we already have in our fridge at home.

4. Personalized Videos Bring Diseases To Life.

A big challenge for current healthcare professionals is to convey the gravity of a disease condition to patients. Unless patients feel this urgency, they don't change behaviours. By 2020, personalized video will enable healthcare professionals to equip newly diagnosed or non-compliant patients with customized videos that show patients like them dealing with similar conditions. Seeing the potential impact of not taking care of themselves through these computer generated videos will help patients make the necessary lifestyle changes, and stick to them.

5. Health Tourism Becomes Mainstream.

What is currently the realm of Hollywood stars and the wealthy will become mainstream by 2020. Health or Medical Tourism will no longer be a choice simply made based on the promise of getting cut rate medical care, but a preferable alternative because of the combination of quality of care, ability to focus on a recovery and generally more pleasant resort-like conditions at many health tourism locations that will allow patients to recover faster. Earlier detection of conditions will allow planning for this type of travel to happen much more frequently as well.

6. Gaming Connects Patients & Changes Lifestyles.

The power of gaming to transform medical care is already being explored in many different ways. The future of gaming will include the ability to create entire communities around specific disease conditions where the end goal of adherence to medication or lifestyle changes will be enabled by connecting experienced patients with the newly diagnosed in a gaming environment and allow them to support one another. Gaming will also enable the development of real skills as part of rehab programs and dexterity exercises. The reward systems built into gaming will also incentivize patients to take positive actions for their own health.

7. Communication Enabled Through The Power Of The Mind.

The terminally ill or severly handicapped struggle with the most basic of communications, yet by 2020 the growing field of brain-computer interfaces will have progressed to a level where these patients can communicate with others via their thoughts. This will enable them to significantly improve their quality of life, let the terminally ill "get their affairs in order" and otherwise transform long term patient care environments.

How To Get This Report:

If you'd like to see the full report, send an email to 202020@ogilvy.com to request a copy and mention that you read about the report on this blog. Read the official release about the 202020 VISION report on the Ogilvy site.

Disclaimer - This report was written by a team of people from Ogilvy CommonHealth, a division of Ogilvy. Though I work at Ogilvy and do often work with the CommonHealth team, I did not contribute to the creation of this report, nor do I mean to take any credit for the research and thinking behind it. My opinion of this report is based solely on reading it after its publication and being inspired by the ideas contained in it. I have not been incentivized or asked to write this review by anyone else.

A Guide To Geolocation & Geosocial Marketing In 2011

One of the topics that has gotten a lot of attention from forward thinking marketers in the last year is the potential for geolocation and geosocial marketing. This year, there will be more devices with built in GPS and the ability to geotag content you create with the location where you created it than ever before. Location Based Services (LBS) like FourSquare and Gowalla are increasing their number of users who use the services to "check in" to locations like hotels and restaurants. Even the backend technology of the Internet is cooperating, as marketers have access to originating IP addresses and access points to understand where a web browser is sitting physically.

Whether this locational information is user contributed or automatically generated, the fact is that many feel 2011 will be the year that geolocation finally emerges as an opportunity that anyone in marketing won't be able to ignore. Whether you have already tried some marketing efforts in this space, or whether you are considering it in the near future - this post rounds up some of the biggest opportunities when it comes to geolocation and offers a few ideas for how you might get started.

1. Creating Geotagged Content Mashups
One of the biggest concerns with geolocation marketing is always around the privacy of consumers and the potential for brands to be seen as "cyber stalkers" for pushing messages that chase consumers around. The nice thing about geotagging, however, is that there are millions of pieces of content online right now which feature geolocation information attached to them. Images are tagged with the exact GPS coordinates of where they were taken. Video can be linked to specific dates and events based on the meta data uploaded. This is offering a great curation opportunity for brands who take this content and create interesting visualizations around it.

Example: Grey Canada's recently released "Global Mood Clock"

2. Offering Exclusive Experiences & Discounts Via Location Based Services
Foursquare and Gowalla are both actively courting businesses to advertise with them. Gowalla recently created a partnership with Disney Theme Parks and Foursquare had a highly debated large promotion with McDonald's as well as an interesting promotion in the UK with Domino's. Each were examples of these Location Based Services using their platforms to offer a layer for brands to buy into for the purpose of promoting special or exclusive offers to those customers who willingly broadcast their locations to their social networks. Moving forward, new services like SCVNGR which focus more on the gaming appeal of checking into locations are starting to offer another way for brands to reach niche audiences of LBS users.

Example: Foursquare with Domino's in the UK.



3. Serving IP-Based Location-Specific Content & Advertising
If there were an "old school" aspect to geolocation marketing, this would be it. For many years now, brands have had the ability to target people based on the location of the IP address from which they were accessing the Internet. Combined with user generated data such as users sharing their location on social networks or adding location details to their personal profiles, this is opening up opportunities for brands to share specific content and advertising messages with people based just on where they happen to be at any particular time.

4. Augmenting Live Events
This may be the most obvious yet clearly underutilized opportunity for geolocation marketing. Whether looking at a large scale sporting event in a big stadium, or a company sponsored customer conference, there are potential ways for geolocation marketing to be used at the event. This could include special offers for individuals who visit a trade show booth or promoting future events to current attendees based on the assumption that people who attend one event may be more likely to consider attending another. Add in the potential for people to connect with others in their social network who happen to be at the same event, and the benefits of encouraging people to create and share content from events to promote the event to those who are not in attendance and you begin to see the potential here.

Example: New Jersey Nets Gowalla Partnership



5. Organizing Change & Social Good
In the social realm, we have already seen the power of geolocation in revolutionary situations such as the recent events in Tunisia where citizens have used the power of geolocation to organize together to promote a shared point of view. Outside of politics, geolocation can be used to find green businesses through apps like Greenopia and also to join social movements and real events organized to promote specific causes. One service, CauseWorld, is creating an entire model based on geolocation for you to generate positive results based on socially motivated behaviours.

Example: CauseWorld



List Of Additional Useful Articles About Geolocation:

• 10 Ways Geolocation Is Changing The World -
• Geolocation Marketing For Small Businesses -
• The Rules Of Geolocation Marketing -
• The Future Of Geolocation Marketing -
• Early Proof That Geolocation Marketing Will Succeed
• The Dangers And Downside Of Geolocation

Can Jumo Solve The NonProfit World's Biggest Marketing Problem?

Today marks the launch of Jumo, the new long awaited social networking platform from Facebook co-Founder Chris Hughes. In a recent interview with the Huffington Post published today, Hughes described the mission of the site this way:

Most every site that's out there focuses on donations. And, don't get me wrong, donating to organizations, especially right now, is really important. But Jumo is taking a very different approach. It's not just about how much money are donating to this or that group. It's about what kind of relationship you are building with that organization.

As anyone who has ever worked on a nonprofit communications or marketing plan will tell you, the single biggest challenge when it comes to cause related marketing is motivating people to act on what they feel. You might hear about underpriveleged youth or dwindling trees in the rainforest and most of us will have an instinctual emotional reaction that these things are terrible and we should do something to help. The problem is that this emotion is tough to turn into real action - whether that action involves donating money or offering time.

Some have argued that this difficulty is leading nonprofits into a wrongheaded attempt to make supporting a cause nothing more than a click (mockingly called "slacktivism") - which devalues the importance of real contribution via time or money, and offers people a chance at "moral self licensing" where they feel they have done their good deed and therefore stop trying to do more.

Jumo's big insight, as Hughes shares in his launch blog post, is that there can be multiple levels of engagement and if a social network can make it easy to do everything from support a cause you care about simply by clicking a "like" button - to actually donating money or agreeing to volunteer, then that is a big win for the entire nonprofit community. On Jumo, I can support causes as much or as little as I like, and find all of them in one place. The mission of the site is clear, and it's promise is huge.

The most powerful part of this idea, however, may be its directory aspect that first launched early Internet superstar sites like Craigslist and Yahoo. In a world where we have far too much noise and demands on our attention - something like Jumo could offer a one-stop shop for anything related to doing good by supporting a cause related organization. At least in part it is based on the assumption that there is a large population of Internet-savvy people who would do more if it were just easier. Whether you think Jumo can succeed at its mission or not, it's hard to argue with that.

How Algorithms Could Finally Revolutionize Social Media Marketing

It is nearly the anniversary of the closing of a 3 year quest you may have heard of. The Netflix Prize was a $1m contest launched by the popular video rental service to improve their movie recommendation engine by a specific algorithmic percentage. The challenge was open to any and all mathematics and University teams and was finally awarded on September 21, 2009 to a team that submitted their winning entry just 24 minutes before the closing of the contest.

What does a prize to solve a longstanding mathematical challenge mean for the future of marketing? More than you might think. Algorithms are at the heart of something that has long been promised by the social web but never quite delivered ... a truly personalized online experience. A social network, for example, that can learn your likes and dislikes so well that it can predict what you will want before you even look for it. Such a system and experience has long been visualized in science fiction, but our reality has been 20 million search results for any search and illogically served banner advertising that promises deals on airfare to Turkey when you actually just want a Thanksgiving recipe.

The solution to this challenge was always to build smarter algorithms, and one way to do that is by having learning systems where they get better and smarter the more you train them through your behaviours. Of course, this requires users to spend some time inputting data in order to make the systems better. Time was the barrier. Luckily, there are a few models for getting users past this barrier which mean that these algorithms now may finally be able to achieve what people have hoped they might for years:

1. Integration with existing behaviours and platforms. If you are a Gmail user, you may have noticed their new Beta feature of the "Priority Inbox" which promises to help organize your inbox by learning which emails you might consider a priority. Using simple logic like highlighting those emails which you open and respond to most frequently, the system will learn over time based only on your hitting a button next to emails to indicate whether others like them should or should not be considered priorities. By integrating with a utility that a large number of people user already, this system makes it more likely that you will take the time to train the system to get usage out of it.
2. Using gaming techniques to encourage engagement. Hunch is one of several increasingly popular sites that helps to personalize recommendations on things you may like. By having people answer questions in a quiz-like format, they create an engaging way for you to train the system through an activity that feels more like a game than a cold form that you check boxes in to describe yourself and your views. Then product recommendations with links are shared alongside your content and you can choose to click on them and follow through to purchase something.

When you have systems like this that make it acceptable and even commonplace for users to take the time to train their algorithms about themselves and their behaviours, then you start to see the vast possibilities for targeting and serving more relevant marketing to people online. This is not about finding your target audience for a product or service message. This is about being able to finally customize a message to what someone may want or respond to before they even click a link or type a term into a search engine.

Gilty Secrets: 10 Marketing Techniques From Today's Hottest eCommerce Site

To say that Gilt.com is on fire may be something of a understatement. The site, which features daily special sales of luxury products at discount prices is on track by some estimates to pull in $400 million in sales for the 2010 calendar year. The growth of Gilt.com has coincided with a shift in how many consumers are thinking about luxury products. As a recent USA Today piece noted, "the new world of luxury is less about designer labels and glitz and more about shopping savvy and an I-feel-good-owning-this mentality." Gilt.com has grown to over 2 million members by catering exclusively to this mentality.

What makes the Gilt.com experience so irresistible? A big part of it is the sense that you are getting a great deal on products from brands that are normally much pricier, but smart marketing is just as much of a component in the success of Gilt.com. Taking some time to analyze what makes the marketing so powerful, here are 10 techniques that Gilt.com is using which might help other brands to duplicate some of this success:

1. Featuring amazing imagery.
The experience on Gilt.com starts with amazing imagery. This is clearly not a site selling average products, because everything about the imagery used on the site indicates a premium and desirable experience. More than that, the images are changing every day, which demonstrates that there is fresh content all the time and that the site will be worth visiting again and again.

2. Offering a sense of exclusivity.

Core to the Gilt.com experience is a sense of exclusivity. You need to be invited to join the site by a current member, and only once you become a member can you access all the special deals. The irony of this is that they have plenty of "sneak in" ways to become a member without getting invited through secret links - but the SENSE of exclusivity is what is most important. It doesn't pay for them to actively prevent people from becoming members, but they work hard to make their current members feel as though they are part of an exclusive club.

3. Focusing on the backstory.

Every product sold on Gilt.com has a backstory which is almost as important as the product itself. Why? Because when it comes to many luxury products, there is an inherent need from the customers to have a shareable story that they can tell to others along with the products they purchase. It is not about buying a blender. It is about buying a blender from a Belgian company that has been making them since 1930, and that you cannot find in any retail store near you.

4. Creating an urgency to purchase without excessive pressure.

Every product that you put into your shopping cart expires after 10 minutes. This may seem like a diabolical move to pressure you into purchasing - and to some degree it does work like that. The aim, though, is to limit the amount of time you can hold onto a product that someone else may want to purchase. As a result, the sense of urgency to buy is built into the site, and when coupled with a relatively easy return policy, it means that they can focus more on converting browsers to buyers in a timespan (10 minutes) that most other ecommerce sites would envy.

5. Providing significant rewards for referrals.

Once you become a member, the reward for referring someone else to the site is a whopping $25 in credit - far more than most other sites. This adds to the exclusivity experience, but also makes it likely that people will share their referral link far and wide with others. As you probably noticed, it is working for me also since I used my own referral link in this post as well.

6. Integrating deeply with email marketing.

Every day, members of Gilt.com get an email telling them about the special deals of the day and reminding them to visit the site to purchase those products before they sell out. They have a blog and a Twitter page as well, but for the vast majority of their users, email is likely driving the largest consumption and traffic because much of their target audience are at work where emails often come with pop up notices letting you know a new one has come in.

7. Selling items that are sold out.

As items sell out or are held in member's shopping carts, the site automatically lets you know and gives you a chance to be placed on a wait list for a product. Not only does this add to your emotional sense of wanting a product (after all, if it is "sold out" it must be good, right?), but it creates a secondary sales channel for Gilt.com where you may not have been able to purchase the product you were most interested in, but might come back to purchase it if it were available. The other benefit of this model is that it helps for projections and planning new sales if you have a good sense of the most popular products based on something active such as a consumer being asked to be put on a wait list for an item, versus something more passive such as impressions to a product or brand page.

8. Standing behind products they sell with editorial.

Not only does Gilt.com offer new products every day, they also stand behind the products they do offer. This "seal of approval" concept lets consumers know that the products they are buying are authentic but also tested for quality and will be exactly what they expect. This also allows Gilt.com on the backend to work with more and better companies to feature products because there is an inherent validation that takes place for a brand that does get featured on Gilt.com that may extend to that brand building more of a relationship or awareness among a desirable group of consumers.

9. Creating a daily ritual.

Every day at noon EST, an email comes noting that the sales for that day are open. Conveniently scheduled at the time when many office professionals are taking their lunch break, this consistently allows Gilt.com to create a ritual for their customers. Not everyone will buy a product every day, but just knowing that this format will take place every day allows consumers to plan a visit to the site as part of their day and helps to drive a big spike in traffic because you know that as soon as the deals open online there will be a frenzy to buy the most popular items before they sell out.

10. Customizing to platforms.

Soon after the iPad was launched, Gilt.com was ready with an app for iPad users that allowed them to purchase directly from the app. Today, more than 10% of overall sales come from the iPhone and iPad mobile platforms that this number is growing. By offering a customized experience for users on certain platforms, Gilt.com is making it easy to purchase no matter where you happen to be.

Not every brand will have luxury products or find this daily sales method easy to duplicate, but taking some of the marketing lessons that Gilt.com already knows could help a large number of brands who have some ecommerce component of their sites to create more engagement with their customers, and convert more of them to action as well.