Social Media Marketing Week

Awareness, Inc. has just released a white paper entitled “2012 Social Marketing & New Media Predictions”, comprising predictions, insights and advice from 34 marketing strategists, brand marketers, and leading marketing consultants. Here are ten comments that caught our eye:

1. “Social media gives us the ability to communicate instantly, yet most marketers have not developed the communication skills to address real time. Marketers have been trained with a campaign mentality, spending weeks planning, designing and executing in a sequential manner. Social marketing is changing that. We now need the ability to react instantly to breaking news, changes on our websites and negative customer feedback. Marketers need a new mentality, infrastructure and workflows to meaningfully participate in real time.” — David Meerman Scott
2. “Brands will move toward agile marketing and real-time thinking,” says Ekaterina Walter. “Gone are the days when it took us six months to develop and launch a campaign, or five days to answer a disgruntled customer. To break through the online clutter, brands will need to capitalize on current buzz to stand out. Expect increased use of real-time analytics tools that lead to agile processes that will empower teams to act on the next big thing in real or near-time. Brands will also expect their agencies to adapt, react and support them in real time.”
3. “In the world of health care, the biggest social marketing development in 2012 is the convergence between the worlds of marketing and IT,” observes Pamela Johnston of The Lahey Clinic. “These two distinct teams are learning from and about each other in ways that will make us smarter, faster and more patient-centric in the years to come. We need to combine our resources to reach patients with relevant messages on the platforms they desire.”
4. “Facebook and the open graph will provide the context to make our digital marketing efforts stick,” observes Andrew Patterson of Major League Baseball. “Offers will be much more specific and will create interactions with our customers and prospects that last.”
5. “In 2012 marketers are going to focus more on the role mobile plays in social. Facebook will reach a milestone with more than half of its users accessing it from mobile devices and that will be a major driver of interest in mobile social media,” says David Berkowitz of 360i.
6. “There is the old saying, ‘information is power.’ However, information and knowledge alone may no longer be enough,” observes Robert Collins. “Social will transform the value of ‘big data,’ providing the depth, relevancy, color, resolution, context, personality and even time-sensitive geo-dynamics that will transform the current black and white, antiquated 12-point, pixilated picture of a customer and market into a more actionable, real-time, life-engaging definition.”
7. “Brands will move beyond the question of whether to participate in social media to a new understanding how to optimize their overall approach to social media,” says Mike Lewis of Awareness, Inc. “ The biggest progression in 2012 will be around taking social data to the next level. Instead of focusing on measures such as reach and participation, brands will begin to focus and act on the insights from those metrics. Specifically, more brands will look at the details of social profiles to better target marketing offers and increase conversion rates.”
8. Tim Hayden of 44Doors sees 2012 as the year when, “We will see the practice of ‘influencer marketing’ give way to building advocates throughout a community or network, bottom-to-top and in all directions. We can no longer bet success on the volume of one person’s followers, connections and propensity to share content. This is already the manner through which many brands and agencies apply social media to customer service, and so it will be in 2012 how passive moments and impressions lead to social media engagements.”
9. “Data is of no use if you don’t know what to do with it,” says Marc Meyer. “2012 will see brands increasingly looking for social media data analysts who understand what to do with big data and how to use it for business results.”
10. “My prediction is that Google+ will play an increasingly bigger role for marketers in 2012. Twitter’s integration with IOS5 will pave the way to integrated mash-ups and symbiotic relationships that will propel our ability to connect and engage consumers,” says Andrew Patterson.

For the full collection, head to awarenessnetworks.com, fill out the form and get yourself a free copy of the White Paper.