Marketing 2.0 trends for 2010 By Emmanuel Vivier – Vanksen Group And Thierry Daher – Vanksen USA influence social network ROI blogs facebook twitter buzz monitoring mobile e‐reputation New‐York – Paris – Luxembourg – Geneva – Hong Kong www.Vanksen.com © Copyright, Vanksen Group USA – All rights reserved Marketing 2.0 trends for 2010 Contents 1. Presence on the web, particularly social media, will be more important than ever ...................... 3 2. Standalone offline approaches, or 1.0, won’t work in a 2.0 world. ................................................ 5 3. The transition of offline budgets to digital and social media will amplify ... 2010 opens into a whole new era of transmedia marketing strategies. .............................................................................. 9 4. Six million competitors! The power of the consumer and of crowdsourcing will challenge and drive brand innovation. ........................................................................................................................ 10 5. 2010: The year of mobile ... AND social: geolocalization + applications + social networks + recommendations ................................................................................................................................. 11 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 13 2 Marketing 2.0 trends for 2010 Introduction 2009 was a year riddled with economic crisis, the phenomenal success of Twitter and Facebook, and disillusionment over a wide array of existing economic models. Now it’s time to pause and reflect on what bounties, pitfalls and trends 2010 will bring. The following is a summary of our expectations for the year to come: a compilation based on market changes and insights, we at Vanksen (offices in Paris, Luxembourg, Geneva and New York) came across over the course of ’09, taking into account the conception and executions of over 280 campaigns we managed for major brands that entrusted us with their business, and exchanges made amidst the 70‐plus conferences and seminars at which we’ve spoken around the world: 1. Presence on the web, particularly social media, will be more important than ever 50% of US users already spend more time online than on any other media. Of this percentage, fewer and fewer engage with brand sites; rather, they flock in growing numbers to social networks — the sites they also prefer for sharing viral content with peers. Of those social networks, Facebook will continue to enjoy the lion’s share of traffic. In December 2009 it hit the 350 million‐member milestone and is expected to surpass between 600‐700 million by the end of 2010. Its global prevalence and staggering statistics — 50% of users spend about 20 minutes on the site per day on average — increasingly pit Facebook against free email services like Hotmail or Gmail. It also erodes, to some extent, the value of Google, since so much of Facebook’s content escapes indexing. In Asia, particularly Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, Facebook has already dethroned Friendster. Provided it improves the quality of its photo storage service, it could definitively also dethrone flickr. (Some argue it already has.) But really, in its current state it needs little more than to launch improved analytics and a "Facebook Management Solutions" tool, something like a CMS that advertisers and agencies can use to build and manage advanced Facebook pages simply and measure profitably for brands. In the meantime, a cottage industry has cropped up to fill that void: keep an eye on Sprout, Involver, Wildfire and — for French users — TigerLily. With over 22 million unique visitors per month, Twitter will also continue to develop — and, crucially, to differentiate itself from the Facebook Newsfeed while pursuing monetization strategies (subscription, premium service models or advertising). A sale to Microsoft or Google, just two of its new search partners, may also be in the runes. And as long as MySpace and Skyblog refuse to reconsider their disastrous interface aesthetics, these particular platforms will continue to lose market share to worthier rivals. In the end, it’s the sites that evolve in response to user feedback that win prominence: decisions to alter your terms of use, protect sensitive personal data or actively fight against spam go far in the online social scene. YouTube is increasingly proving to be a true alternative to television, enjoying over 100 million members in the United States alone, and contending with such rivals as Hulu, Playstation3, Xbox or 3 Marketing 2.0 trends for 2010 iTunes — all of which seek to be the monetizable platform for video. Part of their success stems from their "on‐demand" quality (also illustrated by the success of France’s M6Replay) versus "live" TV content — a constraint that may well sound laughable when, in the future, we explain to our children and grand children that, in our day, a favored TV show could only be watched on a fixed hour. The majority of social media sites are in the process of developing or launching APIs that enable other sites or applications to connect to them, resulting in more and more integration between varied media. Despite efforts to remain transparent, these services are also confronted to the rage of advertisers and agencies when, at year’s end, their APIs fail to support their load or, worse, change suddenly — resulting in bugs or making applications unavailable, sullying whatever integrated marketing efforts they were part of. A true roadmap of future changes for developers will prove indispensable for such services. Considering that, over the long‐term, we’ll all be connected (and thus "social"), the phrase "social media" will have less and less relevance. Social Games like FarmVille by Zynga, Habbo, The Sims or Rolando and FieldRunners (via mobile) are going to explode, availing interesting monetization paths that advertisers can start to exploit. Inventory for ad space is still growing exponentially, but base prices for CPM and display ads aren’t expected to rise ... unless analytics of their impact on online sales improves. It will get harder and harder for internet users to update the panoply of networks in which they’ve terraced their lives, or even effectively track their own data in the sea of information available in each. Syndication and aggregation tools (like Posterous) help keep sites updated in one click, relegating them all into streams regurgitating the same information. Faced with this kind of "infobesity," users will start using social networks to filter information that is modified and personalized based on the profile pages upon which it will appear (Facebook Connect is already used by over 80,000 sites to help do essentially that: see The Prototype Experience), as well as past activity (behavioral targeting) and centers of interest (sponsored links). In a world regulated by the tyranny of ultra‐transparence and near‐instant recommendations (both positive and negative), the web will definitively become the primary determining factor in purchasing decisions both online AND offline. The role of expert and influencer will be more important than ever, and with it, personal reputation. We’ll also see the professionalization of the blogosphere, a blogger‐orchestrated movement to demonstrate their influence, as well as the quality of their audiences, to both advertisers and agencies ("influence" in this case being defined by both reputation AND audience). Being connected with other bloggers is insufficient to be considered influential (that said, Wikio ranking will have to revisit its classification model to more or less maintain its credibility). Having a lot of followers or traffic isn’t enough either; if that were the case, aspiring bloggers could just deluge their sites with photos of naked women, or better yet, start a "splog" — a traffic‐inflater that automatically republishes RSS feeds merely as an excuse to display ads. Moving forward, brands that use blogs for campaigns will want to measure the audience that actually sees those efforts; that is to say, they won’t necessarily be interested in measuring a blog’s total audience. To track the user sentiment, they will likely use available tools or appropriately‐ equipped agencies (like BuzzParadise or Vanksen ;‐) knowing such resources will help them to avoid 4 Marketing 2.0 trends for 2010 the occasional awkward media catastrophe (consider Honda, Domino’s Pizza or Belkin). These options also let them outsource the time necessary to develop an authentic relationship with "influential blogs." Because of growing promotional interest in such networks, the European Legislature and the United States’ Federal Trade Commission is keeping a closer eye on brand participation and sponsorship on blogs and social networks, in hopes of avoiding abuse of trust or outright deception. Proper disclosure ("This post sponsored by...") is now mandatory (which is great). Frankly, we should expect the same standards from tranditional media — it’s a bit odd to focus on how perks or money may dampen blogger integrity when you consider the incredible gifts offered to journalists of beauty magazines, for example. More links will form between the "micro people" of the blogosphere/web and traditional media. We’ll rediscover bloggers & vloggers/podcasters such as Gary Vaynerchuk, Ask a ninja, FunnyOrDie, Lauren Luke,… on TV (at least cable) or in the press — not merely just as guests but