« Ogilvy Group UK Home

2010 is set to be the year that social media marketing graduates. The year when it will be included, as a matter of course, in 360 communications plans. We have seen many brands in the last year turning to social as an answer to stripped down budgets. And only to be surprised that creating an engaging voice in the social web is not as “free” as first assumed.

The 2010 graduation will bring with it a host of changes - technical, communicative and cultural. All of which will contribute to the marketing mix becoming ever more integrated. However, that true integration is not only dependant on the structure of agencies and businesses but on cementing a true social media approach in both PROs’ and clients’ attitudes.

As the web becomes ever more “real time” the inevitable question is what will happen when it can anticipate our movements, thoughts, feelings and wants before we actually have them. Brian Solis started discussions about the “Predictive Web” this month on his blog, and he may well be hitting on a point of interest for 2010. Services such as PlanCast, that allow us to update followers ahead of time about what we will be up to, are likely to be a focus of 2010 and beyond.

2009 was about getting involved with social media. Many brands were grappling to develop their online presence by tacking social media amplification at the end of a campaign, rather than adopting a fully integrated strategy. 2010 is the year of measurement and social media’s full integration into communication plans.

As users will require ways to access all of the sites they are involved with from one place and manage them all at once. This will lead to the rise in the popularity of lifestreaming tools and the management of online presences.

The popularity of applications, widgets is rising as consumers require easy-to-use tools to navigate the social web. Brands are increasingly likely to adopt this way of interacting with consumers by producing something of use and interest to their customers.

Sending a DM tweet to a contact whilst out for lunch and updating your Facebook status on the way home from work is nothing new. However, the idea of being in contact wherever and whenever is set to reach new heights of popularity this year as more and more people choose internet enabled mobile devices for staying connected 24/7 with GPS and location based capabilities to tie into new services such as Four Square.

I had the pleasure of filming an interview with ex-dragons den, current investor at large – Richard Farleigh. A man who has made his millions through taking risks in the post-dot-com-fallout and has worked with hundred of companies to drive business success.

This video was filmed as part of the wider work we are doing at Ogilvy for IBM’sFuture Focus programme, looking at how businesses can work smarter by utilizing advances in technology and communications.

Smart technology is a funny one, some of the simple things that we as the “young digerati” take for granted are the very systems and practices that will become the future of business communications. Talking with a friend who is far more clued up on the subject (@gemmapercy for more info), it dawned on me that so much of the tech that forms the discourse around “cloud” computing and “viruslisation” is not tales of future technology, but present technology. Facilities such as Google Docs, delicious and Amazon’s S3 storage are already changing the way we work.

Far more of our everyday data is being stored in “the cloud” rather than on our hard disks, from our databases, contacts and bookmarks to our personal data such as photos and increasingly video. As Russel M Davies points out in his article on Amazon S3 in this June’s issue of Wired UK – I too would rather trust Google with my contacts than my own ability to sit on my assortment of handheld media centres (the less fortunate of which glare at me every time I open my desk drawer). It is more or less a weekly occurrence that I get invited to a facebook group of one of my clumsier chums who has sat on / dropped / digested in drunken stupor their phone and now require me to send them my number. Which proves a number of things a) my friends are stupid, b) there are many people that I am very glad now have no ability to call me (not that they ever had reason to before hand) and c) that we may all be better of outsourcing our personal lives to the likes of Google or Amazon.