Three Online Marketing Movements To Engage In

Understanding the interaction between search, social media and content translates into opportunity for brands and marketers, such as yourself, to engage an active online marketing strategy that celebrates diversity of channels – provided such efforts are customer focused.

The future of online marketing brings the best of these disciplines together. To meet consumer needs, whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s inevitable and a must that PR will know SEO and Social Media Marketers with be versed in media relations.

Relevance, timeliness and ability to share is the coveted trifecta to win with modern online marketing. That means offering better content and better visibility in all the places customers might be looking or influenced by. It also means a better experience in brand / consumer interactions.

I'm sure many of you out there are like me when it comes to wanting to know and learning about the latest online marketing trends. Here are 3 areas that you will want to be paying attention to in the coming year...

Content Marketing: Brands have begun adopting a publisher model of marketing through content as evidenced by the growth of “content marketing” and “content curation”. This will continue and get increasingly competitive for those that can afford to scale original content and media.

Mobile and Tablet: These days this is an obvious trend prediction. As of late 2010, more Americans own mobile devices, including tablets, than computers. Search, social, local and apps all offer opportunities for consumer sales and engagement on mobile devices. Social networking is one of the top 3 uses of mobile phones and as apps and tablets dominate the market, more time will be spent there and away from personal computers. This means you will need to spend more of that annual budget and strategy time in this growing arena.

Social Business: When you evaluate the impact of the social web on overall business outcomes, it’s easy to see why companies like IBM are adopting social business models. Companies that incorporate social media literacy and empowerment from within will empower their employees, partners and customers to act collectively on behalf of the brand.

Within each of these areas lies an important consideration for how brands will connect people with content and experiences that create awareness, confidence, relationships, sharing and conversions.

Working in “The Cloud”…

Even though the term “Cloud Computing” may still be relatively new, what are the chances people will begin to work remotely once businesses start to implement a cloud platform? I can attest that with a 30 mile commute to work each day, the thought of working from home sometimes is very appealing. How appealing is it from a business aspect though? Can a business survive totally in the cloud? Could a business run from a “virtual” office?

This could definitely work for a business that had all of their applications hosted in the cloud. Think about it… if you used a service like Gmail or Outlook Cloud for all of your emails, met with Skype for all of your meetings, texted via MSN Messenger and could access all of your software applications via the cloud, so you could literally pull this off! What would the significant drawbacks be? I suppose you could say that there is no way to track the amount of work that an employee does, but we all know that that can all be tracked and stored in the cloud. You could say that not everybody knows their way around the internet. That would have been a logical excuse to make in 1997, but it’s 2011 now, and it should be a prerequisite to be fluent online. I guess you could say that it would lower the morale of the employees because of the lack of social interaction, but that’s why we have friends… right? You could even say the obvious, like… “What if we lose our internet connection?” That’s about the only legitimate excuse I could think of, but even with that it’s only temporary, so go outside for a short walk.

Honestly, I just can’t think of a single reason why a business, particularly in industries such as marketing, design, software, etc... couldn’t survive entirely in the cloud. I’m not saying that all businesses could survive in the cloud, but I think that a decent percentage could. Think about the infrastructure of your business. Is there anything that you need to do each day that you couldn’t do via the web? If you can’t think of anything, then you my friend could work in the cloud!