With 2010 upon us, it is time to start thinking about what trends are in store for the next 12 months and beyond. Here at Alterian, we’ve worked with our customers and partners to put together a list of predictions that focus on more effective ways to engage with customers, as well as the importance of measurement and accountability.

If this past year has shown us anything, it’s that due to the recession we’ve seen online monitoring and analytics become a critical component to marketing programs.  Consumers now have the opportunity to become active participants in shaping brands online and smart businesses are listening, engaging while adding value to the active conversations happening around them.

 As we continue to see social media take hold and online monitoring become an important piece in the marketing puzzle, businesses will emerge from the recession looking to further strengthen engagement and interaction with their customers.

 Our list below predicts what we believe the next 10 marketing trends will be and what we believe will be important in 2010, what do you think? 

Let us know in the comments section which trend you’d like to see us dive into a bit deeper  and I’ll write a follow up blog on the topic that gets the most interest.

 1. Social media will move towards ubiquity: 

IDC survey data shows more than 50% of worldwide workers are leveraging the free, public social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook for business today. Rather than being hype it will simply become normal and part of the everyday mix that works alongside email as a principle form of communication online.

 2. Companies will have a social media policy: 

As social media continues to integrate into the marketing and business mix, formal rules of engagement will become more widespread. Many companies are likely to come up against conflict when they try to extend their social media efforts across the board. There will be a need for a significant culture shift in order to overcome these barriers. As social media continues to raise its profile amongst corporate divisions, more companies will invest in Social Media specialists to guide their efforts both internally and externally.

 3. Doing more with less: 

This has been the mantra for all businesses throughout 2009 but will continue through the adoption of analytics and marketing software. Marketing departments are under increasing pressure to improve effectiveness and efficiencies with marketing campaigns, and also to achieve more, all with decreased budgets. 2009 was about how to make your business machine run harder and faster in a bid to stay competitive in a downturn, where consumer spending is in decline or being replaced by reason to buy at all.  This will now convert into the need to not only prove the value of your products to consumers but also the value of your marketing strategies as a whole.

 4. Data analysts will become hot property for marketing departments: 

Introducing analytics, or better analytics means empowering marketing with intelligence about their customers and prospects, so they can more rapidly, and more accurately, identify the hidden value in their customer and prospect databases. Analyzing the operational efficiency of every marketing department and taking action as required also means a marketing dividend can be realised. This can either be used to increase marketing spend or to maintain marketing spend if budgets are reduced; in essence, do more with less.

 5. Measurability of marketers/measuring ROI: 

At a time of economic uncertainty, more companies look to uncover cost savings or serve customers more effectively through leveraging social technology. However, the increased pressure from the boardroom to justify marketing spend, or time investment, means that marketing departments have to show value by measuring ROI.

 6. Getting access to customer data: 

This has become more possible with the introduction of social media platforms, but gaining access to the right data, the right channels and the key sentiments about your brand requires effective online monitoring software.  Social Media offers the perfect opportunity to revolutionise CRM tools and build true customer engagement programmes that are bespoke for each individual consumer, thus helping to deliver ROI.

 7. The necessary technology for effective marketing: 

Companies without the right monitoring, reporting, analytics and execution software are companies without a future. With the increasing importance of the internet for businesses, online marketing and monitoring allow effective one on one engagement that shape successful and focused marketing campaigns.

 8. Integration of platforms and processes will be critical: 

There is a proliferation of things to monitor, measure and manage, making it very difficult and time consuming for marketers to pull together the overall picture for integrated campaigns. There will therefore be a move towards single integrated software platforms so that campaign planning and management are integrated with web and email.

9. Recalibrate marketing for engagement: 

Brands focus on content but with publishers desperate to protect revenues by charging for content, brands will increasingly look to develop content strategies that bring value to their customers.  Social Media Monitoring will be the key weapon for brands building these strategies.

 10. Consumer empowerment: 

Brand value will be influenced more and more by the consumer, making it more important than ever for a brand to have measures of authenticity that will aid in brand differentiation and consumer engagement – you can no longer rely on your brand name as you once did. Organisations are being increasingly judged by their actions and willingness to involve customers, visibly.

 Now that you’ve had a chance to read our predictions, what do you think?  Leave us a comment and give us your feedback. We look forward to hearing from you.

As a marketer and dedicated online blogger, writer, tweeter and so on, you come to realize that you need to know what people are saying about your brand and maybe you’ve decided that you need to be monitoring social media online.  But where do you go for this service? Google offers search, alerts, and now they’re adding Twitter results to their mix. But is that good enough? If you’re going to invest time in monitoring your brand then, in my opinion, you need to use a professional social media monitoring tool. Why? Because there are so many advantages that Google can’t begin to offer and never will.

For example; a search in Google brings back widely varying results and the further you go into the search results pages, the less relevant the results are. By using a dedicated social media monitoring tool the results come back relevant and clean from spam and duplicates. Another point to consider is that whenever you do a search in Google it depends on which Google database your search is hitting and what algorithm is being used that day – three months later the same search could bring back different results, making it impossible to accurately benchmark and analyze the data in any structured format. Some social media monitoring tools have stored and indexed historical results ensuring an accurate repeated search. Further to this, Google Alerts are limited to blogs and are not comprehensive at all – most media monitoring services gather from blogs, comments, forums, wikis and multimedia services like YouTube – relying on Google Alerts is only providing a small part of a much bigger picture.

Finally, Google doesn’t provide a dashboard to aggregate the gathered data where it can be reviewed and analyzed in order to gain insights and realize the potential of the results. Analyzing your data is the most valuable aspect of social media monitoring and without it your search efforts would be wasted! You can see volume by day, volume over time, the most frequently used words in the search, as well as sentiment and tone!

How does this affect your project in terms of time & resources? A real life example comes from a global PR agency. A quarterly audit of a major energy company used to take 12 people three weeks to complete and they sifted thru over 2.5 million Google search results! Fast forward to the present – it now takes two people three days to do the same reporting with a much higher degree of accuracy. What is that worth to your bottom line?

Google is a search engine which is quite different than a social media monitoring tool. Realizing its limitations is important when you are expanding your efforts in monitoring social media. And if you’re waiting for them to provide a free social media monitoring service, you may be waiting a long time!

Eric T Peterson – a veteran of the web analytics business, Principal Consultant at Web Analytics Demystified and author some of must read books on Web Analytics – has published a report on what he sees as the current revolution in Web Analytics.

This report focuses on the needs for businesses to not just create reports but to develop insights and recommendations from the data – something that when I am talking about web engagement I have referred to as ‘actionable insight’ and it’s about more than pretty graphs.

Peterson also discusses the data that organisations are capturing and reporting on, the wealth of data available to organizations, from web analytics, to credit card transactions to observations about location – GPS data. He also covers the privacy issues wrapped around that – that people will give up their data, but it has to be in exchange for something valuable to them.

I like Peterson’s analogy of it being like money – the difference between using the money you have and just storing it – in terms of the potential rewards. As the report says:

If today’s business leaders want to take advantage of this treasure trove of intelligence about customers and prospects, a new approach is required. First and second‐generation analytic vendors are good at what they do, but mining for correlation and causation within massive, disparate online and offline data sets is simply not what they do. To take the next step, business owners need to explicitly recognize the inherent limitations in these systems and augment them with appropriate systems that are built to extract, transform, load and analyze data regardless of the source.

With certain symmetry with our own Customer Engagement vision, he refers to a third generation of analysis tools that are bringing this together – that companies who treat offline and online as separate data silos will concede ground to their competition that look at this more holistically across their enterprise.

As the report concludes:

The only thing worse than not having data, is having data and not being able to use it.

You can read more about what Peterson has to say or download a copy of the report here.