- Digital spending moved ahead but failed to shake up the status quo. While B2B marketers wrestle with a more complex marketing mix, digital channels have finally gained much needed mindshare. Web sites and email topped the list of the most popular marketing tactics, and search marketing moved up six percentage points since our last report. However, conventional approaches like trade shows, PR, direct mail, print advertising, sponsorships, and executive events still dominated the marketing mix in 2009. Will 2010 show even more dramatic changes?

- Traditional tactics commanded the lion’s share of B2B budgets. Conventional marketing tactics continued to capture big chunks of B2B marketer budgets. In fact, traditional tactics had a tight grip on the five top spots in our list of the most expensive B2B tactics. Coming in sixth, the company Web site was the only digital tactic to scrape together a double-digit percentage of the budget.

- Social media managed to make only a few budget inroads in 2008-09. Virtual trade shows, community sites, rich media (video, podcasts, etc.), blogs, and other Web 2.0 tools like RSS subscriptions, mashups, and widgets got the B2B budget scraps. Yet, while marketers try to work out social media’s place in the marketing mix, we were pleased to see, when taken together, these tactics accrued more than 10% of the marketing budget. this year may show some surprising changes in this category. Marketing tactic choices and budgets may have changed, comments welcome.

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1. Easy to read copy – no keyword laden SEO copywriting anymore
2. Easy to digest copy – shorter sentences with less technical jargon where possible
3. Easy to follow copy – give each page a theme and take the consumer with you
A. Change in emphasis on a page start talking with the consumer not at them (after too many years at university was a shock)
4. Provide out going links – show them what other people say about the product or service
5. Provide testimonials – show them what other customers have said – combining that with the outgoing links works even better

All these things put the customer more at ease and helped convince the visitor that they had found what the needed. To my mind they still weren’t sold – conversion rate was too low. So refine the technique further – removing all the barriers to sale.

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Microblogging like Twitter.com is search engine friendly and not over done, yet. This lens is to show you how to use Twitter for SEO to help your position on the SERP and drive traffic to your site. Since Twitter started gaining popularity the question about its SEO value has been on the minds of many webmasters who obviously want to boost their placement into Google. But using Twitter for link juice is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology.

Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines, to ignore the link. Some of these follow the links but exclude them from their ranking calculations (Yahoo!, Google); some ignore the links completely (MSN). The only known search engine that doesn’t comply with Google’s “nofollow” at all is Ask.com. This example alone shows that Google’s algorithms are not the gospel for all search engines.

Once you see a Tweets interactive map you will start seeing how absolutely incredible twitter is and how TV stations are using it to broadcast breaking news, traffic stations are using it to tell people about accidents to avoid, regular people are using it to promote products, people are using it for conversations, doctors use to prescribe, people are using it to make introductions and so on. It is an absolutely incredible thing. It isn’t perfect because sometimes the volume of traffic shuts the service down temporarily, however, anyone with good content or something positive to say can build a small following rather quickly. When you have what you think is a great post – put it on twitter. Although the traffic hasn’t been massive, you do get a fair amount from twitter.

There are also other benefits from using twitter. The key is to use your domain name if you can and post about things that are on your front page. That way the people who capture twitter’s public timeline via the API will also capture the link to your site. That way you can market your post, build backlinks to your site and market yourself. If people don’t want to hear what you have to say, they simply won’t subscribe. Everyone needs to be doing something with twitter!!

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One of the best ways of using RSS is on other peoples websites. As RSS can be integrated to display on other websites easily many will aggregate your content into their website. This is a great benefit to your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign.

Every time you update your feed anyone aggregating your feed will update their links to your site. Every new page listed will get a link. Each of these links, generally, will use your ‘Title Tag’ as the anchor text. They may also use your url as well. So assuming you have good quality search engine, and user focussed, title tags and URLs within your website you get more links.

Discovering new places to get your RSS feed syndicated is an exciting business. If you can find someone willing to syndicate your content, especially if the syndication source is ‘on topic’, you could have constantly developing links, pointing to your new pages when they go live, and you get to control your anchor texts – try getting that from a standard directory.

Well this bits easy. just stick in your feed, generally if you meet the conditions of the site you’ll get in. On many there could be ways of getting increased visibility – some may just stick you in the directory.

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Apps are undoubtedly the poster boys of the smartphone revolution. With more than 100,000 of them now available, their diversity is clearly appealing to a broad audience. Of the 17m mobile subscribers who used an app in October 2009, maps were the most popular, followed by weather, social networking and search apps.

In many ways the mobile internet will this year finish what the fixed internet started. One could argue that the internet has always been fundamentally flawed: the most up-to-the minute, real-time distribution mechanism in the history of media is constrained by access and hardware. The mobile internet looks set to rectify this, providing round-the-clock, immediately accessible news, information, entertainment and communications. At the risk of hailing the coming of yet another false dawn, expect the mobile internet to be big in 2010.

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I hope you’ll find my first Forrester blog post thought provoking:

It is that time of year when every blogger, reporter and analyst is publishing their 2010 Social Media and marketing predictions. (It’s a rather odd phenomenon–aren’t we interested in what’s happening in the next twelve months other than in December?) Forrester’s own Social Media prediction report will soon be released, but I’d like to make my own big prediction: 2010 will be the year marketing–as we know it–dies. Let’s explore the trends and what they mean to marketers.

Marketing’s been under attack for some time, but in 2009 we witnessed the most profound evolution the marketing world has seen in fifty years or more. The pace of change is not going to lessen in 2010. Core elements that have driven marketing practices for decades–such as messaging strategy, mass media, PR, advertising, and others–will continue to change rapidly.

The latest news from the print world is unsurprising: Average weekday circulation at 379 U.S. newspapers fell 10.6% during the six months ending in September–the steepest decline ever recorded by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. And although a recent study found that consumer spending on subscription media increased 7% in the past year, that didn’t mean subscriptions in the traditional sense–the number of households subscribing to magazines dropped two percentage points while subscriptions for home video and smartphone services were both up.

On the television front, households with DVRs tripled in just three years, more consumers are avoiding ads, and a majority feels there is “too much advertising.” One cannot help but feel sorry for networks and media companies worried about matching ad revenue to expenses, but their response is a bit hard to swallow. TiVo is showing ads to viewers as they are trying to skip other ads, and TNS Media Intelligence tells us that “marketing content represents 43 percent of a prime-time hour”–11:46 minutes per hour of in-show Brand Appearances (a 31% increase from a year ago) and 14:07 of network commercial messages.

Certainly, someone has to pay for Fringe, Glee, and The Office to be produced, but chasing down consumers and bludgeoning them with more advertising messages hardly feels like an effective strategy. (By the way, I selected those three shows for a reason: according to the latest Entertainment Weekly, almost one in five people viewing those programs is time shifting, and you can guess what that means for advertisers.)

The story on the Internet isn’t much better. Hulu is striving mightilyto avoid being forced to go the way of TV and load their content with more ads. Social Media sites like Facebook are so loaded with ads that a consumer spending ten minutes on the site might be exposed to as many as 90 easy-to-ignore ads. To improve low attention and meager clickthrough rates, advertisers hope to enhance their targeting of consumers based on their online behavior, but the long-threatened intervention of the government may be at hand. This year could finally be the year that the Feds change the way online advertising works; said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz recently, “We’re at another watershed moment in privacy, and the time is right for the commission … to take a broader look at privacy.”

Marketers have, of course, taken note of the power of Social Media, but they continue to struggle with what to do and how to measure it. In a recent study, 64% of CMOs said they plan to increase their social media budgets next year, but “at least half of respondents expressed uncertainty about ROI.” It strikes me as quite concerning that the top metrics being utilized–mentioned by more than 80% of the CMOs–aren’t deep measures of influence or attitude but shallow measures of presence, such as number of fans and page views.

Meanwhile, it’s possible (although not likely) that the Social Media landscape could change yet again if Facebook stumbles in 2010. (Don’t think it could happen? Remember that 13 months ago MySpace was drawing more visitors than Facebook; today Facebook draws 150% more than MySpace.) Facebook is facing potentially serious challenges. Some are predicting that young people could soon stream off the site to avoid status updates from mom and dad; by one report, just 50% of the 15-24 crowd is checking Facebook regularly, compared to 55% last year. More people are complaining (and suing) about being caught in scams from third-party developers on Facebook. And faced with the growing privacy concerns of its users, how did Facebook react? By implementing changes that many feel make it not just more difficult to protect their privacy, but actually remove privacy protections from some sorts of data.

Facebook seems unlikely to go the way of Friendster (if for no other reason than a serious competitor has yet to emerge), but even if Facebook finds itself being MySpaced in 2010, Social Media is here to stay. The influence of the masses will only continue to grow as Social Media tools improve and more and older consumers climb the Social Technographics Ladder, moving from Inactives, Spectators, and Joiners to Collectors, Critics, and Creators.

Social Media has just begun to change the way marketing and business operates. The coming year will see advertising put under the microscope by a connected, savvy, and critical consumer (just ask Motrin and Unilever). Consumers will use Social Media to exert more influence over marketing and business decisions (see Tropicana and EA). The best practices for brands in Social Media will continue to evolve (and woe be to brands caught violating consumer trust, as demonstrated by recent missteps by individuals at Honda and Belkin). And some multi-million-dollar marketing budgets will be challenged and undermined by simple consumer-generated videos (see the Domino’s employee video–or better yet, don’t!)

As we enter 2010, consumers have new partners that will help to expand the reach of Social Media dialog even further–the big three search sites. Bing, Yahoo and Google recently made changes to the way their search engines index the real-time web, and status updates and tweets are rapidly finding their way into top search results. This means that consumers searching for brands and campaigns are increasingly likely to see results that include blogged and tweeted criticisms as they are links to official brand sites.

The search engine changes mean that 2010 will be the year when brands can run but they cannot hide. Gone are the days when marketers could carefully craft messaging and then broadcast that message in a few channels to huge portions of their audiences. Oh, you can still spend money that way if you want to but in our transparent world, no marketing budget can possibly overcome the actual experience consumers have (and share with friends, followers and Google) with the product, service, or organization. It no longer matters what you say; in 2010, your brand will be more defined by what you do and who you are!

Of course, if marketing burns to the ground in 2010, a new and more powerful marketing will rise from the ashes. The role of the new marketer:

* Won’t be simply to focus on outbound messaging but to consult with sales, customer service, and human resources on how the brand must be communicated in every consumer interaction, every tweet, and every touchpoint,
* Won’t be merely to imagine creative messages but to fashion programs that are seamless with the actual product and service experience,
* Won’t be to plan bursts of communication on a yearlong calendar but to respond to and be part of the ever-changing dialog with consumers,
* Won’t be to count friends, page visits, eyeballs, readers, or viewers but to measure changes in consumer attitude and intent,
* Won’t be merely to talk at consumers but to listen and engage one to one,
* Won’t be to build campaigns but relationships,
* Won’t be to create impressions but experiences, and
* Won’t be buy media but to earn it.

To some of you, these changes sound easy, but they represent painful transitions for marketing organizations. In 2010 and the years that follow, everything will change: job expectations, skills, metrics, structure, budgets, agency demands and compensation, and the role of the marketing function within the organization. While the changes will be difficult, they will also be extraordinarily exciting. In the end, the marketing organization will be integral partners in everything the enterprise does, living up to Peter Drucker’s famous quote:

“Business has only two basic functions — marketing and innovation.”

Marketing is dead. Long live marketing!

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Yet as popular as these themes have become, they're often loosely applied across the industry and essentially no one is speaking the same language. Therefore we just published research defining each type of media and providing interactive marketers with prescriptive advice on how to best apply them. Here's a summary of how we defined each type of online media and their roles:

Ultimately these types of media work best together but making the hard choices of what to include and what not to include is crucial – especially when budgets are tight. But if you simply start by categorizing your media and identifying the right roles based on your objectives, then your on the right path. Here are some high level takeaways that you should consider when developing your 2010 interactive media strategy:

• Create a solar system of owned media. Owned media is a channel you control. There is fully-owned media (like your website) and partially-owned media (like Facebook fan page or Twitter account). Owned media creates brand portability. Now you can extend your brand's presence beyond your web site so that it exists in many places across the web – specifically through social media sites and unique communities. In a recession in which marketing budgets are being cut by 20%, the ability to communicate directly with consumers who want to engage with your brand through long-term relationships can be invaluable.  
• Recognize that earned media is a result of brand behavior. "Earned media" is an old PR term that essentially meant getting your brand into free media rather than having to pay for it through advertising. However the term has evolved into the transparent and permanent word-of-mouth that is being created through social media. You need to learn how to listen and respond to both the good (positive organic) and bad (spurned) as well as consider when to try and stimulate earned media through word-of-mouth marketing.
• Your paid media is not dead, but it is evolving into a catalyst. Many people are predicting the end of paid media (aka advertising). However, that prediction may be premature as no other type of media can guarantee the immediacy and scale that paid media can. However, paid media is shifting away from the foundation and evolving into a catalyst that is needed at key periods to drive more engagement(e.g. Q4 holidays).

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Instead, I hear more and more about the rise of the demand side platform or "DSP." (Full disclosure: my husband works at one of them.) But it's not my husband who has convinced me of this sea change (although don't tell him that!)  Rather, it's the marketers themselves who are embracing the data and advertiser driven DSP model. There are many companies who call themselves DSP's, some already established like AdChemy, x+1 and Media Math but there are others are cropping up recently including Turn, DataXu, AppNexus and others. Most have a combination of optimization and data targeting that is geared for marketers, with a buying strategy that mostly takes advantage of inventory on ad exchanges. What will separate winners from losers are quality of the services and technologies that make up the offering. In other words, are they easy to work with and do they provide results?

With the rise of independent DSP has also come a crop of automated buying platforms created by the agencies, including Vivaki, WPP's B3 and Havas' AdNetic. Many in the industry wonder if agencies have the technical and analytical chops to compete with the independent shops. But no one denies that they have great positioning in the market, already working with the very advertisers the product is meant to serve.

It's very possible that these two forces in the industry will replace what ad networks have done for marketers in the past. Certainly, my alma mater, Ad.com no longer exists the way it once did.

Look for a lot more research on this shifting landscape in the near term from Forrester.

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