1.6 FIVE KEY TRENDS

                              FIVE KEY TRENDS

 

Transmedia Storytelling

 Brands (and individual bloggers) will need to start ramping it up and telling their stories across multiple platforms, from blog to video to Twitter and back around again.
Currently a hot topic amongst filmmakers and game developers, transmedia storytelling will start to enter the mainstream of marketing in 2013, as brands start to leverage multiple platforms and properties simultaneously in support of the same campaign or goals. In a practical sense, transmedia storytelling for brands will incorporate visual platforms such as Instagram and video into campaigns; more broadly, brands should start to think about gaming and augmented reality (see next trend).
The emergence of transmedia will be a big shift for many digital marketers, most of whom are only recently (and perhaps reluctantly) comfortable with the idea of telling the brand story through the written word of blogs, eBooks, Twitter and Facebook.  Add in photos, videos and possibly games, and the digital marketer’s job scope is going to change dramatically.

Augmented Reality

Google wants you to be able to wear glasses that annotate or gamify your world, and they’ve already got an app which does just that.
So marketers, wise up.
If the C-suite already knows what this is, you need to too. They’re interested in it because many luxury brands are already using AR, and where luxury goes, the rest of consumers will typically follow.
For most digital marketers, AR is something to consider when developing mobile apps, creating new ad campaigns, or extending the brand through transmedia offerings.  A cool and clever AR app could be just the right thing to propel your brand ahead in 2013.

Influence

 While this is not yet perfect, some platforms, including Appinions  and, theoretically, Klout, have managed to bring together social media metrics with other factors including whether or not their opinions manifest in major publications or if they have a presence on Wikipedia.
The former assign an individual a score which supposedly represents their influence level – but I personally find it impossible to believe in any system which assigns a score to the hair of a fictional character.
Digital marketers who want to work with influencers need to figure out which platform to rely on in order to determine who will be the best fit for their brand or campaign.

Big Data

For digital marketers of the analytics and data persuasion, the growing corporate focus on Big Data won’t be much of a shift. SEO people and marketing analysts have been using internal and external data for years to help tell marketing and brand stories, and glean valuable insights out of numbers.  For the rest of us, who are “gut” or creative marketers, Big Data will represent a sea change in how we approach our work.
The ability to take sales, customer, or even Twitter data and turn it into patterns and segments is at the crux of what Big Data is and does. All of this data is no longer locked deep in the bowels of your corporate systems, and so now you need to figure out what you want to get out of it to inform your marketing efforts.

Evolution of the Marketing Team

 All marketers will be expected to at least understand social media, though specialists will continue to do the day-to-day heavy lifting of social media execution (as with SEO gurus).
And, as my colleague Nichole Kelly recently wrote, we’re also seeing a huge shift in how people work, how teams are formed and managed, and where and when they work. So your team may soon be distributed across time and space, and you’d better be ready for that shift too.