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I asked my fortune-teller, gazed into my crystal ball, and came up with this list of predictions for 2008:
- Social media overload. Too many services. Too many guides to using them effectively. Too many high hopes.
- Death of email marketing. Finally. Yes, this is one bandwagon I didn’t expect to hop on – a prediction I hoped would never come true.
- StumbleUpon and Twitter gain mindshare. People use one to communicate quickly, the other to share favorites and network.
- Postcard renaissance. The good ole lowly stamped-and-mailed postcard will see a resurgence as reliable communication becomes the need of the hour.
- Open social identity. Someone will discover the online, digital, globally relevant equivalent of the Social Security number. But will everyone adopt it?
- To each man his blog. It’s the online version of an Englishman’s home – a ‘castle’ where one is King (or Queen). Blogs’ll get more popular, not less.
- Trust, influence and attention become the new currency of power on the Web. Dollar valuations will follow shortly.
- Global microbrands fulfill their promise. Everyone is a brand. Every brand has a voice. That voice determines one’s impact.
What’s YOUR prediction for 2008 – care to share?
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Wow! You’re a 59 in Technorati? That’s crazy! Good for you.
Predictions. I agree with the overload. I think there is a call for an Adium/Trillian application for these social media networks. Dean Whitbread says that’s Flock. I don’t agree. I think it has to be even more dynamic. Something like Snitter, only across Twitter/Facebook/Utterz/Pownce, etc.
I think that postcards COULD come back. I just wish there were a way to get stamps even easier. I guess most ATMs offer them now. I’ll have to make a better effort to find them.
I’m hoping that social identity finds a home somewhere. If not OpenSocial, then perhaps something in the OpenID stack somehow. I want it, that’s for sure. I just don’t know where.
Anyhow, great things to think about. Thank you!
Agree with most of your predictions here, because, well, I think a lot of these are already in the works.
One thing you failed to mention, though, which I think will be big next year, is mobile. I personally have high hopes for Android, and I think mobile services will get more and more significant.
I’ll disagree on the email marketing. Promotional email may decline – that is, blasts to mailing lists about this or that special – but email itself is still the lifeblood of marketing and social networks. Name one major social networking service that doesn’t ask you for your address book as soon as you sign up.
Email marketing is more likely to change into notification service (Facebook says you have 8 million friend requests) and content-driven newsletters.
Ultimately, I think you can boil down your post into three key areas – attention, content, and trust. Great content drives attention and trust, and what delivery platform (blog, email, SL, twitter) will depend on the audience.
Good stuff.
If e-mail marketing is dead, Aweber and GetResponse would be put out of business, along with the insistence on the list building model.
Unless e-mail marketing/LB can be re-applied effectively from a fresh angle. I like to hear a 2nd opinion.
Not surprisingly, the earliest contrarian comments are about email marketing.
For weeks, I’ve participated in discussion on email alternatives with better deliverability. My own email responsiveness rates (and I track them fanatically), despite using Aweber, are dropping worryingly. Over-crowded inboxes and shorter attention spans, combined with ISP policies and Web-based email provider action makes email delivery pretty much a crap shoot – not just for marketing email, but even personal messages.
I’ve started using postcards more actively. @ChrisBrogan – not sure, but I think Stamps.com lets you print them off on your PC. I use the USPS Netcards to mail out postcards to a list, entirely online and automated, at reasonable cost. SendOutCards.com is another such service.
Thanks for the feedback.
All success
Dr.Mani
P.S. @ChrisBrogan – Wish I were ‘rank’ 59 – it’s actually inbound links that are reflected in that widget
I think the two points most designed to spur conversation here are the death of email and the resurgence of postcards. Everything else seems pretty logical.
Email: I can’t tell you the last time I clicked through on a mailing list notification. I despise them, as do most humans. Rattle your sabers all you want, email marketing gurus, but until you fix the system, it’s broken and useless (to me, anyway).
Postcards: It’d be cool to see a resurgence of old-school mail, but many things make that unlikely — cost, convenience, ecology (why waste the paper?), and the average person’s disdain for allowing even MORE physical crap to pile up in the office.
My prediction? The attention span and audience desire for quality, longer-form original video content across multiple delivery channels will increase. The writer’s strike isn’t making anyone wish there were MORE lousy TV shows to choose from — just more GOOD content. If people with DV cams and ingenuity can provide that, the opportunity for their success is obvious.
Well at least you have not predicted the demise of the blog. I’m just getting started.
I was going to write to Chris and say that here in the UK I think we can get stamps online.
Pleased to see that Twitter will succeed.
Disappointed that you have not mentioned one of my favourites which is SpinVox. It save all that typing when posting to Twitter from your mobile and translates voice to text which is wonderful.
If we aren’t already in social media overload, I loathe seeing what it really is.
Also, influence and attention already seem to be huge currencies on the web. E.g., insane prices for web 2.0 companies without the revenue to justify them.
Regarding postcards, that seems kind of out of left field. Email, IM, and SMS are very reliable, and barring some kind of infrastructure catastrophe, I don’t see how postcards could resurge.
“Open social identity” I hope will become a part of the OpenID stack, though Open Social may serve that purpose too.
Finally, I completely agree about Twitter. No learning curve and utter simplicity make it the killer social network.
Good post.
@Justin, great point re video. It was predicted to be the ‘next coming’ for 2006, then 2007. YouTube really did explode. Yet, there will always be technology (read bandwidth) limitations to online video in many parts of the world for a few more years, I suspect. My own broadband isn’t anything to boast about – and my part of the world is
pretty‘relatively’ advanced in this area.As for postcards, they are not expensive, and automating the process is possible with some services. I take 10 to 15 minutes to set up a postcard mailing to around 300 people on my donors list. Ecology is another thing, as is office/home clutter.
@Dean – just you wait!
Social media sites will explode when niches get more involved. Seen the social network site for cookies that ran big advertising campaigns recently? ‘Social media’ is the next buzz word. It’ll get bigger before it gets better.
@DefogMyBlog – Sorry, don’t know what SpinVox is, will research it
Thanks for the feedback.
All success
Dr.Mani
“Someone will discover the online, digital, globally relevant equivalent of the Social Security number.”
It’s already been discovered: the email address. Can you name another unique identifier that spans international boundaries, still allows for some anonymity, and is easily understood and adopted by everyone who’s online?
Nice thought-provoking list.
I’m still not sure about the death of email marketing, although I would agree its role is changing. The thing that email can do, if it hasn’t been overused before, is to put information where it will be seen repeatedly.
A good email, full of information that is useful to the recipient with a few ads that offer items useful to the consumer is still one of the best types of marketing, in my opinion. A great example of this is Flylady. She sends out e-mails that people want to keep in their inbox and reread, often including a testimonial for one of the products that she sells. That doesn’t negate the fact that email is slow though.
Thinking about postcards. Will they really be cost/time effective for internet marketing? Aren’t they basically the snail mail version of Twitter?
The idea of an open social identity sounds scary to me. I really hope you are wrong about this one.
Tom Peters has been preaching microbrands for years. I’m glad to see the idea catching on.
Agreed, in the main.
Overload is definitely happening *now*, at least for us fogey-types. The idea Chris Brogan (and, I’m sure, others–too overloaded to check!) brought to light about some central filtering/aggregating system that’s smart and basically functions as the in-point of your mothership. Oh, lordy, what I wouldn’t do for that.
RE: postcards, I think they are the direct-Twitter of the offline world. I could not care less if I’m part of a mass (or even targeted) mailing; drop me a quick line in your own, smudgeable hand, and I will definitely pay attention. Value-added hard-copy newsletters (or somesuch) would also be great and would stand out. Most are too self-serving.
And if you aren’t already on the way to being a global microbrand, hop to it! I wish I’d grokked that—and the importance of having my own, private health insurance—back when startup costs were lower.
What a fearless forecast! Well, I just keep my fingers cross as the events to unfold in 2008. I believe that everything has its own time and accordingly has its own demise.
I agree with your list and thank you for having the courage to post it. I think the future of marketing will depend on how you differentiate yourself from all of the other “noise” out there.
One way is how you think about and treat your customers. It has become popular and the norm on the internet to automate the customer service end of things. As a person, I want to know that there is someone who cares that i just spent my money. Many times marketers don’t want to have to deal with customers. I think it is these businesses that will eventually get swallowed up. They are the ones who create the most noise in any case.
I would like to add that going forward, interaction with your customers in going to be key. Just giving them a satisfying experience isn’t going to be enough. Business owners are going to have to surpass what they have been doing and make their customers their fans. Word of mouth marketing, I like to call it. What better advertising for your products and services? Think about it…
Becky
I think that “death” is overstating email marketing’s chances somewhat.
Surely it depends on the demographic?
If I had a product aimed at the teens or twenty-somethings, then, sure, I’d not be pushing email that hard as part of the mix…
… but I don’t…
… I have a product whose core market is 30s-50s, and in that group, email has close to 100% penetration, but very few have Facebook accounts, let alone Twitter or a personal blog.
I run an opt-in mailing list – I send out a customer newsletter about twice a month (up from once a month a year ago). On days when I send that out, blog hits go up by over 100% on that day and over 80% the following day.
My newsletter typically consists of an ENTIRE article in the newsletter, plus links to half-a-dozen small articles on the blog.
Death of email marketing? Don’t think so.
Ask me this time next year
Mark in West Sussex, England
You’re completely right, email marketing is absolutely dead beyond a doubt. Package up all your house lists and email them to me for a proper burial.
@Susanna – You reminded me about an initiative the Australian Government was considering some years back, while I was training in Melbourne. The idea was to give every citizen a unique email address based on OCCUPATION.
So my email would have been drmani@doctor.com.au
If there were more than 1 ‘Dr.Mani’ – and you know there aren’t!
– the surname would be added, and then date of birth if necessary.
The nice thing about this would be that anyone could get in touch with you if they knew your name and occupation.
However, they likely didn’t factor in the extent of email abuse and spamming, with resulting safeguards ISPs were forced to implement. Today, there’s nothing LESS unique than an email address, I use around 35 of them ACTIVELY and have another 70 or so set up to autoresponders!
@Teeg – for years, I’ve hoped against hope it wouldn’t come to it – but sadly, considering response rates, I felt it’s time to write the dirge to email marketing. Sure, it’ll gasp along for a bit longer before finally breathing its last, but…
@communicatrix – I think that would become the next ‘killer app’ – if someone could come up with a meaningful, customizable way to aggregate content/material for our tastes from various social media networks. Oh lordy, I would too do anything for that
@Arnold – predicting takes little guts. Acting on them does, though
@Becky – I too agree that interpersonal interaction, even if only through the faceless digital media, needs to get more ‘intimate’ and individualized to translate into higher returns.
@Mark – I agree about the demographic sectoring of the prediction, but my focus was more on the fact that email doesn’t get delivered, leave alone get read and acted upon. That’s kind of universal. Good to hear your response rates are holding. Mine plummeted – and I tried ALL the tricks in the book to get them back up!
@John – How about we brainstorm on an e-funeral event – online?! We’d give anyone access… if they opt-in to our email lists
Thanks for the comments, folks.
All success
Dr.Mani
I would be very happy if Dr. Mani gives up all his lists and hands over them to me for last squeeze and twist before email marketing is really dead in the year 2008
Yes. I agree that it will be dead. But I also believe that you will keep people coming in to your lists before the e-funeral is really happen…that’s my prediction, Dr. Mani
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