Brand & Capture

Facebook is set to make many changes this year. With Graph Search rolling out and Emoticons and activity moods now inducted into status updates, Facebook has come through with yet another announcement: the Facebook Hashtag. This feature, similar to the way the hashtag operates on Twitter, will possibly be the hottest new targeting tool on the market. 

Most people will tell you advertising is a subset of marketing, one of the activities you do to help promote your brand and sell products to customers. I think the relationship between advertising and marketing is much more subtle. Marketing is advertising. I know, I'm opening a big can of worms among marketers who try to avoid any association with advertising, but hear me out.

Google recently filed for a patent called "Advertising Based on Environmental Conditions.” This would theoretically take advantage of technology in common digital devices such as your television, X-box Kinect, digital appliances, apps, laptops, smart phones and anything else to build a consumer profile based on the “background noise” it picks up.

No, it's not a typo in the title. While most marketers are busy transforming themselves into digital natives, Chief Marketing Officers are dragging their feet. According to Marketing Daily, a recent IBM survey of 1700 CMOs around the world showed some surprising results. We might assume that those people responsible for steering the marketing ship would also be first adopters and change advocates. Quite the contrary.

I was watching my favorite new show, Top Gear, last night and was inspired to blog about it. Here's the setup. 3 guys, two amateurs like me and one professional driver, get to drive their fantasy high performance cars and trash talk each other. Perfect. Last night, 3 top of the line Lamborghinis. It was epic. One amateur won bragging rights by doing a standing quarter mile topping out at 180 mph in a Superleggera. Yeah, I know, I'm salivating. Major league bucket list stuff, but where's the marketing "takeaway"? Well, obviously if you can get your hands on one of these cars, just slap up a simple call-to-action on your site, and you're an inbound marketing legend. But what can us mere mortals do to take our online businesses from 0-to-60 in 3.2 seconds?

From an estimated $4.5 billion last year, inbound marketing on social media networks is expected to grow to $38 billion by 2015, according to a new report released by Borrell Associates, Inc., a Virginia media research and consulting firm. Last year more than $1.5 million local U.S. business owners employed social networks in their inbound marketing campaigns, accounting for half of marketing spending. Facebook pages were the most popular new marketing stratagem, but blogs, Twitter, calls to action, specially designed landing pages and website redesign were also popular choices for building and strengthening Internet marketing campaigns.

At its outset, many characterized social media marketing as frivolous and the latest certain to be short-lived web trend. But like radio, television and the Internet, all in their early days also considered upstarts with questionable staying power, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have proven their effectiveness to build brands, attract customers, drive sales and develop business-customer relationships. In our increasingly computer-driven world, social media marketing is not merely here to stay but the fastest, brightest path to the future.

Though direct mail pieces are historically considered relatively low-conversion marketing initiatives, powerful direct mail design can make all the difference between an effective campaign and a dud.

It's always fun to wrap up a year with predictions for the next. I'll let the designers weigh in on their predictions for web design in 2010, and I've listed some good blogs to check out below. Maybe I can even perturb our designers into responding with their ideas. My spin is on business influences. How does marketing strategy impact web design in this day and age? Here are some trends I'm seeing.

So we're constantly badmouthing outbound marketing and pushing inbound marketing. You know what I'm talking about - the relentless TV ads, direct mail and spam that gets delivered to your door 24/7. It's not all bad though. Some of it makes us laugh, and the rest, well...