Digital Marketing & Communications

We've already taken a detailed look at how outsourcing of social media could increase in 2012, but how else is the industry set to change in the coming year? There's a lot to be expected ...

The past year in technology was pretty wild.

The really big Internet IPO returned and the massive venture capital funding bubble inflated, which seems difficult considering that the venture capital industry is far smaller than it was three years ago. But look at some of the crazy valuations on revenue-less photo-sharing startups like Color and Path. And there is clearly another bubble inflating in the cloud computing sector, with every company that uses a distributed architecture now calling itself a “cloud company.” So what does 2012 have in store? Here are my predictions.

It wasn’t long ago that my focus was aimed entirely on search engine optimization, but in the last few years that view has shifted to include social media and how it works in combination with your SEO efforts.

Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open. Open.

Every chance they get, someone from Google brings this up as a huge advantage of Android over rivals like iOS. Never mind the fact that a good percentage of the time it’s pure marketing bullshit — why exactly isn’t Google Wallet on Google’s own Galaxy Nexus device? — even when it’s true, there are some very real downsides. The user experience angle has been debated ad nauseam. More interesting is what we’re seeing now. A downside for Google.

Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be?

The power of television in the 1950’s gave advertisers the ability to push messages out to a mass audience. Internet marketer HubSpot believes that shoving unwelcome messages at consumers is like using a sledgehammer. An outbound marketing strategy is based on the hope that mass messages will resonate with prospects. “This traditional, one-way marketing doesn’t work anymore. Consumers are already bombarded with thousands of marketing messages on a daily basis but the majority of them are ignored”, according to Scott Goodson, in his Forbes article, “Become a Social Business”.

  Image via CrunchBase Gamification is the latest buzzword on the street.

Let's be honest, any prediction piece can be written to put a good or a bad light on any of the mobile phone platforms and what to expect in 2012... so let's do that.

It is remarkable to think that we're in the early days of the app era, when there are already close to 600,000 iOS applications and nearly 400,000 on Android.

It wasn’t just here in the U.S. and it wasn’t just iPhone users; the app obsession has gone global and is now bigger than ever. We’ve already taken a look back at the big themes of app development in 2011. But here’s a look at some of the most interesting statistics involving the abundance of mobile apps we devoured this year:

The link above leads to a post by TechCrunch’s MG Siegler about the perils of the open Android OS to Google: major competitors will hijack Android by building their own version, and then lock Google’s services out. MG observes that Amazon is starting to do this: the Kindle Fire redirects attempts to go to Google’s Android Market to the Amazon App Store. Facebook is rumored to be working on an Android-based Facebook phone. Both Amazon and Facebook have search ambitions. And, MG points out that Windows, to which Android is frequently compared (e.g., by me), was never open: it was completely controlled by Microsoft and could not be hijacked or otherwise copied.

Google Analytics is one of the most valuable resources for webmasters, marketers, business owners, bloggers, and anyone who does practically anything online. The following are 50 resources to help you get to know Google Analytics inside and out.

What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.

How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features into their products that helped spread the word.

Let me explain.

Google's Andy Rubin has revealed that the company is seeing more than 700,000 new Android activations each day.

The one biggest problem in social media at the moment is noise and trying to filter all the information that is flying past us in real time but a new...