All indications are that Digital Marketing is seeing strong growth, particularly in the B2B sector. According to the latest data from Forrester Research, spending on Digital Marketing will grow from $27M last year to $54M by 2014 – that’s doubling the market size in 5 years! “Social marketing is great for building more intimate relationships with your clients and prospects,” wrote Forrester’s Michael Greene. “But many marketers are diving into social marketing without a coherent social marketing strategy.”
For more details on the numbers the gang a Mashable put together this great infographic below. See the full article at the Mashable Business Blog.
Our friends over at Mashable have put together a great overview assessment of where we’ve been and the potential evolution of social media over the next 5 years. Below is a excerpt. See the full article at Mashable.com
Over the last five years, social media has evolved from a handful of communities that existed solely in a web browser to a multi-billion dollar industry that’s quickly expanding to mobile devices, driving major changes in content consumption habits and providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.
With that framework in place, the next five years are going to see even more dramatic change. Fueled by advancements in underlying technology – the wires, wireless networks and hardware that make social media possible – a world where everything is connected awaits us. The result will be both significant shifts in our everyday lives and a changing of the guard in several industries that are only now starting to feel the impact of social media.
Where do you think we are headed with social media ?
This is a real winner! I have tried lots of new products and feature enhancements to help manage my daily flood of email, but the new Priority Inbox feature that Google has rolled out this week is the best I have seen in a long time. It was easy to setup and I found three overlooked important messages the first time I used it.
I have relied on Google’s excellent spam filters for years to sift the bogus crap out of my inbox, but I have trouble finding the messages from real people hidden in the jumble of newsletters, service update notices, the latest offers from my favourite companies, and those friends that insist on forwarding every email they read to everyone they know. I am sure that I am not alone.
Yes you can use your email client’s inbox rules to help sort things out, but what about when you use webmail or a mobile device to access your mail? Gmail’s server based filtering rules go a long way to help organize the chaos, but it is really tiresome to have manually add more and more special case filtering rules every time I subscribe to an email newsletter, or I add a new client.
What if my inbox paid attention to which messages I tend to read first or most often? What if it looked at who I actively engage with new messages and replies? What if it used that information to predictively sort my messages, putting the ones I am most likely to want to see at the top? Enter Google’s new Priority Inbox.
Google began rolling out this new feature to Gmail users on Monday. It is now saying that Priority Inbox should be available to all users (including Google Apps users) today. To activate it, look for the “New! Priority Inbox” message in the top right corner of your Gmail window. You will still have access to the regular inbox view, but I am betting that after you train the new priority filter, it’s unlikely that you’ll go back.
We have been seeing social media comments from Twitter and Facebook as part of the Google search results since late last fall. Now that experience has been significantly refined and enhanced. Today, Google Realtime Search has been refreshed with three key additions: conversation view, location refinements and Google Alerts for updates.
Conversations Not Just Comments
The new conversation view feature lets you display tweets chronologically from the original comment and grouping replies and retweets so that you can see the evolution of the conversation and not just the most recent comments. Readers can click “Full conversation” below an update to access the threaded-view.
Monitoring Local Sentiment
The improved location features now let you zero in on your community of interest. If you are a small business and interested only in the conversation about your industry in your town, you can now specify exact locations in the “Custom Location” box to narrow results to a particular city, state or country. If you are a larger organization and concerned with looking at results from a number of different regions, there are also quick links below each update to show only results from that same region.
Automated Alerts
Keeping an eye on the conversation just got a little easier. Google has now made it easy to add your social media search to your Google Alerts. Simply click the “Create an e-mail alert for [search term]” to setup a Google Alert for “Updates.” Updates is a new type of alert for the status updates that Google Real-time Search indexes. You can choose the frequency of your email alerts to be as-it-happens, once per day or once per week basis.
Where To Find It
Google Realtime Search, continues to be accessible via the left-hand search options menu as “Updates”, and now also exists as a standalone product at google.com/realtime. It is currently being rolled out to all users. If you don’t yet have access and want a sneak peak, you can do so here.
