Everyone has a top 5 or 10 list and we’re no different. If marketing is all about reaching and communicating with customers, it doesn’t matter what we did yesterday – it’s all about what our customers are doing today and how we can reach them. Here are 5 marketing trends from Frame Concepts, an Information Graphics and Business consultancy, which we believe are important in 2012.

LBM – Location Based Marketing: With the adoption of smartphones in the U.S. (above 50% of all mobile phones and rising) it’s all about delivering content to consumers based on their location.

QR Codes: Last year we profiled QR Codes – what they are and what they can do for marketers. Although not yet ubiquitous, they are being used by the biggest brands to the smallest businesses.

Video: It seems every year or two “video” is the inside buzzword – akin to “plastics” uttered to protagonist, Ben, in the 1967 film, “The Graduate.” Cisco predicts that 80% of all Internet traffic will be video by 2015.

Social: Business has been jumping into social networks Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Now, social business apps are being written specific to the enterprise and it’s customers – SalesForce.com Chatter, Cisco Jabber, etc.

Infographics: Words and pictures are no longer adequate to communicate simple concepts let alone complex relationships in today’s cluttered, chaotic world. We have to seamlessly integrate our content and messaging into forms that are easy to absorb, entertain, educate and inform.

Gamification, Cloud Computing, Content Marketing, and “Post-Recession” austerity are also important trends to pay attention to this year – whether you’re on the marketing side or not.

Click Here for WMW’s Mobile Marketing Solution

Online Video Factoids:

YouTube serves 1 billion videos per day; the average person watches 182 online videos per month¹.

¹ http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/statistics-the-state-of-the-internet-video/

Contributor: Kerby Lecka
e: kerby@wmwinc.com

Marketing to Smartphone Users: The Time Has Come

Studies¹ predict that 50% of U.S. adults (113.5M²) will be using a smartphone by the end of this year, compared to 34% who are currently using them. As smartphone adoption increases, they are becoming a prime instrument to search, shop and look for local information – leading us to conclude that advertisers need to take advantage of mobile advertising. Here’s some salient smartphone facts:

Smartphone Usage
81% browsed the Internet
77% used a search engine – mobile searches have grown 400% in the past year
48% watch videos

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Mobile Local
88% of information seekers take action within a day
95% looked up local information
61% call a business
59% visit a business
44% make a purchase

Mobile Advertising
82% of smartphone users notice mobile ads
49% of these who’ve seen a mobile ad take action
49% purchase
42% click on the ad
35% visit website

What do Mobile Shoppers Do?
79% have used their smartphone to help with shopping
74% have made a purchase
54% find a retailer
49% compare prices
48% get promotions or coupons
44% read reviews or product info

A New Mass Media Channel

As of June, 2011, there were 327,577,529³ mobile phones in the U.S. among a population of 312,582,000⁴. By New Year’s Eve, with 113.5M U.S. adult smartphone users and a potential 50 – 80 million more under the age of 20, the smartphone is becoming the new mass media delivery system – surpassing the nation’s estimated 114.9 million TV homes⁵.

Click Here for WMW’s Mobile Marketing Solutions – the way to optimize your website, promotions, and information to reach more customers and make more sales.

Mobile Advertising Factoid:
79% of top advertisers do not have a mobile optimized landing page¹

¹ Sources: US Mobile Smartphone Consumer Study, Ipsos & Google, 2010; Google Internal Data; YouTube Survey (conducted Oct. 2010, survey of 160000 m.youtube.com users); Nielsen – Smartphones Will Overtake Feature Phones, 2010
² 227,247,110 age 20 and above x 50% – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States and http://www2.census.gov/census_2000/datasets/
demographic_profile/0_National_Summary/2khus.pdf
³ http://www.ctia.org/consumer_info/index.cfm/AID/10323
⁴ http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
⁵ http://www.nielsenmedia.com

Contributor: Kerby Lecka
e: kerby@wmwinc.com

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Recent reports by Forrester Research and the Carbon Disclosure Project detail the energy, environmental, and financial benefits of the move to cloud computing by US and global businesses. Here are some highlights of key findings:

Clean Facts¹

• Data centers can lose up to 96% of the energy coming into the building, losing efficiency in three key areas: cooling the room, cooling the servers, and keeping servers idle
• US companies plan to increase cloud computing from 10% to 70% of their IT spending, resulting in the reduction of 85.7 million tons of carbon in 2020 – a 50% reduction versus no cloud at all

Lean Facts¹

• Annual net financial savings from cloud computing is forecast to reach $825 million this year

• The projected energy savings by US companies with annual revenues above $1 billion would be more that $12 billion per year by 2020

$Green$ Facts²

• $40.7 billion cloud computing market revenue in 2011

• The total revenue from the cloud market is expected to reach $241 billion by 2020

With the incredible numbers involved – energy efficiency, carbon footprint reduction, cost savings, and market growth – cloud computing is moving from trend or mega-trend to a way of doing business and ultimately, to a way of using the information technology that we already depend upon for everyday life.

Cloud Computing Definition: A model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction (The National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST]).

¹Carbon Disclosure Project, Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century www.cdproject.net

²Forrester Research, Sizing the Cloud http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/sizing_cloud/q/id/58161/t/2

Click Here for WMW’s Infographics Solutions – the way to simplify, visualize and create communications with more impact and results.

Contributor: Kerby Lecka
e: kerby@wmwinc.com

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NASCAR is the No. 1 spectator sport in the U.S. and the No. 2 regular season sport on TV with an estimated 75 million followers. So how does a sport that makes its living off of burning and belching fossil-fuel based hydrocarbons earn the top spot for being green among the major sports in America?

By building the largest recycling program in sports. According to a recent story on www.GreenBiz.com titled, “What NASCAR Can Teach Sustainability Professionals,” in 2011 NASCAR is on target to divert more than 1,000 tons of materials generated at its events from landfills – including cardboard and more than 12 million beverage containers. And, it doesn’t stop there:

• Official tire sponsor Goodyear recycles about 121,000 tires annually for NASCAR

• Environmental services company Safety-Kleen recovers and re-refines 180,000 gallons of oil used at races

• Exide Technologies recycles car batteries

• All 95 races in NASCAR’s three major series – Sprint Cup, Nationwide, Camping World Truck – use Sunoco’s Green E15 blended fuel with ethanol made from U.S. corn, which results in 20% fewer GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions than unleaded gas.

The story goes on to assert that NASCAR’s biggest impact for its green efforts is the potential to popularize green values and behavior among it large fan base – known as the most intensely loyal spectators of any sport worldwide except possibly World Cup Soccer.

By focusing on its waste, emissions, and energy use, NASCAR has been able lever these initiatives into building their brand without alienating their followers, while demonstrating that green behavior is not only cool and sexy – but also quite normal.

NASCAR Green Factoid:
By using E15 fuel blended with ethanol, drivers and team say they get a 6 – 8 % boost in horsepower – as much as 40 – 50+ horsepower in a 750 hp engine.

Contributor:  Kerby Lecka
e: kerby@wmwinc.com

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The federal government has raised the debt limit 90 times since 1940 – actually 91 with Tuesday’s approval by the U.S. Senate. Nine of those increases occurred in the past nine years.

Up until the mid-80’s the debt limit stayed below $2 Trillion. The latest ceiling establishes a statutory debt limit at $16.69 Trillion – an increase of 835% in 25 years.

With an apparently insatiable appetite for federal debt, it’s no wonder that both sides of the aisle linked spending cuts to raising the debt ceiling. What and how much to cut is likely to be the subject of intense debate for the balance of 2011.

Debt Ceiling Factoid:
According to 2010 estimates from the CIA World Factbook, as a percentage of GDP, U.S. debt is 58.9%. In comparison, China’s debt-to-GDP is below 17.5%, while Greece’s is 144%. Japan’s is 225.8%! – so why isn’t anyone talking about Japan?

Contributor:  Kerby Lecka
e: kerby@wmwinc.com

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Discovered these sites through friends and thought I’d pass them along. The Noun Project is a free design site where you can download information graphics/icons. Just going to get better and better as more people contribute. That led me to a funding site called Kickstarter where The Noun Project was funded. What a great idea to get creative projects started and give life to ideas and information. Here’s a bite of The Noun Project’s mission and Kickstarter’s business model:

Mission: “sharing, celebrating and enhancing the world’s visual language”

The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world’s visual language,
so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way. For more info visit: http://www.thenounproject.com/

Kickstarter is the largest funding platform for creative projects in the world. Every month, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge
millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.  For more info visit:  http://www.kickstarter.com/

Contributor:  Joe Cibere
e: jcibere@wmwinc.com

We’ve all heard about how we’re over-communicated to and that because there is so much information being sent to us, we effectively screen 99% of it out. For businesses trying to reach their customers, information overload is a vexing problem.

The challenge for me using Powerpoint for business presentations has always to not make it look like a Powerpoint. I also use keynote which I think is much more creative but still basically a slide show with limited moves. Just revisited an old friend named Prezi. Mostly used in academic circles, or at least that’s where I discovered it, changed the way I look at and design presentations. Once you visit their website (link below) you’ll see what I mean. Be sure and look at the samples in the explore tab.

See more: http://prezi.com/4jrranugjj6p/powerpoint-prezi- prometisdesigncom/

Contributor:  Joe Cibere
e: icibere@wmwinc.com

Regardless of the research projections, it’s clear that the way we use the PC is going through a profound evolution from the fixed desktop to mobile handheld compute-connect-and-communicate-anywhere platforms.

Mobile PC Factoid:
Leading the way in tablet PC sales is Apple’s iPad which sold more than 7 million units in 2010. More than 20 million units are projected to ship in 2011 according to iSuppli, a market research company.

* Sources: Taiwan Economic News, Gartner.com, IEK, TFTS

Contributor:  Kerby Lecka
e: kerby@wmwinc.com