The From Line

Platform extensions are more critical to social media than the sites themselves.

Social media’s super growth cannot continue to defy the laws of physics forever. The time has come for fatigue to set in. According to the GlobalWebIndex Wave 5 Trends report, social media growth has essentially halted amongst 16 to 24-year-olds in the US. Even more surprising, in some countries, social media usage within this demographic is actively declining. The GlobalWebIndex report cites, among others, the following declines in social media activities from July 2009 through June 2011: messaging with friends, sending digital gifts, installing applications and joining groups. These activities are decreasing faster in the US than in other countries, and are doing so at an accelerated rate among American college graduates under the age of 30. The report also revealed an increased demand for professionally developed content including news sources, music and brand information.

For the widest audience reach, HTML 5 is your best bet.

Normally in Trends & Takeaways, we don’t discuss geeky technology topics. After all, this is a marketing blog. However, HTML 5 is emerging as a technology that marketers need to be mindful of when developing mobile and email strategies. HTML 5 has been around since 2009, and is the Web’s 5^th generation markup language. Only recently, however, has the standard become widely adopted. In particular, this new markup language includes features to handle multimedia and graphical content on the web without the need for proprietary plugins such as Flash.

Trend: Smart marketers are leveraging interactive games to overcome short attention spans.

With the anticipation of Zynga’s upcoming IPO, interactive gaming has been getting a lot of attention lately.  Unfortunately, according to Forrester Research, this attention has yet to transpire to mainstream marketing, as 84% of marketers have no plans to incorporate games into their promotional mix.  For the remaining 16%, their efforts are sparking a revolution in marketing, influencing the proliferation of gaming technologies resulting in its access by marketers and agencies of all sizes.  More importantly, games are providing the much-needed content to hold consumer and prospect attention – an extension of the bilateral conversation brands strive for.

Trend: Infographics - Helping Marketers Cut Through The Clutter

Marketing in the 21st century has become immensely complex due to channel fragmentation and an avalanche of data creation. On any given day, Internet users will create 1.5 billion pieces of content on Facebook, tweet 140 million times on Twitter and upload 2 million videos to YouTube. According to a joint study conducted by IDC and EMC, it is estimated that the general public will create 1.8 zettabytes of data in 2011, with that number expected to double within the next two years. To put 1.8 zettabytes into perspective, the number is equivalent to 200 billion high definition movies each 120 minutes long. These new data complexities are the result of convoluted digital relationships, advances in scientific discoveries and the speed of new media.

Marketing Trend: Your Career at Risk!

There's a large shortage of marketers who have both creative and technical talents. But it's just that perfect combination of skills that's needed in today's marketing environment. So we've put together an overview of skills that are proving essential for a marketing pro's career growth.

(This is a valuable combination of skills which helps businesses grow, too, so managers take notice!)