Happy new year everyone! It has been tradition in the beautiful world office to make predictions about the coming year, so here’s what we think 2012 has in store.
Technology
Like public transport, social media will feel full the effect of the London Olympics. Last July saw a landmark Twitter event during the Womens World Cup final between Japan and the USA where 7,196 tweets were sent each second. The ever popular social network will surely see this record broken during the London 2012 Games.
Facebook will inevitably hit the 1 billion user mark by the end of February/beginning of March. With active users staying around the 50% mark, that will mean a potential advertising audience of 500 million people!
We’ll also start to see custom actions in apps on Facebook but adoption will be lower than expected as people start to realise how clogged up their feeds get with pointless stories that honestly aren’t newsfeed-worthy.
Google+
Google+ will have a higher uptake with regards to brands and business marketing due to the importance Google has placed on brand pages to affect search rankings. Have you set up your brand page yet?
Path
We predict mobile services like Path coming of age, and being a viable complementary addition to people that have multi-platform blogging presences because it’s a more intuitive way of posting your lifestream. Early adopters will lead with their personal drivel, with everyone else wondering how it can be used for marketing.
The charity sector
2012 really will be the year that charities realise they have to take online seriously or face a drop in income. Every piece of analysis we conducted in 2011 showed us that the more traditional acquisition channels aren’t performing as well as they used to. The inefficiencies of cold direct mail for example will become ever more apparent. Response rates have been on a downward spiral for the last few years which is forcing the sector to mail in consistently higher volumes -at great expense – just to see the same return they could have expected a few years ago.
There will also be further resistance to face to face fundraising. The market is reaching saturation causing a significant rise in price and cost per acquisition, and this will eventually force charities to look at alternatives.
Online is truly the only channel showing signs of growth, and while it may seem daunting to deviate from the norm, it is counter-intuitive to ignore this and just continue using channels that are in decline.
We also predict that this shift in budgets will instigate organisational shifts across the sector, with digital departments becoming further integrated with fundraising teams. This should hopefully lead to vastly improved implementations of online campaigns, where the synergy between the digital application and fundraising message for a campaign reaches the potential that online fundraising has promised for years.
2012 will also be the year that people start to jump on the mobile bandwagon, but implement their first foray poorly with bad integration with overall comms strategies.
The market is also wide open for a mobile payment processor to take donations as there isn’t a truly a viable default option yet. Any takers?!
So, that’s what we think will happen in 2012. What do you think?
Ash
Tags: beautiful bytes
