1. Content Network Optimization. Search Engine Optimization is great–search marketing reaches more people than Yellow Pages, and allows you to generate targeted leads, but what about optimizing for content? One company, Scienceops, uses their patent-pending algorithms to optimize for content. Contextual marketing is designed to produce data concerned with what the consumer is doing online when they change from a person shopping to a consumer buying. By optimizing for content the marketer gains deeper, extremely relevant, and highly marketable insights into the how, when, and what is needed to make a sale.

2. Approach the new world of technology and marketing with a lot of flexibility and agility in terms of project creation and project management. New applications are coming with lightening speed and today’s hot thing is tomorrow’s big bore, so a rapid pace of change is the norm. It’s frustrating but real to have to keep on such a learning curve.

3. Mobile Advertising. Search Engine Watch notes that “6.8 percent of all U.S. Web traffic occurred from mobile devices.”

4. Plan for the democratization of your brand. That is, the company has less and less control, while those formerly known as consumers (and now known as individual publishers of text and video to the web) have more and more control. So, you have to engage people in a more comprehensive way.

5. Interaction comes before transaction. Each day, the ability of people to interact with each other, with other customers, and with you increases. And each day this interaction takes on greater importance as the precursor to any transaction decision.

For more thoughts on marketing and the future see The future of marketing 2012 and beyond.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.

I. TV Becomes the New Center of Gravity in the tech universe, as all other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy.

II. 2012 Will See Tectonic Shifts in Phone Markets.

The Wireless Revolution Is Real: Asia Is In, Scandinavia Is Second. Nokia, the historic market leader, fails to regain global dominance…

Google Loses Technology Control of Android…

Smartphones Grow Share Dramatically to dominate the total cellphone market.

III. Clouds Are for Consumers (and Startups). Even as a large number of enterprises move pilots onto external clouds, it will become clear that the real trend is for enterprise to stay away from clouds in all key areas, for reasons both of security and reliability.

IV. Security Splits the Tech World in Two, finally getting Front of Mind (and wallet) attention from CEOs: companies with real IP, and the others (Meat vs. Mashed Potatoes).

V. SIRI Stuns the World.

VI. We Enter the Amazing World of Dave and HAL, as Voice Recognition comes of age.

VII. E-Readers Prosper, but Pads Continue to Dominate the CarryAlong Market.

VIII. The Consumption World Explodes. Get ready for new devices, new content, new bundles, new connection techniques, new distribution channels, new aggregators, new pads, new phones, new players, new self-published authors, new garage bands, new consumption models riding on social networks: there is nothing but high energy in the content consumer market. People are now ready to spend subscription money for this sector, and the publisher response will be huge.

IX. Governments and Corporations Focus on IP as though it were their most prized asset. It is.

X. Amazon Gets It All.

You have to read the whole thing at SNS.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.

I don’t think there is any question that future buying activity will be driven heavily by economics, that is, who can offer the most affordable quality. But when there is a decision point between brand options, and price is not the key driver, then consumers will increasingly ask whether the brand demonstrates that it cares about its customers. A couple of examples. Starbucks versus local and smaller coffee houses is a choice that many consumers make. Starbucks attempts, mostly with good success, to overcome its gigantic size with a genuine emphasis on being a local third place. Their reputation for good treatment of employees, for providing health insurance for part-time workers, for frequent promotions and giveaways, like their provision of a free drink for every 15 purchases, the free music download cards on the checkout counter, the constant stream of responses to customer concerns on their Facebook and Twitter feeds, all say that, as a brand, we care about you.

For a subset of coffee customers this is not enough. They will choose a local brand, because the very fact of being local and small says to them, this is a brand that can know us and that cares about us (and, they will usually say, tastes better). It is a built-in feature, really, of the whole localization movement applying to local foods, local book stores, and so on. Local should equal caring and if it does not, something is wrong.

Facilitating such shifts in attitudes about brands are all the tools and new assumptions about marketing. Chief among these is the shift of power to consumers – the Net means that customers own the brand and are the primary marketers. The Net is a megaphone for individual customers and their connected devices are all publishing tools now. Probably the most interesting, and even amazing thing about the Web in the past five years has been its metamorphosis from an information-consuming medium to an information-publishing medium for the average user. I think we are just now beginning to grasp what this means, from consumer interactions to revolutions in the public square.

Of course everyone concerned with marketing and brands is wondering where this is all going. Recently Business 2 Community published The Future of Marketing: 46 Experts Share their Predictions for 2012. Here are a few highlights.

“Cross-department and channel collaboration will become more prevalent as marketing coordinates its research, analysis, activities and reporting with other parts of the business.” -Alexis Kingsbury, Global Marketing Director at Spidergap

“Referrals will also be a much higher percentage of successful business marketing because it’s much easier to either recommend or knock companies online using social media and have your message shared.” -Andrew Baird, Chief Freedom Officer at Amazing Business

“Customer data will become more important than ever. Tapping into Facebook’s social graph will allow businesses to access an incredible amount of information…This will be used to take marketing personalization to a whole new level.” -Chris Wise, Director of Marketing at Guideline Central

“Webinars as an educational and marketing platform saw a huge rise in popularity in 2011, and will continue to grow in popularity in 2012.” -Jeremy Gregg, Executive Director at The PLAN Fund

“The importance of viral and shareable content will drive companies and brands to become more creative with their content, replacing the predictable sales pitch with more informative or entertaining material, making the 2012 browsing experience less like opening pages, and more like changing channels.”- Stephen Powers, President and Founder of Rightlook Creative

In Marketing 2020: Shifting the balance between consumers and brands, the blog Nice to be Seen muses about the new skill sets that the future marketing world demands. Based on a gathering of the AMA Atlanta, the author suggests that technology skills, whether in social media or in newer and proprietary means for reaching individual customers will become a basic requirement.

Finally, Laughlin Constable has created a wonderful video that sums up most of the contemporary assumptions about where marketing is going.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist, author, speaker, consultant, and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.

Flying construction robots at the FRAC Centre, France

Now comes news via GizMag that the FRAC Centre in Orléans, France will host an exhibition entitled “flight assembled architecture. set to run from December 2, 2011 through February 19, 2012. The exhibit will feature a 6-meter tall structure, made of 1500 prefabricated modules, to be constructed by a fleet of small quadrocopters. The flying robots are “programmed to interact, lift, transport and assemble the final tower, all the time receiving commands wirelessly from a local control room.”

Assuming that the actual build process is successful, here is what the tower is to look like.

6-meter tall tower to be built by flying robots

The video of the robots in action, as designed by Raffaello D’Andrea, is pretty impressive to watch.

1. You’re a Global Company That Does Not Want to Maintain a Uniform, Worldwide Corporate Culture.

2. You Want to Ensure That Leadership Has no Casual Interaction With Staff to Preserve an Unblemished (& Uncomfortable) Hierarchy.

3. You are Strongly Opposed to Employer Branding.

4. You Want to Ignore the Fact That Your Employees & Clients Are Already Talking About You on Social Media.

5. You Are Actively Trying to Attract Talent That is Social Media Un-Savvy.

6. HR Reps Don’t Have the Time to Research Candidates.

7. You Don’t Care to Learn About Other Emerging Technologies That Can Help You Streamline Your Business and Save You Time and Money.

8. Your Corporate Culture Strictly Prohibits Recruiters From Using Social Media.

9. You Have no Time to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy.

10. Search Engine Optimization is for the Birds.

If you visit the Allegis site, you will find explanations for each reason, and some useful examples.

My slide show to the monthly executive council is below. I wanted to make three key points:

1. Even in a fast changing environment, developing long-range foresight can provide a competitive advantage. By long-range I mean a decade or more ahead. The confusion that people get into is thinking the idea is to create a plan for ten years from now. That is futile. What is valuable is to identify the key driving forces that are knowable a decade hence, and then start to either learn about them, prepare for them, or even begin some activity related to them now. An example we discussed, obvious for retail, was the shape of the population in terms of its age groups, something that is perfectly predictable.
2. On the future of the economy I wanted to make one key argument, a point which I find makes most business audiences cringe. When I published my last book in 2006 I identified barriers to business in the coming decade, and one of those I called out then was the growing wealth divide. For the audience last week I zeroed in on this, attempting to make the case that a mass-retail business based on selling goods to large numbers of people in many big-box locations will not be sustainable if their customer base disappears. A society where the middle-class disappears will not be able to support such retail in the future. Interestingly this retailer opened in 1979, the very peak of the broad middle-class society in the U.S. This is an issue I do not think most business leaders are thinking about in business terms. We think it is a political issue, when it is even more fundamentally a question of what kind of economic society we want to live in.
3. Third, borrowing a phrase from my friend Gerd Leonhard I described how data is the new oil. This is not news to retail executives, but I emphasized the idea that such data is not only in the numbers and customer tracking, but in the social media space where, for example, style bloggers, are an untapped resource of intelligence and effective marketing.

Here are the slides…

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist author, speaker, consultant, and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultationcontact Futurist.com.

This past summer I had the opportunity to lead a group from the National Association of Electrical Distributors in a workshop on future trends and preferred future planning. The participants, all part of the Lake Michigan Club, were owners and managers of companies that ranged in size from small businesses to large national distributors and manufacturers. Their business is to supply the building and construction industry with an A-Z supply of electrical equipment, from conduit to switches to fixtures. Of course it is an industry struggling to manage during the construction down times we are in. Here is a short video about their annual meeting, with a brief clip of me discussing preferred future planning.

Following the workshop, I was invited by the Association to produce for them a “Scenario Planning Playbook” and a short video encouraging their membership to take a look at it. Scenario planning can be an excellent tool for companies that faced with a volatile and uncertain future environment, because considering alternate scenarios enables you to plan flexible strategies.

The association has made the Scenario Planning Playbook available through their website, where you can also watch the video. If learning about scenario planning has been on your agenda, check it out.

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist author, speaker, consultant, and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech, workshop or consultation contact Futurist.com.

Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood (West Wing)

Timberline Lodge Mt. Hood (East Wing)

This is the kind of thing that government built the last time we had such a deep economic problem and employment needed a boost.

Are we building anything for the future, today, to help get out of the jobs crisis? Just wondering.

Here are some alternate ideas to austerity as the path to prosperity, offered to the UK Government.

Perhaps there are better alternatives to what we are doing?

Glen Hiemstra is a futurist speaker, author, consultant, blogger, internet video producer and Founder of Futurist.com. To arrange for a speech contact Futurist.com.

Since 2006, the situation has gotten worse, of course, with the collapse of 2008, and the long non-recovery recovery that has followed. But now the issue has leaped from speeches about future trends to the front pages.

For over three weeks Occupy Wall Street protestors have been rallying against a number of grievances focused on a jobless economy and the Wall Street, regulatory, corporate and other policies that they see as combining systemically to prevent improvement. The website for Occupy Wall Street claims that,

The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%. We are using the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic to achieve our ends and encourage the use of nonviolence to maximize the safety of all participants.

Street demonstrations are a quintessential American tradition and right, and thus the demonstrators are carrying on in the footsteps of many who have come before them. What makes Occupy Wall Street unique is the intent to carry on an occupation as a tactic. Momentum for Occupy Wall Street has gathered speed in the last several days with the inclusion of local labor unions in the protests, and the spread to cities in almost every state in the Union. While many mainstream media and financial commentators have expressed opinions that range from confusion to disgust, others are beginning to catch on that something is happening here. Even President Obama has said Occupy Wall Street protests are a reflection of a ‘broad-based frustration about how our financial system works’, though I am not sure he grasps how much of the frustration is with his own ineffectiveness in dealing with that financial system (along with the rest of Washington DC).

Many of the Millennial Generation are involved in this protest, lending credence to the generational theory forecast that the Millennial Generation would be an activist generation. Amongst the thousands of protestors, hundreds have been arrested or aggressively handled in some way by the police, which is evident in the following video.

First, when in recent months I have mentioned the “rich poor gap” to business audiences, I have noticed that while some are glad to hear this reality pointed out, others bristle. I will put up a chart like the one below, and explain that I am not making a political statement, rather simply pointing out that the rich poor gap, which had closed between 1946 and 1979, has been widening due to a combination of factors including economic, global, technological, tax and government policy issues, and then I ask whether we really think that a society in which such a gap continues to grow can be a functioning society?

The second observation is that a good deal of my thinking on the likely long-term negative impacts of increasing wealth disparity comes from a quite earth shaking 2007 book by Robert H. Frank, entitled Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. When societies become more and more unequal, they become less healthy, less happy, less productive, less capable of producing innovation, more volatile, more prone to crime, and so on. Frank concludes his fascinating analysis of the drivers and the impacts of inequality with these two very prescient paragraphs,

Income and wealth inequality have been rising sharply in the United States for several decades, exacting a heavy toll on middle-income families. When market forces cause inequality to grow, public policy in most countries pushes in the opposite direction. That was also once the pattern in the United States. But more recently, we have responded by cutting taxes for the wealthy and reducing services for the needy. Historians will someday struggle to explain this puzzling reversal.

As the economist Herb Stein once famously remarked, if something can’t go on forever, it won’t. At some point, we will take steps to limit the damage caused by rising disparities in income and wealth. With a push from intelligent political leaders, such steps can be taken sooner rather than later. For even in an age of thirty-second sound bites, American voters have demonstrated their ability to see things from a different angle.

I have little doubt that the elections of 2008 and 2010, although the winning political parties differed, were both mostly a cry for addressing the decades-long economic patterns leading to the decline of the middle class, as described by Frank among others. The OWS demonstrations are likely to continue at least into the cold of winter, and then re-emerge even more full-throated in the spring. The choice they have made to call themselves “the 99%” is brilliant marketing, and the 99% will shape the 2012 elections. I concluded the section on wealth disparity in my book Turning the Future into Revenue this way,

The bottom line is simple. We can sugercoat economic statistics, point to skyrocketing housing values [in 2006], crow about GDP growth figures that mean little to average wage earners, and the reality is that the wealth divide is growing at the present time, and in the long run is deeply problematic.