2009 … what does it hold for us?  Everyone else has blogged about this, I think I will to …

Marketing Shifts Online

The general consensus is that of an online media marketing boom!  Everyone is predicting that this will be THE YEAR for online marketing to possibly overtake the ad-spend of traditional media.  Could this be a reality?  With the current economy crisis around the world, companies are turning more and more to online media to market their products.  This is far more cost-effective than traditional media and probably the most important factor for online marketing is the fact that it is measurable.

Broader Broadband

Social media, it’s the latest and a continually growing buzz word.  With Facebook on the scene, it has given people the realisation that they want to interact with websites, and to be engaged by the website.  Interactivity and interlinking is the name of the game.  Podcasts, videocasts, blogs, etc.  they are all top of the list of marketing products.

Particularly here in South Africa, our broadband access has been dismal and excessively costly, but that is changing this year with the installation of the Seacom cable bringing greater bandwidth speeds to us later in 2009.  And with the prediction of much, much lower bandwidth costs, this will open up a whole new realm of social media-type websites springing out of SA.

Trendy

Many social media sites are unfortunately trends and won’t last forever.  twitter is a good example of this.  It’s a great way to keep in contact with your peers, it’s a great way to get small bits of information out to a massive amount of people in a short time.  But eventually the novelty will wear off.  That doesn’t necessarily mean the demise of twitter, but rather that it will more than likely metamorphosis into some other form that will be trendy.  With that in mind, I am not saying that twitter is useless, it’s an amazing system, but if we don’t jump on to that bandwagon now, we are going to miss out on the next phase, whatever that may be.

Social media is changing, morphing so quickly.  It’s snowballing at it’s extreme, someone comes up with a great new idea, hoardes of people build on that idea, bringing bigger and better offerings.

As a business, marketing professional, whatever you call yourself, if you have not jumped on the Social Media Bandwagon, you had better do something about it, and do it soon.