What iThink

Things are underway at the D8 Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, California and it will be a very telling 3 days.  Almost everyone who is anyone in shaping the digital landscape is on hand, from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg.  We’ll hear a lot about “what’s next” and those of us in the marketing community should be listening closely.
Because, to re-quote a laughable line from the early ‘90s, “This Internet-thing might just catch on.”
We met with a new business prospect today and the question was “How much of our budget should we devote to digital and social media.”
Not “if.”  Not “when.”  But “how much?”  Believe me, that was not a question ANY of our clients were asking three to five years ago.  And 10 years ago, less that 1% of our work involved digital delivery.
Today, our digital and social efforts–concept through deployment–make up nearly 50% of our total revenue.  With such a shift in such little time, it’s prudent to ponder “what’s next?”
So even while we’re perfecting our presence in the current Web 2.0 & Social Media environment, we must begin preparing for the next wave.
Here are three keys:
Mobile/Apps:  If you’re not already working on this functionality and considering how it can be relevant to your market, it may already be too late to become a player.  Within three years, clients will expect this capability to help connect them with their market.
Geo-Location:  Smartphones will outnumber laptops this year.  The ascension of the Droid platform, across multiple carriers, is not a threat to the iPhone…it’s a complement.   App development for those and other handhelds is already mushrooming.  And as devices and apps become increasingly robust, the ability to master pushing marketing messages to those ready to receive such messages (timing and location) will become a requirement.  That’s where geo-location technology, married with marketing-rich data, comes in.
Data mining: We’ve already begun to collect and compile huge databases on behalf of our clients.  In the very near future (like yet this year), we must learn to do more with that data…to marry it with message deployment technology across all channels.
It will be fascinating to watch how those three keys are discussed  at D8.
At least that’s what iThink!