Technology research firm Gartner recently released their list of the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011. Gartner defines ‘strategic technologies’ as those that have just matured or are still emerging.

I was struck by the fact that at least six of the technologies have already, or will, impact brand strategy and communications planning. Many of these are already being employed at some level.

Listed below are the six technologies with a brief explanation taken from the Gartner press release.

Mobile Applications and Media Tablets

Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding.

The quality of the experience of applications on these devices, which can apply location, motion and other context in their behavior, is leading customers to interact with companies preferentially through mobile devices. This has lead to a race to push out applications as a competitive tool to improve relationships and gain advantage over competitors whose interfaces are purely browser-based.

Social Communications and Collaboration

Social media can be divided into:

1. Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise.
2. Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing.
3. Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr.
4. Social feedback – gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon.

Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.

Video

This is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream.

Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.

Next Generation Analytics

Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action.

Social Analytics

Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web.

Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.

Context-Aware Computing

Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee.

The other strategic technologies are cloud computing, storage-class memory, ubiquitous computing and fabric-based infrastructure and computers.

Are you using these technologies to your advantage?

When I saw your Fall TV spot I thought it was brilliant! Your model is the quintessential 50-something woman. The one so many of us dream of being. She’s cool and hip – gorgeous with a look of intelligence. I can relate to her!

I shop at Chico’s on occasion but I have steadfastly avoided anything that resembled an “outfit”. I’ve never wanted to be tainted with the slightly dowdy, more mature woman look that I’ve always associated with the brand. Sure they have an occasional garment or piece of jewelry that’s cool enough to fit into a working professional’s wardrobe – but that’s about it.

The new TV spot changed everything. You mean if I buy my outfits at Chico’s I’ll look like her? I’m in, baby!

I told my husband that Chico’s had finally gotten it right. He googled the campaign and told me the model in the spot is 36. Come on guys. Did you think we wouldn’t find out? You don’t get me at all do you?

SEOmoz has posted a great list of a few things to do with Google Analytics in order to get more out of the tool. Some of the tips are basic and some are advanced, but all help you to better understand what’s happening with your site and the visitors to it. And that’s very important to your digital marketing efforts.

Topics covered include:

• Use regular expressions for fine-tuning your traffic analysis
• Make sure your analytics code is installed correctly
• Segment your funnels
• Track SEO variables
• Track form abandonment

Read the full article here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/5-quick-google-analytics-hacks

In order to have a mutually beneficial vendor-client relationship both parties must be on the same page. We must make sure we listen to each other and ask the right questions to ensure we truly understand one another.

In an industry that is riddled with lingo and acronyms it is very easy for people to be saying the same word but have different meanings. While someone may throw out the term “brand”, it could mean one thing to a small retailer and something entirely different to a large service oriented company.

Leave egos at the door and keep your minds open to different ideas and perceptions.

There are some amazing people who dive in to make something special happen that we all benefit from. They have big visions, and they don’t just talk it, they walk it…all the way to the finish line. They aren’t daunted by the enormity of the task. Or the numerous barriers in their way. They simply take one step at a time and persevere. And they achieve amazing results.

Anne Trumble and the crew involved with the Emerging Terrain Stored Potential project are among those that fall into this group of people. Anne & Emerging Terrain are behind the visual display on the old Brancroft street grain elevators we see just north of I-80. They spearheaded this collaborative artistic endeavor to re-purpose the derelict, yet iconic, historic landscape structure as contemporary cultural awareness.

I stumbled across a post about this effort last April and was very intrigued by the idea. The more I learned, the more intrigued I became and the closer I followed the developments

On Sunday, a perfect October day, I joined 500 people (including every featured artist) for an amazing dinner prepared with local products by local chefs at the base of the structure to culminate the success of this incredible project. And a success it is.

Rendering of the Concept by Min|Day Architects and Ashley Byars

The reality...Taken from the base

Those silos are so much bigger than they look from the interstate

The selected artists were from all over the country, including Hawaii. And they all came to Omaha to celebrate the project.

Dinner for 500 at one extremely long table. It was a real treat - the food and the company.

There are some great photos of the event and dinner (not like the cruddy ones taken by my phone)  by Sarah-Mai at Eat Pure and on Emerging Terrain’s Facebook page.  Slide show images at KETV. Video on WOWT.

About the visionary and organizer:
Anne Trumble is a landscape architect by training; a writer, teacher, and explorer by desire. Of course everything she does is about landscape, most notably those that actually aren’t designed but happen by chance, necessity, and accident. She’s lived, studied and worked in Vancouver, Cuba, Japan, New York, and most recently Madagascar realizing a serious predilection for islands – the antithesis of her upbringing in the bulls-eye of the United States – Omaha, Nebraska. Although she resides in New York City where she teaches landscape design at Columbia University and works on various design projects, she daydreams about the Jeffersonian Grid, thus explaining why she began Emerging Terrain, a non-profit research and design collaborative with a mission to creatively disseminate information to the public about the social, cultural, and economic factors that shape the built environment.

About Anne from the project background on Kickstarter.com:
“I’ve been obsessed with grain elevators since I was a little kid growing up in the Midwest. I remember going to the elevator to deliver grain. While sitting in line waiting for our turn to unload, I’d stare out the truck window up at the enormous structure and think “that would be so cool as something else”…………

Between then and now, I’ve traveled the world, studying and working in all things landscape; no adventure passed up that is even remotely related to how we use and interact with land. I’ve since re-focused the obsession to the Midwest, in particular suburbs in place of corn fields and thus, derelict grain elevators. They’re no longer necessary.

What do we do with these relics that are too heavily engineered to demolish?”

What she did was amazing. Artists from all over submitted designs and 13 of those now grace the tall slender structures for all of us to enjoy. The panels will hang in Omaha for 3-4 months then move on to other vacant elevators before being re-purposed into temporary shelter and sent to a country in need.

Bravo to all involved. And thank you!

About 45% of consumers don’t have a specific business in mind when conducting a local search online. In fact, more local business searchers begin with general keyword terms in search queries. They have products and services in mind, but they are not sure where to make the purchase, according to a study released Monday from 15miles, the local, mobile and social marketing arm of TMP Directional Marketing.

On the other hand, 56% of social and 60% of mobile users are more likely to search with specific businesses in mind because they are already outside the home looking for a nearby business to fill a need. The study points to a lack of sophisticated search functions in social networks for the differences.

Search engine queries continued to increase at a strong rate with 9% year-over-year growth. Non-search engine queries such as Facebook and craigslist rose 22%, off a smaller base, to capture more than one-third of total query volume. This also impacts local. Of the 9% of local business searchers who use social networks, 93% said they use Facebook to find information on local business.

Most research today focuses on where searches happen, but this study looks at where sales occur. Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter are just a sample of the major players to enhance local search features in the past year. It also examines how to make sense of consumers’ changing behaviors across various media types, and what impact search trends have on the bottom line.

Trend 1: Online search is the preferred method for information about local businesses, with 70% of consumers citing online sites as their primary source.

Trend 2: Search engines are most popular, but they are not growing as fast as other media.

Trend 3: Local searchers are more apt to buy.

Trend 4: Businesses must develop a comprehensive search presence with essential information.

Trend 5: To develop a complete search presence, local businesses must consider every avenue.

Trend 6: Print is declining, but it still holds value for today’s consumers as a secondary source.

Trend 7: With emerging media on the rise, a diverse media mix must now include social and mobile marketing.

Consumers who use social networks and mobile smartphones are more likely to use and write reviews. More than 40% have submitted between two and five reviews in the past 30 days. In fact, 78% of social networkers — up 3% from the prior year — and 71% of mobile users — up 9% from the prior year — consider consumer ratings and reviews important in making their purchase selections.

Of those participating in the survey, 81% believe it’s important for local businesses to respond to questions and complaints on social sites; 78% want special offers, promotions and information about events; and 66% believe that company photos are important.

Source:  MediaPost

Bozell’s Media Director, Karissa Armstrong, was interviewed for a recent article in Omaha’s B2B magazine. Armstrong discusses the social media app Foursquare and the various ways that businesses can leverage it to gain and keep customers.

Please read the entire article here: B2B Omaha – Foursquare Pays Dividends

After years of speculation and rumors, Canoe Ventures launches their interactive TV platform.

Marketers can place overlays in spots that prompt viewers to click-through and request a coupon or sample. Cablevision’s AMC and Comcast’s E! and Style are teed up to run the spots now, while the Discovery Channel and two NBC Universal cable channels are anticipated to be ready by year’s-end.

Canoe Ventures’ ITV Solutions allow programmers to better engage with their viewers through innovative marketing applications.

So far, the “request-for-information” spots can only be delivered into some homes served by Time Warner Cable and Comcast. Verklin would not release the number, but it is likely no more than 15 million. Next year, Canoe aims to be able to stream spots into households served by TWC, Comcast, Cox, Cablevision, Charter and Bright House — all part owners of Canoe.

Networks license the technology and then sell it to advertisers. Canoe then shares in the proceeds of a deal.

Canoe has data showing that the simple appearance of an overlay on screen during an ad raises brand recall — even if a viewer takes no action. “There’s value to an unclicked banner”.

But could the triggers and prompts cause a backlash? Since few ads have them it’s unlikely but if this concept hits the mainstream then I think it will definitely cause some issues with viewers.  Only time will tell.

Mobile Bar Codes Coming to Your TV

Bar codes have been seen flashing on TV screens across the country allowing you to scan them with your smartphone and get instant information.

The process works like this: bar codes are embedded in commercials that appear on the screen. Then a viewer with a smartphone scans them and gets access to more information about a product, which could also include a discounted price.

These mobile bar codes are known as QR Codes, for “quick response.”

QR Codes, already widely used in Europe and Asia, allow advertisers to place bar codes on posters, product packaging and TV commericals and turn these objects into links to online content.

Using bar codes is starting to spread, because more people are using smartphones, and many of those phones have the scanning application to read the codes.

The Weather Channel and HBO also have tested the technology.

Still, there are challenges for TV advertising, such as time constraints. But other observers see bar code technology as a major advertising tool of the future.

I check my messages and there’s one that says something like, “I am blah, blah and I’m calling from blah company. I would like to learn more about your company and what you do.” Or maybe it says “I have an important business opportunity I’d like to discuss with you.” Read More

Link to Social Media Sites – If you company is already utilizing social networking sites for marketing then you are in good shape. Creating icons and linking to your social networking sites is quick and simple. Before you go down this road however, consider the customers thought process. Is there a strong value for them to engage with you in social media? You may need to consider offering social media exclusive content and offers to get your email users to convert.

Drive in store traffic and sales – Whether you are a traditional brick and mortar or online store, all retailers want to drive traffic to their stores. Using email to send your customers in store only sales is a powerful way to engage with them and drive traffic.

Event Promotion – Since email messages are generally sent in standard intervals, it is the perfect channel to communicate both pre and post event information. Email is also important since you will most likely not have the opportunity to personally connect with each of your customers leading up to an important company event.

Link to online content – If you are currently running a blog or have other powerful forms of online content such as video or photography, direct your customers to it. Don’t let organic search be the only means of getting your customers and prospects to this key form of communication.