My fear is that in short order they will be closing down as well and here’s why. These smaller franchisers appear to have built a model that is focused on them. They sell the franchise rights and collect fees from the franchisee but have little skin in the game moving forward.

This is most evident in the Internet marketing efforts or support that is provided to the franchisees which in most cases appears to be little or none. This leaves these fledgling franchisees / entrepreneurs to their own devices with regard to promoting their business on the Internet. As a result there is a lot of disillusionment and confusion because Internet marketing is not something that everyone knows or has the time to learn.

What these franchisees get instead are “referrals” to search marketing companies who then put them in poor performing paid search campaigns that produce little or no business. No skin off the franchisers nose here because it’s the little guy, the franchisee, that is shelling out for these services without even considering if this is the best thing for them to do as a part of an overall marketing campaign.

If you are considering buying a franchise make sure that you have the following as a bare minimum relating to Internet marketing and your ability to use it.

• Your own web site – It seems that most franchisers are loathe to let the local franchisee have any local web site that they can control and build for their market. Having a landing page on the corporate site IS NOT the same as having a web site. I see this time and time again and it always ends up with the franchisee wondering because they thought they would have their own web site.

• Internet marketing strategy – If the franchiser does not take the time and invest the money in the overall Internet marketing strategy of their franchisees then there will be trouble. Most SMB’s don’t know much about Internet marketing so when they are pushed out of the nest and told to go do business they end up struggling to find new business, especially online, due to ignorance.

• More than a referral – If a franchiser is just handing out names of search marketing service providers then stepping back and putting their hands up saying “Hey, we gave you a resource, it’s not our fault!” then that will end badly for the franchisee. Most of these search marketing shops are just putting together cookie cutter campaigns that are not addressing the true local needs of each market. They also collect fees on the monthly spend that many of these franchisees think is being spent on clicks. Not good.

• Internet marketing continuing education – If the franchise you are considering is not actively working to make you better by providing educational resources about search and social media then you may not want to buy in to the system. I am shocked at how little support is given to most franchisees I come in contact with.

I guess that there are few performance payments to franchisers because they certainly don’t seem to really want to help the franchisee succeed online from what I have seen (if there is a franchise doing this well out there please tell me about it!)

So the net / net here is that if you are already in a franchise that is not helping with  your Internet marketing efforts then you need to go it alone. Take your chances by “breaking the rules” by putting together your own web site or running with social media because your business life may depend on these efforts. if there is no support from the franchiser than it’s up to the franchisee. To wait around for promises from franchisers is business suicide as well because there will always be reasons to hold off on something that may end up being an expense to the franchiser.

If you are considering buying into a franchise and the franchiser cannot provide adequate answers to your Internet marketing questions then you need to seriously consider whether this is the right business partner for you. Right now the environment seems almost adversarial but for what reason (other than cost) I don’t know. Do your homework and hopefully you will avoid some of the pain I have seen recently.

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Let’s take a look at what Zappos has done over the past couple years in our last social media example, number 26.

Zappos Twitter Presence

Zappos was one of the first companies to embrace a Twitter aggregation page: http://twitter.zappos.com/. Essentially they created a page on their site that pulls in all the mentions of the company. This is a great way to show the authority of a brand. If there are lots of people discussing your brand then that tends to convey a strong level of legitimacy.

This is also a great way to cross promote the various Twitter accounts the company has, such as the Zappos CEO account which has well over 1 million followers.

Zappos as a company is an early adopter of technologies. It is one of the first companies to embrace Twitter like this and create an aggregation page that has garnered over 1,000 different mentions/links on various industry sites and blogs when looking directly at the link count for the twitter.zappos.com sub domain. This was a very smart move on their part and has paid dividends with an increase in links.

Link Acquisition 

More often than not when companies discuss social media, SEO is not top of mind. But, this isn’t always the case as some agencies and consultants in the industry understand the power and importance of holistic social efforts, and Zappos is a perfect example of a company that thinks holistically.

Zappos.com’s link graph is a perfect example conveying the power of a true social mentality. Since June 2007, when Zappos joined Twitter, they have pushed their employees to embrace new media technologies and become active on those platforms. It is not a coincidence that Zappos has turned its link acquisition into overdrive since doing so. See the chart below which was pulled from MajesticSEO:

This sort of link worth will help their bottom line substantially. I am sure Zappos already ranked pretty well in the search engines, but this sort of link development can only help the entire site garner more search traffic and subsequent sales.

Zappos Facebook

If you peruse over to the Zappos Facebook account you will see once again, a company who understands social. Engagement of their followers is very high, with daily status updates on the page with either questions or sharing of internal Zappos activities. Talk about a great way to make a company seem human, eh?

Their Facebook Fan Page has acquired roughly 28,000 fans to date.  This may be fewer than expected for a company that has over a million followers on Twitter; however, I would argue that these fans are very engaged as evidenced by the 63 comments incurred on the Jan 7 status update.

For the most part Zappos is doing a good job of engaging its users via their Facebook account. However, there is still room to grow with their account - something just seems missing from it overall. One area I feel could use more work is growing readership and subscribers via contests. I noticed a few contests they ran that were shared in status updates, but in large part they felt devoid of any social mechanism that would really cause them to be successful.

Zappos YouTube

As you can see above there is a lot of activity on the YouTube channel page for Zappos. This is in large part due to the sheer amount of upload activity going on. Since Zappos encourages their employees to be social, there is never a shortage of content. Although it might seem that Zappos is doing a good job on YouTube, I feel like there is some room for improvement.

Perhaps running more targeted campaigns and looking into channel sponsorships could help. At Ignite, we’ve found that YouTube can create great ROI, it’s just a matter of finding the right hook and empowering your customers to get creative.

On Site Page Sharing

Frequently a user will find something online that they want as a gift. However, they forget to tell their significant other that they want the item. If you use Amazon you can simply save the item to your wish list, or in this case, you can share the page with a friend using Zappos’ share feature integrated on every page.

Zappos has implemented this pretty well throughout their site. If you click on the ‘add from address book’ above you can pull in contacts from various services such as your Google, Yahoo or MSN account, which makes it easy to find the person you are interested in sharing the page with.

 Register on Zappos Contest – Free Schwag

The above example shows how Zappos is using a contest to increase email and user signups with the site. I pulled this in as an example to show how they could beef it up to make it more social. I understand that there are probably more benefits and greater value to have one more registered site user than a Facebook fan for example, but I still feel there are ways they could make this contest more social.

It would be interesting if they added another section of this form that allowed users to share the form with other users in exchange for additional chances of winning the prize (e.g., each email they send increases their odds by 1).

We have done this in the past for some of our clients at Ignite, and it has proven to be an effective way to get more subscribers, fans etc. Think of it partly as selling your friends for more chances to win. You would be surprised the effect this can have at spreading contest such as this.

Blog About This Item

Ecommerce sites that have the scale and traffic levels of a Zappos.com can really benefit from loading grabable widgets on product pages such as the example above. In this example the user can grab a badge saying they like the product http://www.zappos.com/5th-avenue-lx-champion-grey-suede , and place it on their site. This sort of sharing/fanning integration isn’t going to produce a ton of interest, but when you are working on the scale that Zappos is, this can prove to be a very viable way to build links and brand awareness.

I have a feeling you will see more e-commerce shops like Zappos in the future arming their customers with badges to show their appreciation.

Summary

One of the major problems you typically hear about companies like Zappos and what they are doing, is that it doesn’t relate to you as a company. It is easy to see the amount of work and effort it takes to pull off the social efforts that they have employed. The key to really pulling this off, and what Zappos has done such a good job of, is training social tactics at the employee level like their Twitter aggregation page and their employee Facebook activity and YouTube uploads. Don’t simply rely on your marketing team to pull this off, you need to integrate it into a corporate level strategy.

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Here is real time search can drive business results:

• Increased reach of your messages
• Growth in social equity
• Potential customer acquisition

.. and here are some challenges that brands will now have to come to terms with:

• Marketers need to be empowered and willing to participate on the social web
• Technology today is still not fast enough to monitor live conversations. Real-time search requires “real-time” monitoring which translates to “boots on the ground” brand participation. If a brand is highly engaged and savvy with Twitter, it will be ready to respond when issues arise on the fly
• Brands must be more strategic when posting updates on facebook and consider what keywords to use

The article is timely, since I wrote about how brands should be living in the conversational stream earlier this week.

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When I received an end of year 2009 report on the Top Social Computing Predictions for 2010 from Forrester Research, my attention shifted. Fueled by a timely post by Forrester’s newly appointed social analyst Augie Ray, “The Year that Marketing Dies,” I was compelled to read and share what I learned.

As Ray observes in his post:

The role of the new marketer will (edited):

- Focus on outbound messaging in addition to consult with sales, customer service, and human resources on how the brand must be communicated in every consumer interaction, every tweet, and every touchpoint

- Fashion programs that are seamless with the actual product and service experience beyond the imagination of creative messages

- Respond to and be part of the ever-changing dialog with consumers, not plan bursts of communication on a yearlong calendar

- Look beyond the quantity of friends, page visits, eyeballs, readers, and viewers to measure changes in consumer attitude and intent

- Listen to and engage customers one to one

- Build relationships and not campaigns

- Create experiences not impressions

- Earn media and not buy it

Augie’s post about the death and rebirth of marketing coincides with the release of the new Forrester report, but doesn’t represent nor summarize it officially.

Forrester’s Top Social Computing Predictions for 2010, written by Emily Riley, Nate Elliott, Josh Bernoff, Sean Corcoran, Augie Ray, and Emily Bowen, envision the rise of social computing this year, gaining credibility and accountability in the process.

To set the stage, Forrester’s use of “social computing” may seem confusing to those who usually associate the term with workflow, collaboration, and productivity.  In this case however, social computing is reflective of social media marketing. As such, in 2009 Forrester observed an increase of social media adoption by interactive marketers which was reflected in pilot programs and entry-level engagement and community-building strategies last year. In 2010, marketers will evolve beyond testing to contribute to the maturation of social media marketing resulting in the establishment of formal, not borrowed, budgets and the creation of an official workflow for listening and measurement.

As I believe, Social Media is not owned by any one department. The entire company will eventually socialize represented by each division that warrants an outward and participatory voice. Conversations always map to the activity that exists across multiple networks, spanning a multitude of subjects and potential outcomes. What’s important to realize is that the nucleus of every conversation represents the beginning of something independently important to the person voicing it as well as the theme it embodies.

Social Emerges as a Business Channel

Forrester Research predicts that interactive marketers will prove the value of social media marketing in 2010, leading with insight at the C-level and pushing deep metrics and relevant data into other departments. The goal is to establish long-term strategies, budgets, and measurement practices.

New Media Advisory Boards/Social Councils

In 2010, companies will officially establish social councils, or what I call New Media Advisory Boards, to attain budgets and power. While Forrester observed the creation of these advisory boards in 2009, this year, cross-functional teams will become pervasive, sharing ideas and exploring opportunities for social media. Although councils will emerge as an internal resource, their stature within most organizations will continue to be informal, thus relying on the budgets and capabilities of its members. However, their role is no less critical to the success of creating, deploying, managing, and measuring social media programming as well as governing the processes that bind them.

Over the years, I have participated in the creation of many Advisory Boards, internal and external, within small businesses and Fortune 500 companies as a way of facilitating collaboration, minimizing control debates and corresponding politics, securing buy-in across the organization, pooling budgets, and fortifying governance and accountability.  Members should include representatives from each division that requires a social presence as well as those who ensure that participating employees are denoted.

Making the Case

In 2010, we will move from a “ready, fire, aim” approach to social media to one of strategy and meaning. Marketers will now have to justify social marketing plans with actual business cases to obtain the resources necessary to execute effectively. Using a map such as The Conversation Prism will help brands discover and weigh relevant online interaction and their potential for formal response and programming.

From Information to Intelligence

Businesses that explored the social landscape in 2009 most likely employed one of the many listening tools available in order to monitor and document activity in popular social networks and blogs. Forrester believes that we will move from an era of listening to one of data mining, trend analysis, and ultimately action. Listening and observation will impact other departments including customer service, PR, among others in order to foster collaboration and cooperation between departments.

According to the report:

Product development, customer service, and upper management will begin to align with marketing and customer intelligence to create customer feedback councils as they focus on giving customers what they want, rather than what the company thinks they want.

I believe that in 2010, the valuable insight that emerges from a formal research program will also channel through to affected divisions, persons of interest, and decision makers to evolve the company into a fully adaptive entity that lives and breathes awareness in order to earn relevance.

Measurement

Metrics will encompass greater significance beyond the number of friends, followers, views, and clickthroughs. Forrester reveals that marketers don’t “think” they’re very good at measuring social media today, rating their own efforts at 4.5 out of 10. As the need for accountability rises in conjunction with the creation and employment of more strategic initiatives, measurement is the connection between present and future activity.

Forrester notes that a silver bullet does not yet exist, nor should it. Social Media is a dynamic medium and the mold that’s currently employed by businesses including the creation of a Facebook Fan Page, profiles on Twitter, etc, quickly emerged as standards without first assessing why their initial creation was necessary.

Metrics are elusive without first exploring the objectives and matching social programming and engagement to help deliver against them. Forrester recommends a systematic approach in order to identify the right metrics for their social media initiatives. They should tie to businesses objectives as well without emulating the traditional sales and top-down marketing voices of old.

Take caution however, when determining if out-of-the-box formulas or “scores” will help measure success or progress.

This is why I implore all brand managers and interactive marketers to STOP reviewing existing case studies and social media success stories because many of them were forged and cultivated without the definition of strategic business- and industry-specific metrics including increased revenue, customer loyalty, advocacy, and market share. Measuring sentiment analysis, would-be referrals, and increases in share of voice are entry-level techniques that do not necessarily capture the potential of socialized media channels. Tie metrics to that of action and trackable activity. For example, it’s not about “would you recommend this product or brand” it’s about driving and assessing whether or not someone “did recommend this…” and if so, what happened next.

We must focus beyond positive and negative horizons. We grow by enlivening the neutral and the negative commentary through analysis. Reading the commentary to feel the true state of the market and surface opportunities to incite measurable activity towards a desired direction. Business metrics and key performance indicators are also worthy of integration into new media. Dell continues to serve as an exemplary model.

Twitter

Forrester gazes into the crystal ball and sees one of two outcomes for Twitter by the end of 2010, either it will become profitable and/or it will get acquired. Perhaps the report was published prior to the release of financial information concerning the Bing and Google search deals, but the economics of Twitter actually proved beneficial for the company’s bottom line. At the end of 2009, Twitter reportedly earned a profit and is expected to do so again in 2010 with the release of commercial products and services in addition to an official advertising channel.

Is Twitter an acquisition target? With a $1 billion valuation, potential suitors are finite. Remember, at the height of its boom, MySpace sold for $580 million. In another example, YouTube sold to Google for $1.65 billion. As Twitter is a cultural and social phenomenon unlike any network before it, perhaps Twitter’s best play is to start making strategic business decisions to remove itself from the targets of would be acquirers in order to grow the Twitter ecosystem, along with its loyal user base, organically. Don’t get me wrong however. In 2010, money will get thrown at Ev, Biz, Jack and team out of our view…but how, when and why will have yet to be seen.

Facebook

Privacy concerns continue to plague Facebook and Forrester sees this as an ongoing challenge. As such, Facebook is expected to protect its own interests by helping users protect theirs as well through the release of new tools that offer more intuitive ways to limit the visibility of their photos, updates, and data to different sets of followers.

As a user, I’m not sure where I stand on Facebook privacy. In general, I view online media equally. Therefore I employ a sweeping rule, assume that anything shared online, even if it’s through email, becomes discoverable when, where, and how you least expect it. Knowing this, proceed to shape and cultivate your online persona, your way.

Stowe Boyd suggests we embrace an era of “publicy” while Erick Schonfeld and Andrew Keen believe, “Instead of making the private public, we will make the public private.” When public is the default, you deliberately select what to keep private instead of the other way around.”

Forrester suggests that new privacy controls and tools make users elusive and difficult to target. It’s absolutely true. As a marketer, Facebook is indeed a silo and its limited interaction potential for brands also impedes genuine engagement across the network. While widgets, apps, groups, live video, and Fan Pages provide the ability for brands to attract friends and fans, Facebook does not facilitate the ability for a brand to maintain a profile or benefit from the advantages inherent in profiles within the network today. While yes, a brand can host a fan page, it cannot interact with users as the brand outside of the page. Unfortunately, in order to do so, fan page admins would need to interact using their personal accounts, which blurs the line between personal and professional engagement and ultimately dilutes the personal social graph.

While this isn’t a prediction, it is a public request for fan pages to resemble “profiles,” providing brands with the ability to truly interact in and outside the page as a branded entity and with the potential to earn more than “5,000″ friends (note: not fans).

As real-time search becomes pervasive, Facebook will need to carefully ensure that content appears in dedicated search engines. Many experts will testify that Twitter gained rapid adoption when Twitter search provided a lens into the activity and conversations of its users. Prior to the New Year, real-time Web search engine Collecta introduced the ability to search conversations and content in MySpace – for the first time. Perhaps this move will actually help MySpace matter once again.

Mobile

Whether it’s Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et al, the 2010 prediction report could benefit from specific insight and updates into an overdue move towards an open Web. Facebook’s hiring of David Recordan and Google’s hiring of Joseph Smarr represent hope and peak curiosity. Forrester does state however, that incompatible mobile devices and siloed social applications will shatter the social experience.

While the move towards Data Portability, OAuth and Open Social are promising, the reality is that users maintain multiple profiles across an exhaustive list of social networks today. And individual portfolios of social presences expand and contract with the demise, acquisition or introduction of services.

Our attention span is thinning and the “dream” of a common identity is not, according to Forrester, expected to materialize in 2010. Forrester predicts that our social graphs will in fact grow in distance as mobile social networking becomes increasingly pervasive.

As a result, Forrester emphasizes the need for brands to focus resources and budgets:

Marketers, already bamboozled by social media and with limited budgets, will be forced to make choices. Staff a Twitter feed or focus on Facebook? Having done so, they’ll then have to worry about how those choices squeeze through the tiny interface of a mobile device — and about testing and maintaining multiple device experiences. Look for marketers to pick a set of tools — say Twitter and iPhones — and spend 2010 looking carefully at other platforms to ensure they haven’t chosen poorly.

Brands don’t need to be everywhere, only where customers and influencers communicate and seek information today and tomorrow. It’s how we compete for current market share as well as improve our faculty to compete for the future.

In late 2009, I actively explored the ideas of the Golden Triangle and Three Screens, which represent the fusion of social, real-time and mobile as they connected portable devices, desktops, mobile phones, and ultimately TVs.

With the proliferation of smart devices lead by the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, and Palm Pre, users will find their interaction with existing and new location-based social networks (Loopt, FourSquare, Gowalla) and their respective social graphs increasingly mobile. As such, interaction becomes further distributed… And brands are already taking notice.

However, geo-local social networking and augmented reality are strangely missing from Forrester’s 2010 social computing predictions.

2010 represents a market for intelligent mobile marketing in addition to the incredible opportunity rife within appstores dedicated to each platform.

As Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt, recently stated in the San Francisco Chronicle, We [Loopt] want to use location to bridge the gap between the virtual and real world. That’s where…the technology is the most powerful.”

Geo-local networking represents the connection between online and offline, bringing people and businesses together based on location and interests.

Whether it’s through reviews, mobile coupons, free or discounted products and services, the opportunities for consumers, marketers and advertisers are abundant.

We’re already realizing the power of connecting people to nearby friends, restaurants, bars, stores, events, and now special offers. And, when combined with augmented reality, we can literally see the bridge between the virtual and real world.

Yelp’s Monocle is an early, but exceptional example…

Augmented Reality will benefit mobile and desktop users alike, providing brands with a platform to engage consumers through immersive activity. For example, Rayban’s augmented reality application (click virtual mirror) allows customers to virtually try on sunglasses before making a purchase decision.

Additional marketing examples of Augmented Reality applications are viewable on Mashable.

Comments

To that end, here are five trends that I haven’t yet seen discussed elsewhere, but which I believe will be top of mind for marketers in 2010 if they aren’t already. As with any “predictions” like these - I would love to hear your thoughts about the five I have chosen, or any others I might have missed. I’ll add the best to this post as additions …

1. The Importance Of When. The popularity of Twitter has helped marketers to focus on one element of social media communications that might have been easy to otherwise forget - the importance of when. In a flood of communications and messages, sometimes what you say matters less than when you say it. Consider the significance of this for a moment. So much of our focus as marketers tends to be on the messaging, but how much attention do you pay to things like time of day that your messages run, or concepts like dayparting for any paid media spends? As real time communications begin to happen on many more platforms than just Twitter through tools like status updates on Facebook and LinkedIn and mobile messaging - the question of when is one that marketers will finally start devoting more time and energy towards. This will help marketers to be more relevant to the moment, create new opportunities for publishers to sell media space at premiums based on time, and adversely affect media which has no understanding of time.
2. Rebirth Of Usability. There was a time in web development near the end of the nineties and early 2000s when usability was hot. Jakob Nielsen was on every marketer’s must read list and usability testing was something marketers paid a lot of attention to. Then somehow usability started taking a backseat to many other hot trends online, from interactivity online, to widgets, to social media. Usability became “old school.” The real business benefits of usability, however, are undeniable and in 2010 I believe many brands will start to rediscover this fact and add usability back onto their list of priorities for online efforts. More broadly, I think this will signal resurgence in the attention marketers are paying to their entire interface and mean that in addition to adding the latest social features to a site (which will continue to be popular), they will also focus on how the interface is actually used.  
3. Marketing With Customer Service. Some of the biggest social media success stories for brands in 2009 are those where social media has been completely linked with customer service (Dell, Comcast and Zappos are all examples of this). So much so, in fact, that the transformative power of social media within an enterpise may not even be a marketing function at all. That’s a big admission for a marketer to make, but sometimes the best marketing you can have is great customer service that delights your customers and gets them sharing their experience with everyone they know. That’s critical to word of mouth marketing, and requires coordination from within an organization beyond just the marketing people. In 2010, I expect to see the walls between these two continue to break down, as marketers realize that the moment when their messages either come to life or fall flat hinges directly on the quality of the customer experience.
4. The Rise Of Voluntary Ambassadors. Marketers today are throwing around terms like “brand ambassadors” all the time, with many marketing budgets for 2010 including a line item to foster these ambassadors. The problem is, in 2009 this term was often another way of referring to the practice of getting bloggers to write about your product or service. Amazon Top Reviewers and Power Twitter users are just two examples of big influencers who are not bloggers. A true ambassador program is about unlocking the passion of people who actually have some affinity for your product or service. These ambassadors may not be bloggers - but they do have a passion for your product or service and more importantly, they want to share their opinions. These voluntary hand-raisers are your real ambassadors, and the brands that can find and unlock these voices are going to be the ones who are truly successful with their ambassador programs.
5. More Businesses Find Their Personality. Clearly this is a passion point for me - talking about how companies need to have a personality. After all, I wrote an entire book on it. But as self serving as this fifth trend may seem, the reason why I include it here (and have in previous years as well) is that each month that passes I see new companies uncovering this importance for themselves. In 2009, I saw three large brand RFPs all asking for counsel on (among other things) how to have a stronger personality. Brands like Ally Bank in the financial sector and Intel* in the technology sector demonstrate the real power of personality in terms of making your brand more human and believable … and at industry events the topic of personality (or authenticity or humanity or some related concept) is still a frequently discussed topic. The longevity of this trend is the reason I wrote my book, and also the reason why I keep it on my list of trends to watch for 2010 even though many of you have heard it from me before.

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Even though interactive marketing will approach $55 billion by 2014, the report also observes that not all industries will keep pace with this growth. Retail and financial services are expected to dominate the greatest share of all interactive marketing. Brand advertisers in industries such as consumer goods however, represent the most notable potential for growth.

Nevertheless, Forrester cautions readers of this report to analyze competitive and industry activity before committing to spend and programming

But while it’s helpful to understand industry spending dynamics, we recommend benchmarking your own spend against companies that are like yours — even if they are outside of your industry group.

To provide guidance to decision makers across a diverse set of industries, Forrester studied search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing by 11 business verticals.

The overall theme is innovation and sophistication

Highlights from the research include:

1 – Retails and financial services spend the most in each of the verticals examined, accounting for 33% of all interactive spend.

2 – Big offline advertisers are expected to demonstrate the greatest volume of growth including, media and entertainment, consumer goods, automotive, and healthcare firms. It is expected that these industries will grow at a 22% CAGR over the next five years.

3 – B2B interactive investments will remain consistent, representing 9% of the overall interactive landscape. Business services, accounting firms, consultancies, and agencies as well as business trade elements, will grow from $2.3 billion to $4.8 billion in 2014.

4 – As is any research, there is usually a category for “other.” In this report Forrester assembles education, local services, and government in one sliver with online universities, home improvement services, and local and national government to increase spending by more than 20% between now and 2014. This growth is attributed to 1) local advertising options continue to improve; 2) government agencies promote newly online processes; and 3) the competition for online students will increase. In one such example, the University of Phoenix developed its own online ad network to distribute online promotions and coupons as a means for increasing course registrations.

In each of the 11 categories that Forrester explored, the average CAGR over the next five years was 16% with “other” representing the higher end of spending with 23% and lead generation on the other end of the spectrum with 9%. Other high growth industries for interactive marketing spending include:

Consumer Goods – 22%
Automotive – 19%

Media & Entertainment – 19%
Travel – 18%
Health and Pharmaceuticals – 18%
B2B – 15%
Telecommunications – 15%
Financial Services – 14%

One of the more interesting aspects of the Forrester report was the allocation of spend across multiple channels with Social Media ranking either fourth or fifth (out of 5) within the mix.  In 2009 interactive spend was mostly concentrated on search marketing – rightfully so as with online customers and prospects, almost everything begins with search.

Other top channels in 2009 for interactive marketing include:

Display Advertising
Email
Mobile (which I can only believe will increase dramatically of the next five years)

In a Forrester report published earlier this year, Social Media spend is expected to increase by 34% by 2014, placing it just behind mobile marketing, but ahead of search marketing. Regardless of industry, the top areas of marketing, whether it’s interactive or marketing in general, for any business, must focus on social, mobile, and also the real-time Web. Thus forming a Golden Triangle engagement.

This post represents only a handful of the insights shared in Forrester’s new report. Please visit Forrester online for the full analysis.

Comments

All Internet marketing is more successful when you listen before you speak. And if you listen before you speak again. You must listen to what your customers say and you must watch what they do. Only by seeing what works and what doesn’t do you have a chance of persuading them to believe your marketing message.

Take social media as an example. A proven social media practitioner would advise you that before you engage in social media that you should first listen to the conversation that is already out there about your products and your industry. Failing to do so is like walking into a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone, not listening to what is going on, and just starting to talk to no one in particular.

Working with a firm that employs listening technology as part of its modus operandi will get your social media marketing off on the right foot. [Full disclosure: I serve as Chief Strategist for just such a firm, Converseon.] Merely going at this like an ad agency with a clever person who comes up with ideas in a vacuum just won’t achieve the same success, in my experience.

But it’s not just social media. With search, you must wait for the searcher to initiate–so you are listening first. With banner ads, you can test them to see which ones work better than others. With e-mail, you can test response with small mailing lists before sending the winning version to the main list.

With all forms of Internet marketing, listening to what customers say and watching what they do are the key methods for fine-tuning your message until it resonates with your audience.

This might sound like a lot of work. It is.

Instead of just thinking up your message and delivering it, you are constantly tweaking and changing what you say based on the customer response. And it is time-consuming, honestly. It undoubtedly is less work to come up with just one message and deliver it, than it is to come up with dozens of messages, constantly tinkering to get your final one.

But you’re not trying to minimize the amount of work to come up with a message. You’re trying to maximize response. And there’s no way that your first message will be as good as your 50th. So, even though it seems like coming up with 50 messages is more work than coming up with one (because it is), it ends up being easier to get results this way. So, if you can guarantee getting good results one way, but not the other, which one is less work in the long run?

Ask yourself: If you aren’t listening to your customers to fine-tune your messaging, just what are you listening to?

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