When international ‘social influence marketing’ agency Razorfish (part of the Publicis Groupe VivaKi organization) releases a new study, I always get kind of excited.
That’s not because I’m a complete geek or freak but because the studies and reports Razorfish publishes are not only extremely insightful but also, well, extremely beautiful.
Don’t believe me? Just take a look at last year’s great Fluent report I posted about earlier (have to talk about that one soon again, it’s so full of information) and that should be in your bookmarks. Anyway, as you could guess by now, Razorfish has published a new report.
In this new report, called “The Razorfish 5: Five Technologies That Will Change Your Business in 2010”, that was released today Razorfish talks about, well, what it says in the title of the report.
Enough fooling around: what are these “five game-changing technologies for business in 2010”?
The most successful will be the social brands with social voices operating in real-time
Well, I’m not going to talk about them all because it’s again a report you should take the necessary time to read. However, let’s say there is a lot of cloud computing, social media, mobile, multi-touch, etc. going on. Technology, yes, but always with the business and marketing impact.
I will briefly tackle one topic in this post: the ‘social brands are enabled through cloud services and distributed application technologies’ part (and there are some bold predictions in there).
It won’t come as a surprise if I tell you that, I quote, “the most successful brands in 2010 will be the social brands with social voices operating in real-time”.
As Razorfish writes: “The notion of social voices implies real people participating, talking and guiding consumers on behalf of their companies in an engaging and conversational manner across every consumer touchpoint, digital or traditional”.
This is stuff you know, my blog is all about exactly that. However, a social voice alone is not going to be enough, Razorfish says.
Without the cloud, real-time interactions would not be available
What is missing? I quote again: “a key ingredient will be working in real-time across the spectrum. That means real-time in terms of the campaigns that are launched and executed, the mini applications that are developed and pushed out, the products launched in response
to changing needs, the targeted consumers and the customer services offered”.
And this is where the technology part comes in. The report says that “cloud services are a necessity to deliver on the promise of social brands”.
Since it’s late where I live, and I’m tired, I quote again: “You simply cannot launch a digital product, run an online marketing campaign cost effectively or reach new users quickly, unless you are using cloud services. Nor can you integrate your own marketing efforts into the broader social Web without leveraging cloud services in the same way as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn”.
Why? “Because once integrated, these social applications can drive immense traffic to your digital product, Website or microsite when you least expect it, resulting in you needing to
scale your infrastructure up quickly and roll out new features to capitalize on the
increased attention”.
OK, enough quotes. What are we talking about here? Technologies like Facebook Connect, Open APIs (think Twitter) and much more. Yes, it’s all about the cloud.
Or as Razorfish says: “without the cloud, real-time interactions would not be available”.
Now, get the report via this link and read it yourself, including the bold predictions. As always, comments are welcome.
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