Predictions or wishful thinking...take your pick!

I am not very good at predicting trends. That is why I particularly enjoy reading other experts’ end of year blogs. Throughout December each year I basically get a crash course on what worked last year and what experts predict upcoming year.

I was totally wrong last year in my prediction that mobile is finally going to make a much needed entrance to the B2B space in the US. I wonder if 2010 will be the year businesses see the potential in using mobile technology. B2B sales and lead nurturing relies heavily on relationship building so to me it makes perfect sense to include mobile as a customer retention tool especially considering advances in GSM technology. For instance, a customer might find it perfectly acceptable to share her cell phone number with a firm if she is getting location based additional perks such as opportunity to network with other executives while attending a tradeshow or access premium services through smart phone applications. Cell phone is an intimate medium and I see it as an opportunity for relationship building. We just have to orient our thinking in terms of added value to the customer rather than another outlet to “sell, sell, sell”.

The biggest dot in everyone’s radar this year is social media. Basically the sky is the limit in terms of how B2B lead generation can use social media. Blog after blog I read is stating that social media is all about conversation and great content. The major hurdle I see is to convince people who hold the purse strings to resist temptation to jump the gun and start pushing sales messages down people’s throats instead of using social outlets to listen to what people are talking about and figure out how to bring in value to the conversation related to their business.

I think the shiniest toy this year is going to be video. Video on corporate home pages, video in transit media, video in mobile, video in lead gen and video in CRM……I used to be a practitioner of multimedia when way back when we had a hard time even explaining to our parents what it is that we did at work. I am now glad to see digital technology has caught up with possibilities video represents.

I see video, email and search doing the heavy lifting in demand generation this year…..well, see I could not resist and slipped in my own prediction. I hope I am right! It will be an adventurous year for marketers.